How the tech job market has changed during lockdown

As the beginning of July approaches, businesses in England are starting to come out of lockdown. The tech sector has been one of the least impacted industries by Covid-19, but not completely immune to disruption.

Over the last few months, CWJobs has a rise in applications for certain IT disciplines and more recently an increase in the number of jobs being posted.

Our 2020 Confidence Index shows that although Covid-19 is the top concern among the tech workforce, 81% are confident in the current state of the industry. This explains why candidate activity hasn’t changed much before and after the coronavirus outbreak.

Listen to our podcast with employer branding experts Universum and In House Recruitment, where we discuss key findings from our Confidence Index survey and the tech recruitment landscape now:

Similarly, our most recent tech candidate survey reveals that productivity levels in tech have remained stable over the last few months.

Despite the number of UK unemployed rising to 1.3 million in the first three months of the year, demand for specialist tech jobs has remained high, with an average of 38 job seekers per vacancy.

An increase in tech job postings and applications

In May, we recorded 10k jobs posted on our platform, and in June we’ve had over 12k jobs posted receiving 243k applications.

When looking at specific tech areas, the top jobs that were posted in April were for software development, infrastructure, web development and IT support.

Our Confidence Index 2020 reveals that the most time-consuming task for tech teams during lockdown was setting people up to work remotely, which explain the increase in demand for software development, infrastructure and IT support.

Evolving tech hiring strategies

Lockdown has created a need for companies to adjust their hiring strategies. With people spending more time at home, video conferencing software   has taken the place of face-to-face interviews.

Interestingly, our research into the UK’s emerging tech hubs finds that almost half (49%) of tech workers would take a pay cut to be allowed to work from home. And two-thirds (66%) would accept a job that was over two hours away if they could work remotely.

As the UK eases out of lockdown, we’d expect to see more companies embracing video conferencing software in order to improve the candidate experience. We would also expect to see an uptake in skills-based assessments that improve the candidate experience further, by removing any bias from the recruitment process and keeping candidates informed of the progress of their application.

Moreover, brands that have maintained communication with job seekers during lockdown are more likely to fill positions quickly and remain in candidates’ consciousness as a caring brand that values their time.

Company re-branding

Many organisations have had the opportunity to reflect on their branding and to make adjustments that ensure they remain aligned with the wants and expectations of jobseekers post Covid-19.

We’d expect to see an increase in companies updating their values with a strong focus on the health and wellbeing of employees. Companies need to be clear on the type of candidates they want to attract moving forward and updating their brand can be an effective way of attracting new talent.

A focus on upskilling

When lockdown began, job descriptions evolved for many employees. In some cases, workers had to upskill in order to fill newly-created roles, or those that became available due to redundancy.

As workers start returning to the office, we would expect companies to provide employees with more opportunities to upskill in technology.

Our research into what attracts tech workers to a role finds that over half of IT workers would leave a company over a lack of learning and development opportunities. As such, we expect more companies to encourage employees to map out their own training programmes in order to future-proof their business.

The CWJobs platform enables companies to create a profile and promote their brand to reach a wide tech audience. The roles that companies advertise are matched with the most relevant tech talent through our innovative product technology and unique candidate audience.

With our expert understanding of tech recruitment, we support companies in hiring the people they need, quickly and efficiently.