2020: A Year of Contrasts
The French job market was heavily impacted by Covid-19 in 2020.
The country had a first lock down from mid-March to mid-May and a second lighter one in November.
Key figures show a dip in Q2 and rebound in Q3. Compared to 2019, jobs openings were at -40% (Q2) against +55% (Q3). This shows that the market massively compensated the losses on Q2.
This phenomenon repeats itself across almost every major specialism and sector, from middle to top management positions. The same figures appear for permanent and temporary contracts.
However, for 2020 as a whole, the total figure of newly created jobs is -18% compared to 2019.
Job Openings & Candidate Shortages
The massive difference between Q2 and Q3 created a very unpredictable market on different aspects: jobs and candidates’ availability.
After the world stopped for a few weeks in Spring 2020, we had a paucity of new assignments one month, and then of candidates the next. Clients put on hold every project, before opening positions little by little.
Every non urgent matter was postponed, and we waited patiently until further notice.
Then, in September/October, recruitment started again. Suddenly, we were retained on assignments left and right, but still we struggled with just a few candidates.
Were candidates unavailable? No, on the contrary. They were very open to discuss job opportunities. They were curious and eager to know about the market. First contact was easier than ever, but no one wanted to take the risk to go forward. A probation period was simply deemed too risky.
How to react?
As a ship on a stormy sea, we vowed to stay on course. When nothing is predictable, you can only rely on what you know. More than ever was the time to be a consultant: provide good counsel, keep our clients close, engage with them, communicate and give trusted insights.
Actively managing candidates and clients was crucial. As the recruitment processes became shorter, candidates became more unpredictable so we needed to make the process as smooth as possible.
What Next?
2021 started fast.
We must act proactively. We need to see what's coming: clients are already adapting, and this ever changing situation is our new reality.
As the situation is unusual and unpredictable, we tend more than ever to think for our clients. We must be there for them and keep on delivering the best service possible. We are all making this reality our new reality.
Julien Wilhelm
Partner France
An interview with Anders Blom Monberg, Country Manager for Protector Insurance Denmark.
Working from home can be a challenge, even when you know the job, company, and stakeholders very well. When you are new however, you must learn everything in the virtual world.
Many things have changed during this pandemic and onboarding sure is one of them!
At Friisberg & Partners we hear from many CEOs and understand that it has been extraordinarily demanding to get into the new role when the employees and managers work from home. However, many of the CEOs are also finding benefits and new opportunities with getting an online start, instead of a physical presence.
The Country Manager at Protector Insurance Denmark, Anders Blom Monberg shares his thoughts about how he has handled an unusual onboarding when he started his new position on January 1st, 2021.
What considerations did you make before you started, knowing that the offices were empty, and everybody was working from home?
“Before I started this role, many people had already been working at home for a long period of time. I am therefore used to being a leader in a virtual world, and my colleagues are used to the same. It was a big help that we all knew what we were dealing with and had adapted beforehand.”
Did you have an introduction plan?
“Yes. Protector Insurance had given me an introductory plan, and many of my
The arrival of COVID-19 in Finland transformed the economy and working life, to say the least. Like many service businesses, Friisberg Finland was forced to face facts in March 2020: the uncertain situation in Finland and around the world has increased caution for headhunting customers and candidates.
The fact is, however, that the need for competent professionals still exists; if we wish to ensure continued growth and move on from the crisis, we need the right people in the right places.
What has changed in the recruitment of key personnel over the past 10 months?
Successful recruitment is ensured through psychological aptitude tests and personality assessments.
More and more customers want the option of two top candidates to choose from instead of one at the end of the headhunting process with both candidates tested using psychological personality and aptitude assessments and their references checked. Why? Especially in these circumstances, customers want to ensure that they will be able to hire one of the two best candidates as quickly as possible. A diverse psychological personality assessment tailored for the position in question provides information on the top candidates’ competence but also on what motivates them and how they will fit into the culture of the business.
Candidates for key personnel need security and continuity.
The COVID-19 situation has made candidates more security-oriented; people are looking for a good, safe job and a guaranteed income.
There are risks involved in transitioning to a new position in a new company. Due to the crisis, businesses have seen an increase in refusals at the end of their own recruitment processes, especially if the process has been prolonged.
Successful recruitment is still the sum of many parts.
If the company is well-known and has a positive employer image and interesting operations, it most likely will not suffer from a lack of candidates, even in trying times. A relatively unknown company with a less appealing reputation or employer image, however, may not be able to attract the most sought-after individuals on its own.
Uncertain times affect the choices made by candidates. That is why hiring companies must pay attention to the candidates’ sense of security and offer them support in changing circumstances. The employer image built by the recruitment processes should also be kept in mind.
As positions and searches become international, finding the best candidate beyond the borders of your own country is becoming increasingly common.
The best candidate may be a returning migrant with a spouse, in which case the spouse’s career opportunities will influence the candidate’s decision on switching jobs and returning to their native country. Family relocation support and levelling the threshold of making a transition are currently of particular importance.
Participating in a headhunting process and assessing aptitude should also create value for the candidate.
Regardless of whether the process results in employment, the best type of recruitment process supports a positive employer image by offering the candidate personal feedback from the headhunter. The feedback should cover an analysis of the candidate’s interviews and a report on the aptitude assessment.
Such elements leave a positive image of the hiring company while supporting the professional development of the candidate.
A successful recruitment process has an efficient schedule and open communications and does not involve unpleasant surprises at the last minute.
These three tips enable you to ensure the best recruitment results, hold on to the best candidates and allow the key employee to start their work according to schedule:
In the middle of a crisis, such as COVID-19, an experienced headhunting partner can help you avoid any pitfalls and hold on to your candidates throughout the process.
Despite the pandemic, Friisberg Finland has seen excellent success in its headhunting processes; our customer and candidate experiences are at a very high level. Last year (2020), the NPS measurement of our customers’ and candidates’ satisfaction and their willingness to recommend our services to others was +77 among customers and +87 among candidates.
Mika Rossi
Partner
Despite the impact of Covid-19, and a slowing economy, executive search activities are still brisk in South Africa.
Richard Lipstein
Partner, USA
While the majority of jobs are found directly through networking, developing and maintaining relationships with executive search firms and recruiters remains an integral part of managing a career.
What I hope to accomplish here is to describe how best you can work with these professionals to successfully accomplish both your job search and career management strategy.
Recruiters have wide and broad access to the market and compensation information, trends, tips and connections in addition to specific jobs.
There are two types of executive recruiters – those who work on contingency and those who do so on retainer also known as retained search consultants. A contingency recruiter earns a fee only when the client hires someone they have introduced. A retained search consultant, on the other hand, is paid in advance to conduct a search.
There is a vast difference in methodology between contingency and retained recruiters. The search consultant typically has an exclusive arrangement with the client to fill the position and takes a longer time to complete the placement using a more detailed process and methodology.
The contingency recruiter will work the process a lot quicker and most probably deliver more candidates to increase the odds of making a placement. They can introduce a candidate to numerous clients at the same time while a search consultant can only introduce a candidate to their retained client during the course of a specific search.
Although the best recruiters will provide considerable support to those with whom they are working, whether retained or contingency, remember that both types of recruiters work for the client not the candidate.
A retained recruiter is more likely than a contingency recruiter to have the following:
Contingency recruiters can be very effective in some circumstances, of course, particularly when the position is at a lower seniority and compensation level. Retained search consultants, on the other hand, tend to work on more senior and higher paid positions.
Both types of recruiters look for the most appropriate candidates with a background that closely fits the needs of a particular search assignment so someone looking to change careers or move laterally would likely not be appropriate during a particular assignment.
Tips for working with recruiters:
Make it easy for recruiters to find you by doing the following:
When a recruiter calls, ask key questions (remember, you should interview the recruiter too!) such as, among others, how well do they know the client, the depth of their relationship with the company and their experience filling similar positions.
Be honest, responsive and courteous (let the recruiter know of issues and who else will be involved in the decision, for instance) and never continue the process if you are not interested in the position (as opposed to seeing how far along you will go in that process).
Be decisive – before an offer comes, be prepared to accept or decline.
Trust the recruiter particularly as it relates to managing the interview process and how you compare to other candidates under consideration. Be decisive – once again, before an offer comes, be prepared to accept or decline. If the process continues past your point of interest it will damage your relationship with the recruiter as well as their relationship with client. Finally, let the recruiter negotiate the compensation package if necessary.
The most important thing I can recommend for those who want to develop and maintain long-term relationships with specific recruiters is keep in regular touch with them after you’ve landed the job and serve as a source on other searches.
Recruiters will love you if you help them on other searches and will be very beneficial to the success of your career!
Throughout the past year our work environment changed dramatically and work from home (WFH), or a home office, became widespread like never before. Let me share with you some – and surely, there are many more – challenges I saw many firms face, as well as having talked to many employees.
At first glance it sounds just great! You don’t need to get up early, you can skip your commute time, you can avoid quick lunches and you can set your own hours to work when you feel like it. Unfortunately, in reality it doesn’t always work that way - it is very difficult to set up and stick to normal business hours. You might have to homeschool your children and so can’t do everything you’d intended to. This means you end up working into the evening or worse still, put off your tasks. Most employees complain about the rigid structure of a regular schedule, but that structure can actually be hugely beneficial.
Some ideas for better time management:
Based on many research studies and also on my own experience, people in home office mode tend to spend more time working than before.
When your personal life and your professional one are under the same roof, it's harder to switch off either one.
How to avoid overworking:
Well, we’ve all faced distracting circumstances while working from home.
These might simply be due to the set-up of our home office: an uncomfortable chair, not enough space for the laptop, etc. It might be a technical issue such as a slow internet, an electricity outage, etc. which are annoying and sometimes difficult to fix. Other disturbing things could be the noise from the neighbour’s house renovation right in the middle of your video presentation, or your partner just using the espresso machine.
At times some disturbances can be funny such as in the middle of your Zoom presentation your cat crawls across your desk in front of the camera, or one of your kids insists you to fix his/her toy asap.
The important thing is to never lose your sense of humour!
In a ‘normal’ work environment human interaction is very important - in some roles it is even crucial.
Social contact is vital and can boost your productivity. You should find those platforms, apps and time to talk about the weekend events or other non-work related events. You could set up time with your colleagues before or after work to chat freely about more personal things.
When working from home, it is possible that you, your workload or the results of your work are only partially visible to your employer or manager. This can easily happen, especially in larger organizations where remote workers are not as recognized or could be the last in line to get a promotion.
Understandably, this sort of low visibility and lack of recognition can be demotivating and possibly limit your performance in the long run.
What to do?
We all have our own ideas of working from home – in many ways this unites us as a shared global experience. The future may well result in us all returning to office based lives, but even if that is the case I feel sure that over the past year we will have learned more about ourselves and our own working practices.
Zoltan Petho
Partner Hungary
- an abused phrase in recent days.
The Trump-Biden transition traumas will be the subject of many a student essay for centuries to come, but as shocking as recent events have been, they were entirely predictable. A lame-duck POTUS from November to January has always been problematic, but never like this.
I’m a Brit and our electoral practices ensure the immediate handover from one administration to another is done just as soon as the votes are counted, and Her Majesty issues her ceremonial invitation to the winner to form a government – usually the next day.
I’ve been in Executive Search for over 25 years, and it always baffles me why some organisations want a “handover” during which outgoing and incoming senior people are expected to co-exist, in parallel, in effectively the same job, within the same entity.
I acknowledge that there is such a thing as corporate or institutional memory that some may want to retain, but I’ve worked extensively with family-owned and owner-managed businesses as well as with large corporates - and I have seen that it’s never easy. When a founder sells their firm or retires, the new owner / MD might think it’s a good idea for the old boss to stick around, for an earn-out, or on a retainer as a consultant. Equally, a family business understandably may not want the next generation to banish and then reverse the decisions of the last. To have the founder, parent, or old boss still at their desk, or even just dropping by occasionally, is rarely if ever a good thing, even for just a few days.
In my experience, here’s why handovers intended to deliver a smooth, orderly and seamless transition usually don’t:
Every time a client asks me, I recommend against a handover period, or a transition, or indeed any overlap at all - and the more senior the appointment, the more serious the potential negative consequences. When the time comes for a change at the top, I advocate a planned but “clean break” every time.
Maybe the best outcomes are realised when there is a decent interval between departure and arrival? I have a client at which I see this in action right now. The last Managing Director left some weeks ago and the board of directors has had to step up and cover off what the MD does, with some vital support from Group HQ. The new MD will be joining soon, but when they arrive there will be leadership clarity, both strategic and operational, and a guaranteed warm welcome from the other directors who now have some insights as to why the business needed a new MD.
Following the General Election of 2010, Belgium spent 589 days without an elected government - not ideal, and an extreme example, but it seems that country suffered little by comparison to the current carnage in the United States under two men with overlapping mandates who agree on nothing. I am sure America has been done lasting damage by this election-to-inauguration transition.
Yet, despite the high stakes, business leaders are too often undermined during a transition period.
Andrew Guy
Partner UK
Little did we know a year ago what the year 2020 would bring, but all too soon we learned…
Never before in modern times has our way of life, our freedoms and our expectations have been so collectively and adversely affected. For far too many it was suddenly sink or swim. All areas of business have been affected, including our own.
Having said that, I am enormously proud of what we in Friisberg have accomplished. In this harsh reality in which we have all been forced to operate, we have not only survived, but through hard and focused work we have strengthened our position and continued our strategic expansion.
Events throughout 2020 forced our clients to rethink, restructure and change. Many things we all took for granted before the pandemic have altered and will continue to shift in the months ahead.
Companies with global footprints and those who do international business have been forced to change their traveling habits and we have all adapted to virtual meetings. Perhaps traditional face-to-face meetings will now only be used for when you are establishing new relations, or for ceremonial reasons from time to time such as opening a new site?
Business have already started to rethink and change the way they “go to market” and actively embracing emerging technologies will undoubtedly speed up the digitalisation of sales. That development is inevitable.
We have all adapted and learned quickly because we were forced to. Looking forward, I am convinced that the changes we already have seen will remain – I don’t think we will ever go back to how it was “before” - we have all learned by doing not from some seminar that was forced upon us.
All this “new” means businesses need the right people and processes to be able to perform and develop:
Some businesses will adapt quickly, but for some it will take a little longer. Some businesses already have the right key people in place whereas it is becoming ever clearer that some do not.
So, although the future is here, 2021 will just be the start in terms of how we consolidate the changes.
I am delighted to confirm that Friisberg is now better placed and more ready than ever to continue our growth strategy, and to support our clients locally and globally.
Peter Strandberg
President
CEOs face new and very specific challenges in supporting their organisations through, and then managing the lasting implications of, this current crisis.
According to recent work by Gartner, sixty-nine percent of boards accelerated digital business initiatives because of COVID-19, with almost half now actively looking for fresh technology expertise. Digital business models are now being pursued in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic - business strategy is changing.
Board members that are not themselves Digital Natives might lack the insights and expertise required to make informed decisions and reasoned judgements regarding, for example, AI, UCaaS, Digital Marketing, IoT, 5G - which are needed to ensure their business will survive.
We have talked with many companies over recent months that have made significant investments in the analysis of Big Data, automation and new forms of online collaboration. These moves, originally forced by the need for business continuity, are now finding permanence as processes change forever across all industries.
Technology enterprise leaders and industry analysts with whom we have spoken have confirmed that such shifts would be near impossible without a digital strategy and effective technology leadership. Long before the pandemic, strategic decisions by CEOs and boards, on behalf of shareholders, including the setting of company goals and assessment of the top teams’ performance were increasingly linked with investment and hiring decisions related to technology. That has simply been fast-forwarded by the virus.
Yet, despite the rapid and widespread adoption of digital business tools all around them, there are still many large companies that try to continue to function without the technology expertise of a CIO at the board table.
"As a CIO, the CEO and the board expect from me, not only to fix the WiFi... They also expect me to put the right priorities on the right strategies.... "
Rene Deist, CIO Faurecia
Technology is reshaping business models in almost every sector but securing the best technology leaders can be problematic... However, Friisberg's Partners and Consultants are fully familiar with every dimension of the issue. Your business may not even know what it really needs, but we can help you shape your thinking and then identify and attract the right leadership, for your business as it will be - and needs to be - to thrive.
7 Traits of Highly Successful Digital Leaders
Lorri Lowe
Christmas is inching ever closer, although we know that this year Christmas and New Year celebrations will not be the same due to the impact of Covid-19.
It is during the holidays that many people re-evaluate their life choices. Throughout the year there are clear peaks and troughs in the number of candidates open to new opportunities and taking this into consideration when hiring can be a great advantage.
Friisberg & Partners recommends to their clients that they consider these two questions:
Almost 25% [1] of people actively search for new roles in January, however there is typically a corresponding increase in job postings. The fact that many people are more relaxed during downtime means that 75% of the market are more passively open to talking with Headhunters about opportunities - and then being much more easily persuaded to leave their current role.
Susanne Becker Mikkelsen, Managing Partner of Friisberg & Partners International Denmark states,
“We often find that many Chief Executives and HR Directors are very busy at the beginning of the new year when new goals and plans are being launched, precisely when resources and time to contact potential candidates are scarce. We always ensure that assignments are carried out professionally, especially at busy times and an Executive Search firm can be critical to success. We can contact and make potential candidates aware of a vacancy, and ensure that candidate becomes interested in discussing it further."
Even if you feel you have a stable and secure workforce, we recommend reading the 2019 Epinion study [2] wherein a thorough analysis of the market showed that the four most common reasons for people taking on new work challenges are:
There are of course no hard and fast rules, however we can offer advice to make sure you’re taking the right path. It all begins with hiring the right person for the right position, but besides recruiting the best people for your company, you also have to nurture an engage your talent to stop them from leaving.
We can help to ensure that your organization is worthy of the talent it has and the talent it needs, and that you are motivating your people to ensure their ongoing commitment.
Josephine Lindhart
Friisberg & Partners International Denmark
You need to load content from hCaptcha to submit the form. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationYou need to load content from reCAPTCHA to submit the form. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationYou need to load content from reCAPTCHA to submit the form. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationYou need to load content from reCAPTCHA to submit the form. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationYou need to load content from Turnstile to submit the form. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More Information
