Last Thursday our colleague Tom Hill lead our Lunch and Learn session.  We looked at the story of recruitment since COVID and we were once again grateful to be active in the sectors that we work in. The session helped us to realise how much we’d adapted our ways of working in the last year and highlighted the importance of continuing to build strong connections.   

Our Story: 

• Work at JSD is now virtual in every respect.  We interact with each other, our clients and our candidates via Teams or Zoom.   

• We have grown in number and we are focused on developing to keep our recruiting skills relevant.  Our new recruits are tackling an Apprenticeship to support this aim. 

• Our challenge is building our knowledge base and keeping fresh – client visits historically offered the opportunity to spend informal time with our clients and really get to know them and a wide range of their people, to walk around their offices or their sites and drink in their culture.  

• Time out of the office added variety and complexity to our working days. 

New Approaches: 

• Lunch and Learn, podcasts, reading and listening are some of the new ways we have found to build knowledge. 

• Encouraging exercise and building it into our calendars, is one of the ways we are coping with a candidate-flooded market where we must increase the intensity of our working days, talk to more people and spend more time in conversations to find the very best to present to our clients.   

• Sharing information in morning team meetings, welcoming insights from our suppliers and valuing the contributions of every person who reaches out to us is what helps us as search professionals to build snapshots of the market.   

• Now more than ever before we welcome “catch up” calls.  We are on your side and we believe that sharing views about market conditions and providing advice to clients and candidates on recruitment processes or appropriate salaries for roles is a very important aspect of our service.  

JSD Consulting, is an executive search firm with over 20 years’ experience in food and beverages, pharma and B2B markets. We believe in the value that we add, and we enjoy every opportunity we can to interact with our network and engage in friendly conversation.  The new intensity of our role is challenging, but we are determined to consciously evaluate our ways of working, to sustain our energy levels and to keep loving what we do. 

If you are a hiring manager or a potential candidate and you’re thinking about marketing in a virtual world, we would love to chat to you.