At the beginning of this year, we shared this image with everyone on our LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram pages:

Hope is such a powerful thing that it motivates us all to be steadfast and resilient, to seek progress instead of looking backwards and to trust the people that we work with to get through every challenge by supporting each other.

This is what we hope for this year. And it sure is looking brighter.

Australian borders reopened on Monday, 21st of February. One of the most important sources of labour and one of the biggest contributors to Australia’s economic growth are our immigrants and the people who come here to work. Every business can agree that the travel restrictions brought about by the pandemic have stifled the job market’s growth. We’ve experienced this when people have approached us and said they can’t find workers or there’s a skills shortage in their organisation.

Most of the time, we were able to do what we do best and provide effective solutions. But in some cases, almost everyone who had experience in a particular job or had a specific skill was already on worksites or in offices full-time - with some people even working at full capacity in 2 different companies. The border reopening is a welcome relief to the job market. We have already seen the instant alleviation in entry level roles when borders reopened to international students earlier this year - and many students are now working part-time in warehouses, on farms, at cafes and in retail outlets.

The general relaxing of lockdown rules is a huge relief, not only for brick-and-mortar businesses, but also for workers who depend on shop-front traffic. For us to be able to recruit for businesses that need to reopen quickly, we’ve streamlined our interview processes to reduce timeframes by more than 75% while still retaining the quality of our screenings. We’ve managed to do this online instead of having candidates coming into the office, and we’ve still continued to produce the same solid output. To support businesses who needed office roles and administration staff to meet their demands during the pandemic, we also hired and onboarded online, and got their new staff up and running from home.

We were one of the first companies that employed Rapid Antigen Testing and secured a good amount of them due to our team’s foresight. This allowed us to place people into roles rapidly while still adhering to protocols.

It’s the hope that we can actually live through this pandemic and not only survive. It’s the hope of a brighter future that makes businesses think of ways to restart, respond, and retain as we usher in the new normal, living in an almost post Covid-19 world.

What’s not lost on us is that the most important thing for companies, and even the country's economy, is healthy Australians - both physically and mentally.

At some point we all know of friends or family who have suffered, on a physical and a psychological level, from Covid-19. For us at Zoom Recruitment, we use what we do best to facilitate their journeys back to the workforce when they’re ready.

Resilience. Progress. Stronger Relationships. Our wish for you and your team this 2022.