As a business owner, you face an unprecedented challenge, trying to run a successful, profitable company amid a pandemic. With uncertainty looming, it’s human nature to want to draw back and even reduce your staff and perhaps freeze hiring efforts altogether. However, to ensure your business runs like a well-oiled machine and remains profitable, you should always be hiring and recruiting new talent. Check out our three reasons why you should be hiring during a pandemic below:
Reason #1: Consider Long-Term Impact
After many of the current virus-related mandates and restrictions expire, your business will most likely be looking to set yourself up for a successful future. It might be slow now and cause you to think you need not hire. However, to approach your recruiting and hiring process from this perspective is short-sighted. Instead, you should look at your business’s future and plan for a long-term strategy instead of getting stuck in the present. For example, you might feel you don’t need two new salespeople at this time. That doesn’t mean you won’t in a few months, and now is the ideal time to train these team members so they are ready to hit the ground running when your business picks back up. When business returns to its normal breakneck speed, you will be thankful that you moved forward with hiring two new salespeople when at the time you likely thought you would not need additional talent. This way of thinking is setting yourself up for expected success, thinking ahead, and positively looking to the future.
Reason #2: Large Pool of Newly Accessible Talent Due to Career Changes and Reevaluation 
Another reason you should always be hiring even in a pandemic is that these unique circumstances present a large pool of prospective talent that wasn’t available before COVID-19. The virus has changed the way many businesses operate, meaning you now have digital resources that allow you to communicate with candidates who don’t live nearby. In this way, COVID-19 changed the way many people work and search for new careers. This has resulted in many people changing careers or opting to work remotely when they were previously in-office employees. The inception of remote work as a valid way to do business has given many companies a new way to recruit and employ ideal candidates. For example, if your business is in Pennsylvania, your ideal candidate could reside in California. Before COVID-19, that likely meant they were unable to apply for the job. Now, thanks to so many businesses moving to remote work exclusively or primarily, you have access to a whole new pool of possible candidates.
Reason #3: Let’s You Develop a Talent Pool
Even if you are currently unable to hire, you can begin developing a rich pool of talented candidates upon which you can draw when you are ready. For example, perhaps a person isn’t a good fit for your company’s needs right now, but they may be a strong culture fit for the future. You can build an ideal “dream team”, a list of potential candidates you can access when your business has a specific need and are ready to hire. Additionally, you could also hire a candidate who shows potential and attempt to train them or refine their skills, creating an even better employee.
Bottom Line
Admittedly, doing business in today’s uncertain and conflicted world is challenging and can even be downright scary. However, it’s important to keep in mind that being over-prepared is always preferable to being underprepared, so just because you don’t feel you need to hire a new employee right now doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue them. The health of your business long-term, the newfound access to talent all over the country, and the fact that you can build a list of candidates or prepare candidates for future employment in your company are just three reasons why you should always be hiring, even during a pandemic.
