With massive changes taking place regarding employment rates and the overall job market in the UK, people are not sure what the future holds. Although the world is surrounded by Coronavirus, which has been around for almost six months, the UK unemployment rate stays unchanged. There are multiple reasons for the statistics not changing, and some of these are:
- While a lot of people are out of work, many of them are not looking to begin working any time soon, until the pandemic passes off or there is better progress on a cure. Unemployment refers to the people who are out of work but looking to begin working, which is not the case in large parts of the UK.
- Other factors include the Government has been pushing out schemes to assist companies across the UK so they would reduce the number of people they lay off, which increases the number of people working on paper but in reality, companies cannot afford to keep them.
One of the most popular Government schemes was the emergency wage subsidy scheme. According to this scheme, the Government was paying 80% of workers wages up to £2,500 every month. They managed to get through and protect about 8 million jobs at approximately 1 million companies in the initial weeks of the programme.
However, if the unemployment scene is carefully studied, almost all companies are laying off people which is proof that most of them do not have work. The first attempts to gauge the economic fallout showed employees from company payrolls dropping by 450,000 at the beginning of April as staff were laid off and hiring ceased. Additionally, the number of people claiming unemployment benefits significantly increased in the first three months of the lockdown to almost 2.1 million, according to official figures capturing the onset of the coronavirus crisis.
From all companies that were shutting shop with people losing their jobs, the highest dynamic belonged to the youngest and the oldest people at companies. These times are also making it difficult to find out exact details since the Coronavirus has made the entire process a lot more confusing. Most companies released that they have to embrace the new normal and they started
have started work as best as they can through online meeting and remote working. Whether they are having internal or professional client meetings, they handle them online for the most part and meet people whenever they can keeping all the norms and safety standards in mind.
Employers are now conducting interviews and other meetings over video calls and not in person, which means that they are no longer meeting the people they are hiring, which lead them. This is one of the main reasons why they had to start conducting background checks on the people working in their companies. Most companies can get all the information that they need through a DBS check. However, a few companies who would need a little more than basic information for which they usually need to conduct an enhanced DBS check and is only relevant to particular jobs.