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Beyond Recruitment: How We Can Strengthen Your Hand During Covid-19
It has been, to put it mildly, a tricky old year.
Here at Monarch, providing recruitment services for the aviation industry accounts for a significant part of our business. You'll doubtless be aware of the catastrophic and inevitable consequences that Covid-19 – and its accompanying lockdowns, quarantines and travel restrictions – has had on aviation. Revenue worth billions has evaporated, while tens of thousands of redundancies have been made.
The damage done to the aviation industry has made headlines worldwide, but it's by no means the only sector suffering right now. Many other high-risk-industry clients of Monarch's have also been forced to make redundancies.
Staying Visible
The lack of actual recruitment work to be done hasn't prevented us from staying in close contact with our clients. Rather than simply vanishing on them until there are new roles to be filled by our candidates, we've been reaching out with messaging along the lines of, 'We’re not trying to sell you any of our services right now, but we’re here to listen to your issues, and we’re here to help.’
Because what we can offer right now are free personality profiles for the newly or soon to be unemployed. Now, the idea of a ‘personality test’ may conjure memories of the daft online quizzes popularised by Buzzfeed back in the early 2010s: ‘Which ‘Friends’ Character Are You?’ and so on. Our questionnaire, however, meets the psychometric criteria established by the European Standing Committee on Tests and Testing, and has been registered with the British Psychological Society.
The profiling process comprises of 112 probing and sometimes challenging questions. We always ask that these should be completed at speed, so that the participant's responses are as instinctive and truthful as possible. For most, the questionnaire should take around 15 minutes. We actually disregard questionnaires that take 40 minutes or more, as such a timeframe is indicative of somebody attempting to ‘game’ their results.
Mining Mindsets
Each profile generates two sets of results: the first is extremely detailed and intended for use by Monarch only, as it requires training in order to parse out the data generated. The second – seven pages long and accessibly written – is intended for the participant and, where applicable, their immediate managers.
These results give easy-to-understand insights into a person’s mindset: their inherent abilities and strengths, as well as their weaknesses. As we often say here at Monarch, you can teach new skills, but you can’t teach a mindset. It’s the part of you that’s more-or-less set in stone, and our profile can map it out with such uncanny accuracy that it often startles those reading their results.
The results document not only details each participant’s mindset, it also suggests specific careers and roles that that mindset would be suited to. For those rethinking their work life in reaction to the turmoil caused by Covid-19, this guidance can prove highly thought-provoking and helpful.
And for a manager, gaining a real insight into an employee’s mindset enables them to deal with that employee far more effectively. They get a better understanding of what it is about the employee’s day-to-day work that motivates or frustrates them. And with so many of our clients undergoing dramatic restructuring programmes right now, administering our profile – again, for free – can help identify potential new roles for existing employees.
Help is at Hand
For those looking for work, I’d also recommend looking at LinkedIn to discover the many free resources that can be found there. Many consultants, lifestyle coaches and HR experts have been offering their services for free during 2020. These services can include one-on-one advisory sessions by video call; access to training materials that would normally be paywalled; or the opportunity to have your CV looked over and spruced up by a professional.
That latter service – CV-sprucing – is also something that we’re happy to provide for free here at Monarch. Because if 2020 has showed us anything, it’s that we really are all in this together.
Interested in taking our mindset questionnaire – or signing up a member of your team up for it? Click here and we’ll get you set up. It’s completely free.