In Demand: Which Skill Sets are thriving in the New Norm
What's the most common question that recruitment consultants hear from candidates and clients as we're wrapping up a phone call or meeting?
In my nine years of recruitment experience, the answer to the synonymous question "how's the market?" has changed a lot. But now, perhaps more than at any other time in my career, the answer is one that demands careful thought and a fair amount of speculation.
Which sectors are doing well? Which aren't? Who is bouncing back and who is struggling?
Watching the news can stoke speculation on whether lockdowns, states of emergency or the likes can change the shape of your week, your year or even your career path. With that said, I'd like to provide some insights into which professions and skill sets have been in demand as a result of the shifting landscape with our clients. Whether you're a job seeker or an employer, I hope this information provides you with some ideas and hopefully some reassurance that your skills could be applied to positions and/or industries you may not have previously considered.
Servicing Different Customers
As some of the largest players in the OTA sector began announcing cuts to their global workforce, certain parts of their businesses became more susceptible to the shrinking business size. With Expedia, Airbnb, Agoda, Klook and more reducing their workforce by anything from 20-40% globally, very few business verticals were left unscathed, and those who have remained after these announcements are left feeling trepidatious about what the future holds.
Several of the aforementioned companies publicly compiled staff directories of the cut staff to assist them in finding new positions: Agoda listed 33 staff for their Tokyo operation alone with a range of backgrounds, foremost of which is customer service.
The transferable skill of customer service from OTA to other sectors has becoming very apparent in recent months: Wahl+Case's clients in financial services, fintech, e-commerce, food delivery, enterprise software and gaming have all been open to reviewing customer support professionals from their former travel industry homes pro-actively, for a number of reasons.
The vast majority of customer service professionals firstly are bilingual (in some cases trilingual), which instantly opens doors with international clients and their international customer bases. Regional coverage becomes viable, with some of our clients employing customer service staff to cover multiple markets across APAC, or with monolingual reporting lines overseas.
Where applicable, OTA customer support functions also have the advantage of an understanding of payments. Depending on the customer service team structures, a capable customer support professional from Agoda or AirBNB can be a highly attractive prospect for Fintech payment solution providers like Stripe, Square or Adyen.
Finally, the volume of customer enquiries that an OTA professional may field makes them well-equipped to deal with industries as diverse as financial software solutions like Bloomberg or Refinitiv, to newer, thriving business models like food delivery: Wolt and Foodpanda are rapidly expanding their footprint in Japan to compete with Uber Eats and Demae-Can.
We all know how tough customer service can be dealing with irate tourists. That thick-skinned, bias to quick incident resolution skill set that OTA professionals acquire is a highly-prized experience in the market.
Social Distance Marketing
Visiting the Wahl+Case office was weird.
As a company, we have adopted a completely open policy to remote working: as a result, it was a new experience to walk through Harajuku and Meiji-Jingumae, where it quickly became apparent that offline marketing initiatives like billboards and train ads have been starkly absent from my socially distanced life for a while.
On the phone with a highly experienced Marketing Director last week, she made the point that right now, companies needn't specify 'digital' in their job title; it's the lion share of all marketing activities right now. My initial assessment of how COVID-19 would affect recruitment was that positions that don't immediately generate ROI - like marketing - would be put on hold. What we are instead seeing is a high demand for marketing professionals to put the advertising in front of the right demographics using predominantly digital methods.
Job titles like media marketing manager, social media manager, SNS specialist, digital campaign manager and so on have come to the fore: irrespective of industry sector, the shift to dominating your mobile screen or getting a piece of that YouTube commercial space is on the rise. Bytedance, Amazon and Rakuten have all placed an emphasis on recruitment agencies focusing on their marketing roles: Wahl+Case consultants have repositioned their portfolios in accordance with this to ensure that marketing professionals looking for a move can explore the biggest players in the B2C sector.
E-commerce companies too have recognized that while brick and mortar retail sales are down, consumers are still eager to get their fashion fix: digital marketing professionals are in high demand with online fashion and cosmetics retailers. Clients that were previously cautious about their hiring in this space have since reached out to us to begin hiring again, a great sign of recovery for professionals in marketing.
New Norm, New Skills, New Sectors
While COVID-19 has brought much unexpected change to the job market, some of this change is undoubtedly positive. It's exciting to speak to jobseekers and hiring managers who are open-minded to considering jobs and staff they may previously have not considered. These may be tough times, but being agile enough to consider a new direction can, and has, allowed us to make placements with new candidates into new companies and sectors.
We're endeavoring to stay as engaged with the market's twists and turns as possible here at Wahl+Case, and if you - as a jobseeker or employer - want to know how to get the most out of it, let us know!
Benedict Mallinson
Manager | Consumer & Financial Technology