This is a YouTube video titled "What has Mike Richards experience of the world of remote working been like?" containing a monologue by Mike Richards recorded in late 2023. Mike Richards shares his insights and experiences as a recruiter navigating the evolving expectations around remote and flexible working policies post-Covid, discussing candidate questions, company adaptations, and the importance of intentionality in office attendance.
And for me as a recruiter, it's quite a weird world. I was just looking down some here, some of the questions prior, when I was recruiting, prior to Covid, I'd be asked, so, what's the job? Who's it for? What's the salary now? And maybe a brave 1 in 10 people might say, what's your flexible working policy? I say, flexible effort out the door. Now, if I did that, I'd have no one working for me. And, you know, if I don't ask that question of my clients, I don't get to help them recruit because that's what I get asked. I just recently I was talking to Leanne before that. I've been recruited for a client in Texas, thankfully placed the role. But I approached 100, over 150 candidates for the role. And it was weird. The responses I got back. I would get the following list of questions and here we go. Just so I got it right. So I'd send out the job description, I'd send the link to the job. And then the first bit was, so, is the job in the office hybrid or remote? What's the salary? Where is it? What's the job again? And you guys laugh. But I was literally doing this and I'm like, crumbs. And what happened? We actually got to the final stages with this one cad they fell in love with Thought was really great. And what they were finding is he said, actually, I'm not going to be in the office. I'll be hybrid. And the company itself has actually changed because they realized that their IT teams were a bit sort of separate. They were in the office two or three days a week, but all the finance was coming in five days a week. And they're like, well, actually, do we need to. We just had two years of working from home. And it's just as Joel told there about intentionality, I gave a session in New York Cash Exchange, and Steve Rosenthal from Broadridge podcast guest, he talks about the fact that within their offices, they were finding they were going back to their offices. Everyone's. Everyone's back in the office. Back in the office. And then he would go into his cubicle or his nice office. And the fact was then at 5 o' clock, he'd leave and he wouldn't have seen any of his team. They were just doing the job. So what they actually did is they pivoted a little bit. I can't remember the exact phrase, but it's about intentionality. He said, if you're going to come in, come in for a reason. Have meetings in your diary. Don't just come in for the sake of it actually make a difference. Otherwise you're just giving money to the state for your travel and all this. And you're wasting time. You've proved it.
