With the massive changes that were taking place in the workforce in the UK, companies and businesses were reviewing the way they were hiring people. The job requirements and descriptions for many companies in the UK included providing background checks, making sure there were no past misdemeanours, and basic online and tech knowledge since all work involved checking-in, getting through internal meetings, and in many cases client meetings through virtual or video platforms.
While the smaller companies had been remote working for a long time before the pandemic, the changes took some getting used to for the larger ones. Many of them already had their processes set in stone, and changing them was quite challenging. As the pandemic grew, the number of people losing their jobs kept increasing, with nothing much that anyone could do since the markets were slow, people were uncertain about the future and did not want to spend large amounts of money unless they had to. There weren’t enough people going outside to support businesses. A lot of the trends were changing fast, the UK, along with many other parts of the world were looking for lesser human interaction.
People were now preferring to order take-out food at home, over going to a restaurant. When it came to shopping, they would pick the items that they wanted to purchase online, over buying them at the store. In the initial stages, the country went through a national lockdown and people were told to stay indoors as much as possible since the pandemic was spreading through human interactions. Now that many healthy steps were in place, it did not change that fact, and people still were not planning on heading out if there were a chance of them getting sick, that too after seeing how poorly the medical care system in the UK dealt with the pandemic.
Companies found themselves adapting to these changes, and getting any work done meant building an online platform to be able to interact with people. The precautions that people had to take if they were planning on getting outdoors still existed, and they had to follow them if they did not want to get in trouble. At the time of the second wave of the pandemic, in early September, the rules were a lot stricter, and the police were allowed to enforce them if people were not going along with them.
Employers needed to get through background checks if they wanted to see if the people they were working with were a good fit for the job. A simple and quite common background check was the CRB check which could be handled by anyone and for anyone else. It allowed them to check for and gather the information required. Additionally, employers were allowed to use another approach which was the DBS check that gathered additional information on employees or prospective candidates who they were planning on hiring. The best parts about the latter tests are that they were more intensive, and the DBS certificate could be reviewed online, which made it a lot more convenient.
