The employment scene in the UK had been terrible throughout 2020 with the Coronavirus pandemic hitting the country since March of this year. The first three months of the COVID pandemic saw more than 1.3 million lose their jobs. While many of these people could not be added to the unemployment index either since they were not planning on working at the time or were in companies that could not support them, but were doing so through the job retention scheme. The Government in a recent meeting decided that they would continue with the job retention scheme till the end of October, which meant that they would have supported companies to hold on to their employees for about eight months since the start of the pandemic. Overall, the UK is also seeing that the opening up of the economy is not changing much and there is still large scale unemployment throughout the country.

From all the job loss hitting all parts of the country, the only people hit the most are the youngest generation that is just entering the workforce. The Government is doing its best to mitigate through this issue, and they have been assisting through a great extent, but the question of whether it will be enough is another tough one. The economy slowly began opening up at the beginning of August, and while the government expected people to start spending their money, they were surprised to notice that they didn’t spend as much as anticipated.

While most had seen the working of the economy over a previous couple of months and how the healthcare system tried to assist with the pandemic but was not the most positive, people were not ready to take any chances just yet. Although people were in their homes for the better part of three months, they were not in any hurry to rush out and begin spending. Smaller businesses like restaurants and bars started opening up, and people were encouraged to make smaller payments.

Furthermore, to keep up with some of the restrictions of the pandemic, the initial days meant that a lot of the companies began working remotely. The main reasons were so that they could follow the remote working norms and get straight back to work, instead of holding off for longer.

Companies also started coordinating through video and regular calls since the entire team could

not be in the office. Employers immediately started handling a DBS check for all their employees

to make sure they could trust them without worrying about their integrity. They also coordinated tracking the DBS certificate which they could handle online so they would not have to worry about leaving their office. Depending on the amount of information that they needed on an individual, they could coordinate various tests, and there were multiple versions of these to dig deeper, which usually depended on the job profile that they were hiring for. Many positions mandatorily needed this information, and they had to make sure they provided it.