From The Management
Recruiting during COVID-19 lockdown
31 March 2020
Paul Sweeny, Chief Technology Officer, BidFX
We are all living through tough times. The world has locked down to fight the coronavirus. Economic activity has stagnated, and a deep recession will surely follow. In the immediate fallout, many good people are finding themselves out of work. At least the banks in the City are putting a pause to planned redundancy programmes until the crisis is over.
The FinTech sector is generally surviving – touch wood – because employees can work remotely. In London, like in most affected cities, developers are hunkered down, self-isolated at home, mastering the art of collaboration over video conference and instant messaging. Agile development practices such as pair programming require some adjustment for these times where social distancing is mandatory. Remote screen sharing us helps achieve conformance to the required 2 metres of separation. So far the technology is holding up well. The Internet backbone has not melted down yet. Impressively, we recently staged a one hundred person town hall over Google Meet without a dropout.
Rest assured the FX markets are not going away, no matter how severe the recession to come. When the virus has passed, and it will pass, world trade will pick up, investments will resume, and businesses will exchange currencies. BidFX is a growth company and will, therefore, strive to recruit great technology staff during the COVID-19 lockdown. BidFX are adapting to recruitment in the new reality of the pandemic. We are interviewing candidates by video. We are hiring from countries under effective quarantine, in the knowledge that our new joiner may have to work initially remote and potentially do so for months. We are shipping equipment to isolated staff and onboarding new teams at safe arm’s length. As with everything we do, BidFX is learning much from experience, and we aim to come out of this crisis must stronger than we went in.
Stay at home, protect healthcare workers and save lives.
Then perhaps take the time to refresh your CV.
