Virtual Executive Assistants on the Rise

We’ve partnered with digital agency Major Tom to join an initiative that offers a curated version of our services to helps business leaders make good decisions quickly—because connection is more important than ever. You can see them here.

We spoke with Liz from Major Tom to discuss the state of the recruitment industry, including how e-commerce is being affected, what it all means for talent, what has changed for us personally, and how you can prepare for what’s to come. Watch the video below, and read on for the full conversation.

Liz:

Okay. Alrighty. I am Liz from Major Tom here with Alisha Adams and Tess Sloane from Eleven Eleven Talent. They are headquartered in Vancouver but are a global company and we’re going to chat today about the current state, what’s going on in the world and how it’s affecting us and our unique takes on it. So to kick it off, what changes are you seeing in your industry right now?

Tess:

Yes. So we are in the retail apparel and consumer goods industry and so a large part of our industry is bricks and mortar, and a large majority of brick and mortar has been closed down and completely grounded right now. So what we are seeing is a lot of the brands that don’t have an established eCommerce channel are truly suffering right now. A large portion of sales and profits have been impacted and a large number of hourly workers have been significantly impacted.

So we’re seeing a lot of mass temporary layoffs. We’re now seeing some of those temporary layoffs and move to permanent layoffs to help companies recoup those lost sales. Straight off the bat, we saw salary cuts as well. So in retail, in our industry, at the beginning we saw entire senior leadership teams take a 20% salary cut right off the bat. And now we’re seeing that actually funnelling down to the senior vice president level, the VP level, the director level, they’re all being asked to take a cut at this point.

We’ve also seen some of the larger players taking a real stand to keep their hourly people paid for as long as possible, and their salaried people as well. So we actually, locally, we saw Lululemon do that straight off the bat. And then we had a lot of brands follow suit, so that was a really positive thing that came out of it.

We’re going to see a lot of movement with top talent through this and some of the bigger players are really trying to ensure that they secure their people. We are going to see a lot of talent exchange going on in retail and apparel and consumer goods right now. And I guess on the flip side, some businesses in our industry are thriving currently, any kind of fitness product, obviously Amazon, grocery stores, drug stores, big box retailers, Costco, Walmart, to really great talent during this time, and we’re seeing them actively pursue that as well.