Feature_Recruitment & Restaffing
RECRUITMENT & RESTAFFING As live entertainment operators around the world predict that 2022 could be a record-breaking year, the scramble is on to get depleted staff numbers back to full strength. Gordon Masson reports.
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recent report in the UK suggested that 90,000 jobs had been lost in the cultural sector because of the Covid-19 pandemic, suggesting that millions of people globally have experienced an impact on their livelihoods and many may have already taken the decision to work in a different sector. That dilemma is just one of the challenges that human resources executives and recruiters are facing ahead of a year that many live entertainment experts are predicting will be the biggest ever for concerts, festivals, and other shows. “Just before Covid we had about 110 employees; now we’re at somewhere between 85 and 90, but we want to be at 120 by the end of this year,” reveals TicketSwap corporate recruiter Ruben Pluimers. Heather Papst, who is director of people, North America, for TAIT, tells IQ, “In terms of
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our employee population, at the end of September our headcounts were at 85% of our end-ofyear target, so we are on track to meet the goals that we set out in terms of recovery, readiness, and mobilisation. “We have recalled and rehired just about everybody from the group that was furloughed. We’ve also rehired people who actually left us and had to take another job in the interim, and then we have 100-plus brand-new hires to the organisation.” Papst adds, “In the US, it’s a tight labour market. Our unemployment rate keeps dropping, which is obviously a good thing overall, but it means that there is more fierce competition for talent.” Detlef Kornett, a member of the executive board of Deutsche Entertainment AG (DEAG), which has operations in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, the UK and Ireland, notes that
each country has its own challenges and it may well be that business will not be up and running everywhere until Q2 or even Q3 of next year. “Restaffing is, of course, different country to country, but with continental Europe we have been able to keep staff during the crisis because there have been much better support mechanisms on the part of the governments – more favourable furlough schemes and other systems – so the staff are all fully on board, even if they are not all working at this time,” says Kornett. “So we still have people on furlough, but in terms of overall numbers we’ve actually got more people than pre-Covid because certain sectors, such as arts and exhibitions, have grown and needed to employ more people. “When we look at the UK, we’re a little bit below staff numbers compared to pre-Covid, but that also has to do with changes in our makeup – we lost a theatre to renovation in the West End
