The country might be in Coronavirus lockdown, but compliance recruitment is still going on at breackneck speed. I and my colleagues in temporary recruitment have been busy, although the situation might be on the cusp of change.

Despite the fact that much of the City of London now resembles a ghost town, over the last couple of weeks it seems that there has been no change in demand for new compliance staff from client-firms. Rather than put the whole process on ice, they are more than willing to organise video conferences or interviews using calls on Whatsapp. The main fly in the ointment that I have seen so far involves the logistics by which a new recruit gets started in the office during the onboarding process. Before a firm makes its formal offer of a job to a candidate, its internal policy usually dictates that someone high up has to approve the appointment with his signature. Such people are elusive at the best of times, but HR staff can usually be relied upon to track them down. Now, they are hiding from the world at home. Because more than 95% of all people at banks and other financial firms are now working at home, it is also harder for us to find the right people to do the necessary logins for new workers.

No financial institution that I know of in London is even bothering to maintain a skeleton staff at its premises. Two weeks ago, it was typical for a firm to split its people in half, into an alternating red team and a blue team, with one 'on' and one 'off.' Now some firms are keeping the odd person on the premises, but no more.

I believe that the Government has told people at financial institutions that they are, or might become, key workers. One normally thinks of National Health Service staff when one hears this phrase, but if a bank were to need to move people into its offices for some kind of emergency, it would probably be entitled to do so, especially to fix a malfunctioning server or something of the sort.

The picture, then, is a surprisingly healthy one - no pun intended - but with people working from home and not in the office. At the moment we are where we ought to be for this time of year - it is a busy time and ought to be growing busier. My only worry is that it might slow down.

Another consequence of the Coronavirus is the Government's deferral of IR35 for a year. Sometime after the budget speech that he delivered exactly two weeks ago which did not mention it, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced in a press release that the new accounting standard will not now come into force until 2021. This means that contractors can still work for limited companies if they wish to.

And what of pay rates in temporary compliance jobs? It is very hard for firms such as mine to benchmark these at the moment. Because of all the uncertainty generated by the virus, one might think that people are probably more likely to be flexible on the issue, but this is impossible to know.