Rethinking Your Post-COVID-19 Hiring Tech Stack

COVID-19 has severely disrupted the way companies recruit.

Many that have grown accustomed to traditional recruitment are struggling to keep up to the new normal where digital becomes the main channel to communicate.

Without a vaccine in the foreseeable future, organizations are also struggling to make timely headcount decisions to hire or furlough. Future-focused recruitment leaders must start to plan and provision for what is to come when recovery trickles in and business traffic starts to rise.

This will ensure that the organizations will not be left behind when the economy reopens and struggle to cope as competitions are getting all the talents.

The current lull period provides talent acquisition departments with an opportune bandwidth to draw themselves out of the recruiting cogwheel and think deeply about remaking their recruitment strategy that would work during and after this pandemic.

Rethinking Your Post-COVID-19 Hiring Tech Stack

Here are five steps you can take to augment the way you recruit after COVID-19:

1. Align your recruitment strategy to the post-COVID-19 business model

Although the pandemic will be over, the impact brought upon may stay around much longer. Consumers are now well trained to get their wants and needs online.

From a gym or yoga session via Zoom to getting tutored on Teams, such shifts in the consumptions will have a huge impact on business models and the type of workforce that is necessary to run it.

The local supermarkets may need lesser stores and retail crews, and instead, ramp up the numbers of last-mile delivery and inventory people.

These are distinctive segments of the population and at the fundamental level, different ways to reach them would be needed to bring targeted candidates into the funnel.

It is paramount to set time to meet and discuss with your hiring managers and senior management to understand the projected business changes and how that might affect the kind of people to attract and hire.

2. A hard look at requirements

Since time immemorial, the criteria to hire is usually centered on a combination of qualification and a minimal year of relevant working experience.

It didn’t take the pandemic to show us the inadequateness of this filter but it does shine a spotlight on this as remote work arrangements are proving that outcomes and deliverables outweigh the process.

And results may not necessarily be coming from your most academically qualified employees or the one with the most years of experience.

Ten years of experience may simply be one year of experience repeated ten times.

The correlation equation has never worked and it is time to throw it out of the window.

But with what you may ask?

A better way to test the ability and capability of a candidate is via assessments. That would provide evidence of the foundational skills that they are able to apply in the real world, and not simply something they regurgitate after textbook memorization.

For software engineers, skill assessment platforms like Adaface can easily help to identify qualified developers accurately using an intelligent chatbot with an in-built code editor.

Not only does it save time but the results would make for an easier decision to decide between hires.

3. An alternative to face-to-face

As we continue to mask up and fist bumps, it is unimaginable to encourage any face-to-face over job interviews unless you are getting candidates to do a swab test prior to the meetup.

Face-to-face is also not scalable given that you can’t meet Richard if you are currently speaking with Louise.

An asynchronous video interview option is not only safer and scalable, it reduces the amount of time spent traditionally on hiring.

Platforms like VCV.ai could condense a 21 hours of hiring marathon into just 45 mins for any companies looking to hire 3 candidates from 250 CVs.

4. Start your own (virtual) career fair

When things recover, companies (many of them your competitions) will be ramping up their hiring to support their growth plans.

The old ways of 3 rounds of interviews over 2 months would no longer cut it. Expediting the hiring process and outrun your competitions are key to winning the race.

That means dismantling the old timeline and replacing it with an accelerated one by taking the cues from the world of speed-dating.

And it starts by putting up your own career fair to drive the crowd and quickly get them vetted by your hiring managers through video in quick succession.

Hiring can happen quickly and efficiently and it may even encourage great reviews on Glassdoor.

You can explore Hireplace to organize your first virtual career fair.

5. Make your onboarding consistent

First impression still counts in a post COVID-19 world and a good candidate/employee experience hinges on it.

For some time, onboarding duties are assigned randomly or simply to the person who does not happen to be in the room.

The extra work is something most seek to avoid but that also removes the most important moment for the new hire.

It does not even require a handler to be present if you consider using onboarding apps to provide the same consistent experience for every single hire.

From the submission of documents to check-ins to getting information about the nearest ATM machine, an app can easily take care of them without extra nanny duties imposed onto reluctant seniors.

PeopleStrong has an Onboarding module that takes care of all that without any human interventions.

6. Start measuring your workforce

Perhaps hiring may not even be necessary if internal mobility could solve the problem.

Better (re)deployment of your existing talents is not just quicker and a safer bet, it provides the facade of progress within the organization.

But deciding who to go where can not be regressed to gut feel or instinct. A structured way to capture, track, and monitor the attributes of your talents would support an evidence-based approach.

Just like knowing the make-up of your character when you are gaming, it would allow for an accurate understanding of what your talents can do and who may have the shortest deficit to fit into a new role.

And with predictive people and hr analytics, the assumption could be closer to your desired outcome.

Platforms like Pulsifi provide that bird’s eye visibility for talent managers to make such crucial decisions better.

Few industries have been left untouched by the economic fallout of this pandemic.

The implications are being felt at all levels of an organization. Regardless of where your hiring currently sits on your to-do list, a recruitment strategy is a necessary component of rebuilding your workforce.

And tech will continue to enable the pivot to align with the new digital future, scale the efforts, and further reduce administrative burden so that talent acquisitions get even more bandwidth to be strategic.