The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has posed plenty of challenges in the business landscape, and the human resources is not an exception. As the “new normal” transformed the traditional hiring procedure into digitization, hiring managers and recruiters are finding new approaches to ensure a safe environment for the applicants to prevent the health risks brought by COVID-19.
According to CNBC, 36.5 million U.S. workers are now unemployed because of the economic impact of the COVIC-19 pandemic. To meet the increasing job demand across different sectors, corporate recruiters are turning to new technologies to engage and court potential hires in the age of social distancing and remote work. This led companies to introduce cutting-edge recruitment tools to optimize the recruitment process amid a pandemic. These include the applicant tracking system, job aggregators, and videoconferencing programs.
As long as the effects of COVID-19 continue to persist, recruiters need to find new strategies and adapt to the challenges of the current hiring market. Luckily, digital platforms and tech tools are now offering opportunities for the HR sector to level up their recruitment process and hire the top talent despite a global crisis. If you’re one of them, here are the strategies to get the top applicants during a pandemic.
Be thorough with your recruitment procedure
If you’re recruiting top talents during a global crisis, you need a detailed recruitment plan before beginning the hiring process. Hiring remotely is a completely different experience than onsite hiring, that’s why you need a strategy to make the recruitment process work for the company and potential employees.
Before the hiring season, make sure to have a comprehensive system in place to assess your recruitment tools and hiring platforms in advance. This will help recruiters familiarize themselves with the recruitment procedure before the first wave of applicants comes in. Doing everything ahead of time will ensure the process will run smoothly.
The first part of the recruitment process is almost the same as hiring in person, from compiling the candidate lists, narrowing the list down, administering the test, and choosing the ones to proceed on the interview. When sending an interview invitation via video call, make sure to include complete details, such as the interview schedule, link of the video meeting, and detailed description of the job.
Hiring remotely involves providing several pieces of information to potential candidates and ensuring you’ve completely reviewed the applications you receive. You may expect a pile of applicants to come in, so you have to set stricter standards about what you’re looking for in an applicant and make the job qualifications clear.
Narrow your search to serious candidates
One of the main challenges for recruiters is that posting jobs online makes it easy to apply for a position by just using résumés, which results in a sea of résumés and half-hearted applications. This is especially difficult for startups and small businesses, since hiring a single candidate involves high costs and can take several weeks. It can take up a large portion of resources from screening applications, checking references, and evaluating skills.
Hiring remotely requires a nontraditional method of hiring instead of relying on traditional HR tools. Today, AI recruiting tools have special features that look beyond résumés to screen out the applicant pool. These include in-depth assessments, live technical interviews, skill-based tests, external evaluations, and merit-based assessments. These tools speed up the hiring process without affecting the quality of hires. Basically, the more thorough the recruitment tool, the easier to eliminate non-serious candidates, leaving you with top-quality hires.
Consider career shifters
As the job market becomes more competitive, more people are reassessing their professional development in the next few years. Some are considering to reskill and shift careers from hard-hit industries to thriving and stable sectors.
Before, it was a common practice to hire candidates within the same industry. But as hiring trends have changed, employers are now open to hire career shifters. While it may add up to the standard applicant pool, companies treat career shifters as an opportunity to revitalize the company and create a diverse workplace.
Many recruiters also realize that these types of candidates are better than conventional hires. They are also more affordable than highly specialized candidates. Although they are harder to recruit, recruiters are embracing new methods to hire employees with diverse talent and unique attitudes.
The pandemic has reminded us of the need to innovate with the times, and the traditional hiring procedure is long overdue for developments. Taking the strategies above into consideration will help your HR team’s recruitment methods evolve and improve as the business landscape moves toward digitization.
