The shape of our world is changing rapidly in the last seven months under the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic and societal upheavals. No other recent event has plunged the businesses into this much uncertainty and change. One of the most damaging consequences of the coronavirus is the record low unemployment. In fact, the number of unemployed people is higher than at the historical times of the Great Recession. 

As the second wave of the pandemic emerges in most of the world, we are witnessing the re-architecting of the HR industry. However, the significance of the hiring process didn’t lose its intensity. Instead, it has one of the essential roles in maintaining businesses afloat due to HR having the responsibility to keep up employee morale and to manage recruitment.

Hence, it’s crucial to determine what are the changes that are arising in these tumultuous times and how are they affecting HR. Being able to understand these alterations and how can they erase traditional ways of hiring can help organizations and recruiters to achieve their recruitment objectives. That is why we are exploring the consequences of challenging 2020 on hiring processes.

CANDIDATE SOURCING

Before identifying the right talents, recruiters need to source potential job applicants. Although hiring managers know where to seek, manual screening can be a tedious and time-consuming task. That is why artificial intelligence has found its way to the recruiting process, offering to alleviate its difficulties and lengthy activities.

Most companies nowadays use recruiting technology to conduct the recruiting process with more ease and be able to focus on more essential tasks, such as creating the onboarding strategy. Hence, recruiters are introducing an applicant tracking system (ATS), recruiting software, and social media screening to hiring, which helps them detect the best candidates. By using the AI, recruiters can connect all their platforms and seek talents on social media channels, which widens the talent pool.

Besides, due to social distancing, many organizations have to limit their geographic search and do everything in their power to find local talents instead of flying someone in. Recruiters are also leveraging internal candidates more than ever as that move is both time and cost-saving. Unfortunately, many are also facing hiring freezes, which means that they can only target internal talents.

To make their talent pool as flexible as possible, organizations will also consider and accept project-based freelancers, gig workers, and temporary employees. That’s allowing interim roles and organizations that provide them, to have a bigger role in the hiring process. They can create a bridge between assignments that need to be covered urgently and the moment of finding the best match.

BACKGROUND CANDIDATE SCREENING

COVID-19 doesn’t leave much place for mistakes because too much is at stake. The pandemic demands from companies to be precise, certain, and to think through their hiring decisions. It is how the interest in automation and AI grows. Recruiters need a hiring process to be seamless and fast, but also to detect a quality hire.

One way to achieve certainty that a candidate is the right fit for the organization, hiring managers to start relying on social media check programs more than ever. These platforms provide recruiters with deep insights into a candidate’s professional conduct and achievements, ensuring that they are welcoming a genuine and moral employee to the team.

Social media screening programs can detect potentially toxic language, racial bias, discrimination, sexism, and discrepancies in a candidate’s resume. By analyzing data within the scope of work, intelligent AI algorithms can notice candidates whose behavior could deter the workplace and the safety of other employees.

REMOTE HIRING PROCESS

Over the years, recruiting has been through different phases, but coronavirus is triggering its sudden remote and tech revolution. Due to social distancing and lockdown requirements, hiring managers had to find a way to continue regular work, including interviews, despite the lack of personal contact. It is how various tech tools solving the distance element started to emerge.

Although it’s been seven months since most countries got to experience COVID-19, we are still trying to avoid meeting a large number of people face-to-face as a protective measure. Therefore, both employers and hiring managers are meeting their new workers in a remote setting, leveraging the AI and recruitment technology.

Recruiters still need to make the candidate experience seamless and get to know them as they used to before. That is how video interviews and platforms became more present in HR, allowing the hiring managers to question and meet their talents without outside the office. Many are also using one-way video interviews where candidates can record their answers without the recruiter being present.

EMERGING TALENT ABUNDANCE

Although one would think that COVID-19 will trigger talent shortage, we are facing talent abundance due to high unemployment levels. With many young people entering the world of work and unemployed seeking new opportunities, recruiters have the chance to choose between many talented candidates.

However, talent abundance might be a convenient trap because many job seekers will apply for all available vacancies, even if they don’t match their qualifications. They are facing a limited number of job offers and high demand, which is why recruiters need to be careful. Hiring managers should be equally selective as before to avoid making a bad hiring decision that could cost the company millions.

By Jigna B.

Jigna has been working with iSmartRecruit for so long. She is highly qualified in generating productive content and marketing the content. She has produced several contents that can make you understand the core problems of hiring professionals and recruiters and providing them with quite satisfying solutions through a recruiting technology called the Applicant Tracking System.