Online recruitment during the Covid-19 pandemic
Our previous blog highlighted the impact of Covid-19 on the recruitment and assessment space and how recruiters are turning to online interviewing and digital platforms to assist with recruitment.
The question many organisations are now facing is whether to stop recruitment for fear of the economic impact of the virus or to proceed with hiring to prevent business slowdown, and to ensure an adequately stocked and high performing workforce once the epidemic passes.
There is no doubt that recruitment has started to take a back seat for many organisations. This is largely due to current economic uncertainty. Furthermore, the recruitment process tends to involve face-to-face CV screening, interviews and then assessments. As everyone is not yet geared toward video based interviewing and online assessments, there may be a bottleneck in this area. Onboarding new candidates can also prove to be difficult given the current situation. Furthermore, many organisations are still relying on assessment instruments and processes that are paper and pencil based, manual, non-integrated or that have to be completed face-to-face or via video or voice. This is now proving to be a very difficult and time-consuming process.
What can be done to address some of these challenges? Interviews can prove a stumbling block for some companies at the moment. A potential solution is to move assessments to earlier in the recruitment process, prior to an interview. Assessments can thus be used to shortlist for the interview process, by quickly identifying high potential candidates and thus cutting down on interview time.
To further enable the interviewing process, organisations can consider standardised interviewing templates for various roles and levels. As an example, we can use our Evalex Competence Framework to create structured interview guides with questions that are standardised and aligned to Levels of Work. Seeing that most interviews are generally quite unstructured, this approach can bring in some form of consistency in process and ratings for online interviews.
A further consideration is to focus on assessments that are completely online, and that do not require face-to-face interventions. At Evalex we provide online assessments from blue-collar to executive level that effectively address these challenges. With an automated delivery process, the assessments provide for email notifications of set-up, candidate completion and reporting that streamlines the recruitment process.
Online communication platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Bluejeans, Skype and Zoom then allow for the seamless delivery of selection feedback to line management on assessment results, as well as development feedback to participants. And yes, all of this can happen while working from home.
Given the current challenges around face-to-face assessment interventions, the use of structured interviews and an automated, integrated, online and time-sensitive assessment process with strong predictive validity can greatly help organisations ensure continuity in their selection and development processes. Let us know how we can assist you to keep your company’s recruitment and development process up to date in this time of social distancing.
For more information, please contact us on [email protected].