An overview of Evalex’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown and our view on the impact of Covid-19 on the recruitment, development and talent management landscape

Evalex and Covid-19

Evalex and Odyssey Talent Management have been monitoring the developing Covid-19 situation since March 2020, when President Ramaphosa first announced the country-wide lockdown.

During the course of the pandemic we have issued a number of communications that focus on the extraordinary – and sometimes surprisingly ordinary! – responses that are required to maintain a fully functioning and productive workforce.

Since the start of lockdown, we have put the resources in place to be able to provide our clients with continued service delivery of our assessment solutions. With a strong online focus in our assessment and development methodologies, participants can complete our assessments online without any physical intervention, whilst receiving support through email and telephonic means. Furthermore, we encourage the use of already available technology in the form of telephonic and video conferencing for meetings as well as for selection and development feedbacks – a process that the majority of our clients already follow.

We have summarised each of our Covid-19 communications below. Please click on the respective headline to read the full article on our blog:

The impact of Covid-19 on the recruitment and assessment space

As could be expected, Covic-19 also impacted the recruitment and assessment space in a significant way. Advances in technology and the widespread availability of broadband access have made it possible for recruitment and assessment activities to take place online. We have seen recruiters adopting online interviews through communication tools such as Zoom, Skype, WeChat Work, Slack and Microsoft Teams to replace the traditional face-to-face meetings.

Our Evalex psychometrics assessments have been available online for quite some time , allowing easy participant access and completion, along with fast, cost effective and efficient assessment administration and integrated reporting.  

It is also worth highlighting that our Evalex Leadership Assessments, which consist of five integrated simulations are also completely online in terms of administration, participant completion, scoring and assessment reporting. The simulations are combined with our psychometrics, and this integrated combination provides very high predictive validity in ascertaining an individual’s ideal level of leadership functioning.

We predict that leadership assessments in the market that are still face to face and, in some cases, paper-based, will find it difficult it increasingly difficult to survive the current pandemic environment, and for that matter, the workplace of the future.  

Online recruitment during the Covid-19 pandemic

There is no doubt that recruitment has started to take a back seat for many organisations, largely due to the current economic uncertainty. To compound matters, the recruitment process tends to involve face-to-face CV screening, interviews and then assessments. Onboarding new candidates can also prove to be difficult given the current situation.

In addition, 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 that Evalex can provide some innovative solutions and suggestions for.

One such suggestion is to 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. Read more about our other creative solutions.

Online development during the Covid-19 pandemic

As different levels of lockdown continue in the majority of organisations globally, people who are working from home may have less work to do and more time on their hands. This provides a fantastic opportunity for personal growth and development. Organisations can capitalise on this time to provide recently appointed employees with feedback on assessments done, or use the time wisely to catch up on development feedbacks, which usually take a back seat in the normal course of business.

To complement development feedback sessions, Evalex has developed a digital development reporting portal that allows individuals to access their assessment results online. The portal is a development tool, which lets people compare themselves against current and future aspirational positions and to identify strengths and development areas in order to build a Personal Development Plan.

Some other great ideas for companies are to focus on talent management through a skills audit of their teams or completion of a long overdue assessment of leadership competence, values, climate or culture.

Finding opportunity during Covid-19: Engage with students and young talent!

Online classes will most likely continue for most tertiary students till the end of 2020. This means more students will be online for longer periods than usual over this time and forward-looking organisations are already engaging with, sifting, assessing and pre-selecting potential candidates for their future talent programmes (such as graduate recruitment and learnership programmes), even when these programmes are only set to take place later in the year.

If your organisation plays in this space, why not use this time to target your ideal candidates, rather than taking the risk that the best and most talented candidates are already committed to other programmes by the time you are ready to begin engaging with them? Odyssey Talent Management can facilitate this process by providing a completely online and automated graduate and learnership process that can easily be implemented.

Internal and external talent acquisition during the Covid-19 pandemic

During this highly uncertain Covid-19 period, many organisations have taken a uniform approach to freezing their interviewing and onboarding processes and many organisations are either implementing salary cuts or retrenchments.

What a lot of organisations may not be thinking about is the opportunity that Covid-19 provides in two areas – the recruitment of scarce and suddenly available talent in the market, and the opportunity to identify internal talent required for taking the business forward into the future.

We predict that forward thinking organisations who consider the importance of either sourcing potentially readily available external  talent, and/or understanding the talent that lies within their businesses, are likely to gain the upper hand and thrive in the years to come.

Identifying and managing resilience in the time of Covid-19

If ever there was a time for organisations to understand, identify and strengthen the resilience of their organisations and employees,  it is now. Many companies have already had to close shop due to the Covid-19 crisis and others are in a battle to stay alive.

Resilience is a quality displayed by individuals who are able to remain calm during a crisis and who can move on from disruptive events or situations without experiencing negative long-term consequences. Our blog provides some insight into the area, and how our solutions help organisations identify and manage resilience.

If you would like any further information, or to discuss any talent management requirements with us, please contact us at [email protected] or +27 11 803 8703 or visit our website.

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