COVID and innovation in recruitment processes

Coronavirus is changing the way we all do business and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Businesses, like ours, had to quickly adapt and change the ways they operate – and for some, this was easier to do than others.

At the beginning of the UK lockdown, many sectors froze recruitment drives, made redundancies and relied on using government initiatives, such as the job retention scheme, to make safely through to ‘the new normal’.

It was reported that the number of permanent job vacancies fell at their sharpest rate in April this year, and for job seekers, the future looked bleak.

However, some smart businesses realised a need to maintain their hiring efforts for key roles that would support business continuity and drive them through the toughest times we have ever seen.

This undoubtedly posed a challenge for those looking to recruit – face to face assessments went out of the window and online interviews via Zoom and Microsoft Teams took their place. Removing unnecessary physical meetings and searching for alternative, digital methods of recruitment is now commonplace.

Online assessment functionality is highly useful for recruiters with large volumes of applicants. Early stages of the recruitment process are often already digitised using software, and it likely this could extend to a 100% ‘zero-touch’ process, where candidates are only ever recruited online.

Online assessment platforms can be tailored entirely to your recruitment requirements and take your applicants through a series of assessment questions (compiled by you). Based on these results, you can quite literally ‘whittle down’ your applicants and take the best ones through to the next stages, without the need for face to face communication – perfect for social distancing measures.

Most platforms will also contain some form of reporting dashboard where you can view all your candidates’ results. Here you can measure key competencies and select the best calibre of candidates for your roles in one streamlined solution.

To put it plainly, there is software and technology out there to significantly digitise the recruitment process, enabling you to operate better virtually in these unpredictable times. This software creates time savings, streamlines processes and holds all information centrally.

We know a thing or two about online recruitment/assessment platforms, and our solutions are helping HR and recruitment teams in a variety of sectors better manage their candidates through a mixture of ‘off the shelf’ solutions or bespoke assessment solutions. Get in touch with us today to find out more.