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What organisations need to consider when hiring through COVID-19

What Organisations Should Be Doing During Covid  Hiring

by Charlotte Gurney

COVID-19 is dominating all the headlines and its story is still unfolding. The impact and speed of the crisis has been felt far and wide. It’s clear that organisations response through this crisis is being scrutinised. Its important to think about how you adapt your hiring strategy and how you effectively onboard new employees.

Key thoughts

Brand

Think about the culture of your brand. In an uncertain time for candidates they will be nervous and the culture of the brand and how that businesses has behaved through this crisis will become very important.

Social Responsibility

Demonstrate social awareness through CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiatives. Promoting the values to society and ways they can help their clients, employees and the community. Actions taken now will be long remembered by potential employees in the future, but demonstrating compassion and their approach will be remembered for a long time.

Human Interaction

During this time there needs to be a shift in thought on how to utilise technology in the hiring process. Using video interviews to build rapport can be a challenge with the absence of natural body language, however to give more insight the application of personality /psychometric tests, ability/technical testing can be utilised in the sifting process.

Induction Process and Strategies

Its important to note that some candidates may not have worked from home before. With some candidates being employed remotely, considerations on compliance, information security, data protection, health & safety and employee well being all come into play.

HR and managers need to rethink how an onboard process works in todays environment. A proportion of the market has put recruitment on hold however we are observing that some organisations are taking on a different approach and analysing what roles are critical to the business in terms of continuity and survival. Whatever the approach, thought must be given into the lead time to recruiting and onboarding such individuals to minimise disruption.

A new area for most companies would be providing an online induction strategy to introduce a new employee into the corporate culture and values. HR and managers will need to work closely during the induction period. Promoting the feeling of inclusion, being wary of acronyms and assigning a buddy to proactively decipher the business and the team.

HR and managers will need to work closely during this induction period, whether that’s sending out welcome packs with IT equipment to a welcome call or video call by a senior manager to welcome the new employee. Its important to keep the virtual presence in the shape of virtual team meetings whether that’s a brief in the morning a simple team call on a Friday afternoon to discuss plans for the weekend to stay connected.

Whatever your strategy you are thinking about deploying, its important that ‘a new normal’ is here to stay for the time being and what you deploy now in looking after new hires will only benefit their mental well-being, engagement and loyalty to your organisation in the years to come.

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