As the whole world looks forward to getting back to their “normal” lives, it appears the life we once knew is gradually changing into a totally different one. The pandemic is forcing everyone including small businesses to live a “new normal” life where transactions have to be contracted in a contact-less market.
Due to various policies by the Centres for Disease Control agencies around the world to reduce the impact of COVID, it’s imperative that businesses who want to continue to operate, come up with processes that can adapt to this new way of operating.
In our previous blog post, first in the series titled: How to improve your business processes post-COVID 19, we looked briefly at some business processes that will have to adapt to the new way of conducting business remotely and with as less physical contact as possible.
So let’s take a look at one of those processes to see how it can be improved on.
Hiring/Onboarding new employees
Even though this type of business process does not directly add value to the end consumer, recruiting good hands supports the smooth running of your business.
As a result of the pandemic, a lot of organisations had to cut down their staff strength and in some cases layoff many.
But as we begin to see measures to ease the lockdown, organisations are taking bold steps to re-open their doors to customers and in many sectors like the healthcare, food and IT industry, hiring seems to be ramping up faster than ever.
So what are the best practices for hiring post COVID and beyond?
Digital Recruitment
The process of digital recruitment can be defined as a way of leveraging technology to source, assess, attract, select and recruit candidates for open positions. It includes everything like career websites, leveraging job boards, recruiting through mobile, social hiring, and online assessments.
It is an upgrade to the traditional or conventional hiring process.
Digital Hiring is an efficient and cost-effective business solution
It is an efficient and cost-effective solution that saves a lot of time because allows recruiters to schedule and conduct video-based interview sessions online and eradicates all hassles of travelling distances within the recruitment process. Candidates and hiring managers can take/give interviews anywhere and at any time.
Not every business can embrace remote working such as those who are into the aviation and hospitality business but if you run a business that can afford to allow your employees work from home, then looking into ways of streamlining your entire onboarding process online will be a wise choice.
Since you might not have the luxury for face-to-face interactions as you used to, you might need to consider following the following steps to improve your hiring process:
- Create a career website and make sure it’s mobile-friendly
- Develop an efficient but simple on-boarding plan from source to selection.
- Select the best communication platform that works for you and your team so you can stay connected since you can’t meet face – to – face.
- Get rid of all bottlenecks that slows down your hiring process.
- Go paperless, send all correspondence by email and adopt the use of digital signatures for approvals
- Leverage job boards and social media sites like LinkedIn to improve the quality of hire and recruitment process. This also increase the size of talent pool you have access to.
- Schedule phone screening and video interviews, and assessment to reduce cost.
- Virtually onboard new hires and train them
- Have a centralized cloud system where all your documents are safe and can be easily accessed by the hiring manager
- Embrace digital recruiting tactics in the form of ATS and CRMs that streamlines your recruitment process remotely, if you can afford it
- Prioritize the health and safety of everyone involved. Be empathetic!
