Why COVID-19 May Have Provided You a Prime Opportunity to Upgrade Your Team
Recruiting Top Talent Is Easier Now Than the Last 5 Years – Here’s How to Snag Your Next All-Star
We have heard from several clients that some of their employees who are stuck at home collecting unemployment don’t want to return to work, even though there is work to be done, or will be soon.
How should you respond to this news?
This is your chance to let your less talented and less motivated workers go, and get out there and recruit the top available talent. In fact, maybe you have some employees you wouldn’t mind losing. Now might be your chance to upgrade.
With so many industries and companies in upheaval, turmoil, and uncertainty, a lot of great talent that wasn’t available just a few months ago may be available now or very soon. A few reasons why:
> Top talent has been laid off
Some companies just couldn’t hold onto their best people and had to let them go. Those people are now looking for new work.
> They see this as their chance to take a new direction
With so many things ending, being delayed, or being restructured across so many industries, no job will be quite the same even after the COVID-19 lockdowns end. With that backdrop, workers and leaders who were enjoying their jobs before may now be looking at them with a newfound disaffection.
They may be considering this as the time to move on and try something new.
> They have time to look for new jobs
Many top workers find themselves laid off, working from home, or working with reduced hours. People who were busy working and commuting for 50 or more hours per week now may only be working 30 hours. With all that extra time, workers who have been wanting to leave their companies for a while but just didn’t have time to pursue new opportunities now have the time to pursue them.
If you reach out to them now, you might be able to snag some of the best talent available in years.
Get Ahead of the Coming Hiring Surge
Once the lockdowns end, there will be a surge in recruiting and hiring that will probably last for a while as more and more businesses re-open and start rebuilding. That process may spread out over many years, or it may be condensed into six to twelve months.
Either way, you want to be prepared for it and ready to go get the best talent you can find. Lack of talent is one of the greatest complaints most businesses have about the hiring process. Right now, the talent pool is about to be much deeper than it was just a few months ago.
How to Recruit Top Talent as the COVID-19 Crisis Winds Down
1. Look for Flexible Employees
After businesses start to re-open, there’s a pretty strong possibility that the workplace culture and scheduling will be permanently altered from before. You can expect more telecommuting, shifted schedules, and other more flexible work arrangements.
With that in mind, you will want leaders and team members who can work effectively in that sort of environment. You want someone who can adapt to a variety of contexts and who isn’t overly dependent on a predictable routine. Not all positions will change like this of course, but many more will than we would have thought possible before all this upheaval.
2. Be Flexible Yourself
You may find yourself having to adjust your expectations, even in the interview process. Some prospective workers will ask about safety precautions, on-site testing, options for working from home, contingency plans, and other creative arrangements and accommodations.
Too many people have been stuck at home suddenly having to juggle child care for kids normally in school. Will that happen again? People will want the flexibility, and you should find ways to provide it and work it into your recruiting and onboarding processes.
3. Do Interviewing Remotely and Leverage other Technology
In-person interviews – if you want to get a jump on hiring top talent before the lockdowns end – are now a luxury you probably can’t afford.
If you have positions coming open, don’t wait for the economy to open back up to start recruiting. You need to start recruiting now. And put in place the technology that enables you to interact with and even onboard your best candidates without them needing to come in to see you.
In addition to virtual interviews, this may require digitizing some of your key training documents and manuals if you haven’t already done so, or making videos of your workplace to help acclimate them for what to expect.
4. Rely on Digital Recruitment Tools
A lot of hiring and HR experts are talking about this. The problem is – hardly any recruiters or hiring managers really know how to do it well. It’s easy to say “move everything online.” It’s a lot harder to do this effectively.
Previously most traditional recruiters have relied on LinkedIn and commonly known job boards, and keyword-based resume sorting and other automated processes. What are they going to do differently now? Those approaches are already digital. So if you go to them, you’ll get what you would have gotten before all this mess.
You need a more effective digital recruitment process that will find you the best talent available for your open positions.
PainLess Hire has been using such a process – a proprietary, scientific one we developed – for many years and with unparalleled outcomes for our clients. Even when finding the best talent was challenging like in the last couple years, we have still succeeded in attracting them. See a few of our case studies for examples.
Here’s a brief look at the process you would go through when hiring through us. And keep in mind that we do almost every step in this process:
- Post jobs on specialized industry boards where existing talent will see it
- Use carefully chosen skills and personality assessment tools to sort your applicants more effectively than relying on keywords and resumes
- Select your upper tier of candidates and schedule phone interviews
- Conduct phone interviews and narrow field down to 2-3 top candidates
- Schedule live interviews with top candidates
- Conduct live interviews – using online technology during COVID-19
- Make your selection for top preference
- Review background checks for top preference
- Call references for top preference
- If no red flags, make the offer
Again, the best part about this hiring process is – when you work with PainLess Hire – you don’t have to do any of it, except for the live interviews and making the offer. We do EVERYTHING else.
We run the skills and personality tests and tailor them to each position. We make the phone calls. We schedule the interviews. We do the reference checks. We do not use a cookie-cutter process, the same thing for every client. It is more like a concierge experience. You will experience a customized hiring process built upon the unique needs, hard skills, and soft skills required for your positions.
With all this – our fees are lower than traditional recruiters, and our process is faster. We typically deliver in 2-6 weeks what usually takes them 2-6 months.
See More: Compare us to traditional recruiters
Now is the time to start looking for the talent that will upgrade your team to be ready for when the crisis breaks.
Schedule a free hiring consultation and see how different our hiring process is than anything you’ve experienced before. We don’t call ourselves PainLess Hire to be clever – our name is what we deliver for you.