One of the early learnings of post-COVID-19 planning is the pressure that small and medium sized businesses will face as they start to address their recruitment strategy until year end. In many cases without the necessary tools to operate effectively in this post lockdown world.
Managing job applications, assessments, shortlisting, interviewing, offer management and onboarding of candidates in a remote working environment is a lot more challenging to handle if your only tools are Email, Excel Spreadsheets, and Zoom.
As the UK lockdown now eases moving into June 2020, attention has turned rapidly to ‘readiness preparations’ for the return to work. A new ‘normal’ that for many will, for the foreseeable future, include a highly probable work from home philosophy through the rest of 2020.
What may work well in the office where you can stretch your legs and pop your head round your colleagues door to get an update on an interview, forward interview notes via email, or agree next steps on a potential candidate, becomes much more difficult when everyone is working remotely. Issues such as GDPR, consistency and fairness of the recruitment process, compliance and reporting all become challenging when these elements must be addressed outside of the usual secure office infrastructure.
The best assessment is that as we enter this new world of remote working, managing hiring within the small and medium size business landscape without a centralised online platform will be an increasingly significant challenge.
So, what are the key hiring challenges for businesses, particularly the UK’s engine room of SMEs, to address over the coming 6-12 months?
Driving down the cost of recruitment
Insights from our own clients indicate that as an organisation grows its hiring demand and evolves it recruitment capability, it also can significantly reduce its level of direct Recruitment Agency and Recruitment Job Board spend.
Transitioning to a centralised recruitment approach supported by an effective Applicant Tracking System is likely to be a key catalyst. It is the Recruitment lead (s). who typically have the expertise to produce a tangible increase in the % of job applications from the growing number of free of charge job board aggregator channels (Indeed, Google For Jobs, Neuvoo, Adzuna, etc). They will also be the ones that control the use of Recruitment Agencies, not as a default hiring option, but as a necessary expense only for those 'hard to fill' or 'niche' roles. The onus will therefore be on the recruitment specialists to not only generate the right candidates – but to do so at the right cost. With the predicted growth in the unemployment rate, it is highly likely that the candidate market will be rich with available talent. Using an ATS and its assessment functionality will help to pinpoint and progress the quality candidates that much quicker to successful hires.
Consistency / speed of process
Organisations increasingly understand the need for an objective, fair and consistent recruitment process. It needs to be one that removes any individual recruiter or hiring manager bias or discrimination during the candidate assessment / selection journey.
Introduction of video assessment to screen and, objectively, assess candidates through the interview process are already becoming the norm. Many of our clients have recently adopted video interviewing platforms such as Shine and LaunchPad Recruits as standard within their recruitment processes. I expect this to grow substantially as business gets back to ‘normal’ and hiring gaps in a post-COVID-19 world are identified. Up to now, the take up of this technology has been a little slow – often governed, I believe, by the perceived reluctance of candidates to engage with web cams. The experience of the past few months has probably changed that landscape.
The 80/20 principle
Additionally, in a world where candidate volume and application numbers are likely to rise dramatically, pinpointing quality applicants will become critical. As such, speed of process will become a key differentiator to enabling a recruitment process to be focused on the 80/20 principle. The focus should always be on 80% of time being spent on the top 20% of applicants based on a consistent assessment scoring methodology.
Furthermore, to get this top 20% of talent through the hiring funnel quickly, reducing the time taken to manage the various steps of a recruitment process (job approvals, interviewing scheduling, automated assessment, video interview assessment, offer approvals, etc) will be vital. This can often take much longer without a centralised platform to track these processes and seamlessly facilitate the multiple different stakeholder inputs required from Finance, Recruitment and Hiring Managers.
Centralised data and reporting
Pre the days of an ATS System, I well remember chasing down data and information from a team of office-based recruiters and hiring managers to get a handle on recruitment progress. Let alone chasing that information from dispersed remote teams. Or trying to capture any specific detailed insights as to what was holding up candidates getting through the recruitment funnel quickly. Driving adoption of an ATS across the business mitigates this in one step; ensuring that all data capture is within the centralised recruitment software and thus highlighting bottlenecks in the recruitment process, and providing instant access to all recruitment-related metrics (Time to Hire, Equal Opps, Diversity, Cost of Hire, etc, etc).
As they say, ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. As such, an ATS provides the real-time visibility for companies to take effective corrective actions to improve their hiring success.
A snapshot of dashboard reports in Jobtrain:
New hires and onboarding
Probably one of the critical elements of the recruitment process that will now come ‘front and centre’ as the UK gets back to work. Recruiting new hires outside of a physical office-based interview without a centralised ATS will be difficult. Yet onboarding those successful new hires without that centralised platform will be even more challenging.
Our Green Room Onboarding (a branded mini portal fully accessible to potential new starters) is being adopted at pace by companies to support the engagement and communication of the company culture, policies and key contacts for a new hire. In addition, it also provides an introduction for the new hire to their team, direct manager and any documentation required ahead of them joining. Creating that sense of belonging for a new hire before they start will help to reduce dropout between offer and start date. Not only that but it will also facilitate a sense of belonging to a new hire that may never even have visited the company offices.
GDPR compliance
Whilst most focus will be on ensuring business continuity and safeguarding employees and customers against the ongoing COVID-19 health threat, there will also be serious operational risk to consider. This will come in the form of additional risk of financial penalties associated with the May 2018 GDPR regulations. Reviewing GDPR compliance in this new world needs to be carefully considered to avoid recruiters and hiring managers storing data (CVs) on laptops and home PC's personal drives and sending information via email. Or furthermore, using inadequately secured mobile devices, or using an unsecured home Wi-Fi network to send and share data.
Centralising all recruitment activity within an Applicant Tracking system reinforces an organisation’s GDPR compliance. Ultimately, the ATS holds all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) candidate data in one system of record and employs automated archiving tools to ensure candidate data is removed according to appropriate data retention policies. These capabilities provide organisations with the confidence and protocols to ensuring they meet their obligations as the data controller.
In summary
For small and medium sized businesses in a pre-COVID-19 world, managing recruitment without a centralised ATS may have been manageable. In the ensuing post COVID-19 environment of the next 6-12 months, I’d propose that those that employ an ATS will be those companies that speed up their ability to secure the quality hires. After all, it will be these quality hires that will enable companies to turbo-charge their way towards stability and growth as the engines of the economy start to fire up again.