The population might be getting double jabbed, but one thing’s for certain -  for small and medium sized businesses, the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over just yet! In many cases, we’re seeing Small and Medium Enterprises without the necessary recruitment tools trying to operate effectively in this post lockdown world - and it’s not easy. 

Managing job applications, shortlisting, assessments, interviewing, and offer management in a remote working environment is a lot more challenging to handle if your only tools are email, Excel spreadsheets, and Zoom. 

What works well in the office - where you can pop your head round your colleague’s door for an update on an interview, forward interview notes via email, or agree next steps on a potential candidate – this all becomes more difficult when everyone is working remotely. GDPR, consistency and fairness of the recruitment process, compliance and reporting – they all become issues and challenges when they have to be addressed outside of the usual secure office infrastructure. 

The best assessment is as we move more permanently into the world of remote working, managing hiring within the small and medium-size business landscape without a centralised online recruitment platform will become an increasingly significant challenge. 

Key challenges for SMEs to consider moving forwards 

Bringing the cost of recruitment down 

The insights we see from our Jobtrain clients indicates that as an organisation grows its hiring demand, and evolves its recruitment capability, it can also significantly reduce its level of Recruitment Agency and  Job Board spend. 

Transitioning to a centralised recruitment approach supported by effective hiring software is likely to be a key factor. Recruitment leads will typically have the expertise to produce a noticeable increase in the percentage of job applications from the growing number of free job board aggregator channels (Indeed, Google For Jobs, Neuvoo, Adzuna, etc).  

With the predicted growth in unemployment, it is highly likely that the candidate market will be rich with available talent. Using applicant tracking software and assessment functionality will help to pinpoint and progress the quality candidates much quicker to successful hires. 

How your hiring can be quick and consistent

Small businesses increasingly understand the need for an objective, fair and consistent recruitment process. Additionally, in a world where candidate volume and application numbers are likely to rise dramatically, pinpointing quality applicants quickly is fast becoming critical.

The speed of the recruitment process is a key differentiator to enabling a 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. To move this top 20% of talent through the hiring funnel quickly, reducing the time taken to manage each step of a recruitment process will be vital. This can often take much longer without a centralised platform to track these processes and seamlessly facilitate each stage of the recruitment process. 

Use Centralised Data and Reporting 

Pre-dating the days of an applicant tracking system, an average day would have involved chasing down data and information from a team of office-based recruiters and hiring managers to get a handle on recruitment progress. Driving adoption of an ATS across a business mitigates this in one step. It ensures all data captured is within the centralised recruitment platform and this naturally will highlight bottlenecks in the recruitment process, and provide instant access to recruitment metrics (Time to Hire, Equal Opps, Diversity, etc). 

SMEs need to be aware of GDPR compliance

Whilst most focus is on ensuring business continuity and safeguarding employees and customers against COVID-19, there are also serious operational risks to consider in the form 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 PCs personal drives and sending information via email. Or using inadequately secured mobile devices or an unsecured home Wi-Fi network to send and share data. 

Centralising all recruitment activity within recruitment software only reinforces an organisation’s GDPR compliance. Ultimately, the ATS holds all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) candidate data in one system of record and uses 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 meet their obligations as the data controller.

The TLDR;

For small and medium-sized businesses in a pre-COVID world, managing recruitment without a centralised ATS may have been manageable. In the ensuing post COVID-19 environment of the foreseeable future, those SMEs managing recruitment with an ATS will be those companies that speed up their ability to secure the quality hires. After all, it is 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.  

If you’re an SME and recruitment technology isn’t on your radar, now might be the time to start researching to keep up with your competitors for the best talent.