Hiring in the COVID era: Four strategies recruiters are using to overcome pandemic challenges

The effects of the global pandemic on hiring practices have touched every industry though not uniformly, with sectors such as information technology and e-commerce witnessing a boom.

In Australia, the closure of international borders has led to a smaller talent pool, while the uncertainty of the pandemic created a reluctance among workers to leave their current employer.

Stay-at-home orders meant employers could only gauge a potential candidate’s suitability for a role in virtual meetings, taking the benefits of in-person communication out of the interview equation.

These issues have made selecting the right candidate more challenging and increased the cost of a bad hire. In fact, research by Robert Half found the average cost of a bad hire is now between 15% to 21% of that employee’s salary.

Higher stakes and disrupted hiring conditions have pushed recruiters to adopt creative promotional campaigns to attract talent and video tools to build connections remotely. 

For Steve Grace, founder of startup recruitment agency The Nudge Group, and Simon Moss, director of The Recruitment Company, these new approaches are here to stay. 

Building connections in a remote world

Less than one year after Steve Grace founded The Nudge Group in July 2019, he was thrown head first into recruiting during a pandemic.

Grace witnessed a surge in hiring from April 2020, primarily among businesses specialising in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud-based systems and e-commerce.

But coinciding with that boom was a growing reluctance of candidates to change roles.

“People were reluctant to move. They felt loyalty toward their employers because they kept them during a very difficult time,” Grace tells SmartCompany. 

Grace used storytelling marketing to respond to this trend and encourage candidates to change roles during such a tumultuous time. 

The Nudge Group launched the YouTube channel Give it a Nudge, featuring carefully structured interviews with its clients who are startup founders. The interviews help them tell their stories.  

“The idea was to get candidates to connect with the business before they had even met them,” Grace says. 

Simon Moss of The Recruitment Company agrees that overcoming people’s hesitancy to change work has been a major problem throughout the pandemic. 

“A lot of people get to the final stages of an interview process and then say, ‘I’m going to stay where I am’,” Moss tells SmartCompany. 

Moss attributes the problem to a lack of connection between candidates and their potential employer, which has led The Recruitment Company to also invest further in video tools. 

The recruitment agency updated its suite of interviewing, induction and job specification video tools.

“They are all built around creating connections because that’s what we’ve found has been missing,” Moss explains. 

Candidates now receive videos at strategic points along the application process, such as right before they accept a new offer.  

“They’re going to get a counter offer from their current employer, so one video tries to affirm the connection at that critical point,” Moss says.

Simon Moss, director of the The Recruitment Company. Source: supplied.

Utilising your own talent pool

When the Nudge Group saw competition for candidates spike midway through the pandemic, it had to think outside of the box to attract talent for its clients.

The talent crunch was partly due to the fact that expatriates were leaving Australia to return to their home countries, and others could not enter.

“The job market got smaller and yet the economy around tech startups was getting bigger and faster and growing quicker,” Grace says. 

Grace says the trend led to a dramatic rise in salaries in industries such as information technology, as businesses compete head-to-head to attract the same talent.

At The Recruitment Company, Moss turned to proactive networking to find the right candidates for his clients.

Prior to the pandemic, The Recruitment Company sourced candidates from LinkedIn, advertising, in-house database searches and networking.

The vast majority of candidates are now selected from the businesses’ own database, which it built from networking and headhunting.

“Advertising is getting a lot less quality candidates, so now you have to go and search for people,” Moss says.

Quest for meaning and work-life balance

The pandemic has touched the everyday lives of practically every worker, disrupting their delicate family arrangements and routines.

As a result, hiring managers have noticed candidates are seeking more meaning in their work and greater work-life balance.

Grace says workers want to belong to a workplace where they can contribute to a bigger purpose. 

“I think that was driven by people working from home more, with less distractions, and they actually wanted their work to mean more,” he says.

The Nudge Group now helps its startup clients communicate the reasons they exist through video content. And Grace says the approach has been easy to execute because many of his clients are in the education and health industries. 

Moss, on the other hand, believes more employees now prefer working for companies that respect work-life balance than those that are purpose-led.

“People are increasingly aware of how a company treats them,” Moss says.

“The line between your working day and your evening is now very thin and a lot of companies take advantage of that,” he adds. 

The Recruitment Company encourages its clients to show their attitude towards work-life balance by setting clear expectations around flexible working arrangements.

Virtual interviews are here to stay

Whether you like them or not, hiring managers overwhelmingly agree that video interviews are here to stay.

Grace, who has worked in recruitment for more than 20 years, says technology has fundamentally changed hiring practices. But video interviews are not a change that he’s overly optimistic about.

“I think video interviewing is not as effective because we’re losing an element of human intuition that interviewers have developed over years of interviewing,” he says.

Moss has become accustomed to virtual interviews at The Recruitment Agency because the business began using them well before the pandemic.

But he believes their growing popularity has led to an increase in job applications from less serious candidates.

“A lot of people are not taking the process as seriously,” he says.

“People think ‘okay, I’ll do an interview, I just have to make sure I have a shirt on my top half’,” he adds.

Moss hopes, however, that candidates will adapt overtime and learn to be as invested in video interviews as they would be in face-to-face ones.

“People are adaptable. Just think about how ridiculous things that are normal now would have seemed a year ago,” he says.