Recruiting Teams in Uncertain Times

The handshake. It’s the classic image of the interview: a recruiter or manager meeting for the first time, beginning what will ultimately be a long and wonderful relationship.

But with the spread of COVID-19, travel restrictions have been imposed, work-from-home stations are being finalized, and the CDC is advising against hand shaking.

Unfortunately, while all these changes are happening in the world, the need to build teams doesn’t go away. Whether your team is forced to work from home for a few days or a few weeks (or more), they still need to bring in the same headcount – and adapt to a world where they can’t even bring candidates in for interviews. 

We’ve been thinking about this a lot, and our CEO Drew spoke with Max on our team about the impact of the coronavirus on our business and on recruiting teams everywhere. Check it out:

 

But what about your organization’s recruiting?

Now might be the time to evaluate your team’s digital recruiting stack to start to power your recruiting through this remote stretch – and even keep improving when you finally get back into the office. 

This is our thing: as an AI recruiting company, we work with teams to automate the parts of recruiting that keep recruiters from what they’re great at: building relationships and delivering on the human side of candidate experience. We’ve compiled a list below of the best ways to tackle this new world.

Naturally, our first suggestion is to bring aboard an AI recruiter to help supersize your team.

While recruiters are focused on adapting to the new remote landscape and continuing to connect with candidates, Wendy takes care of monotonous action – all without having to shake a hand. 

 

An AI recruiter helps your team adapt to changing times

Your recruiting team was already stressed, and now they’re having to plan for real disruptions to the business and their day to day. And they’re still stuck in the same rut:

• Sending the same messages over and over
• Trawling job boards or LinkedIn for hours on end
• Scheduling and rescheduling with candidates over and over
• Having the same conversation over and over again over the phone
• Entering data and notes into a ton of systems
  

 

Meanwhile, our AI recruiter: 

• Uses programmatic outreach to find and reach the right candidates (and your team doesn’t have to lift a finger)
• Has an engaging, automated chat with potential candidates
• Automatically and natively schedules next-step interviews using Cronofy 
• Coordinates the hiring process over SMS or other messaging
• Compliantly and tirelessly captures everything – the best note-taker you’ve ever hired

 

With Wendy, your team is able to focus on building relationships – whether in the real world or the newly-remote one.

 

Tools for distributed recruiting teams

So now that you’ve got an AI recruiter on your team, what should you do to get that great talent through your pipeline? Here are some best tools and practices we’ve seen for adapting to a distributed recruiting world:

Videochat 

1. No surprise here: Zoom and Google Hangouts are perfect for interviews (we especially recommend Zoom if you’re doing group or panel discussion)

Assessments

1. AWW for whiteboarding… awesome for live projects!
2. Recorded video interviews are definitely a part of the digital recruiting stack, check out Modern Hire or HireVue, among others
3. We still use Google Docs and slides for collaborating on writing tests and presentations
4. For pair programming, our tech team uses Codeshare.io – but there are tons of great options out there (HackerRank, Codility, Repl among many others)
5. Personality assessments like pymetrics are a great way to bring  new data into your hiring
   

 

Virtual Career Fairs and Conferences

1. We’re bullish on virtual career fairs as the future: Brazen is one of the biggest names out there.
2. With conferences being canceled across the country (and the world), keep an eye out for digital conferences. Hopin is awesome software for putting on virtual events, and if you’re looking to attend: The Talent Board has a great variety of digital events (in addition to their in-person workshops and conferences)

 

Double down on your content

Write, post, record that podcast, shoot that video – now is a great time to think about how you’re reaching your talent communities without having to meet face-to-face. There are tons of tools out there – we like to use Audacity for podcasts and then we use Fiverr for post-production on our videos.

 

It can be stressful dealing with all that comes with the impact of the coronavirus, but there are definitely tools out there to help keep your hiring humming. How is your team adapting? We’d love to hear from you.