Recruitment Under Lockdown
When Covid 19 hit, the world literally stopped! Everything halted. We are so blessed to be working in Financial Services and Fintech as these industries have remined strong.
We quickly adapted as everything we use is cloud based anyway so we literally took our laptops home and started working.
Our clients were also quick to adapt – screening, interviewing, onboarding was and is been done remotely and it has worked out well. I am truly impressed at the resilience and adaptability of our clients. To quote Charles Darwin, “ It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”. This is so true – we have seen other businesses adapt during lockdown like restaurants doing heat at home meals, pubs transforming themselves into shops/takeaways and many, many more.
6 Biggest challenges in Recruitment during Covid 19
1. Being Agile has never been more important
We are all working apart so implementing a methodology using sprints, prioritisation of jobs, candidate/client management is important to us. We use tools like Trello and Slack to help with these tasks and duties
2. Being open to change
This is not only relevant to recruitment but to all of us in every aspect of our lives. We had to change our process quickly and help our candidates and clients adapt along the way. Once we found a routine, we just fell into it and it has been a very smooth transition overall
3. Knowing your industry
Keeping abreast of industry changes was key during the pandemic. We specialise in Financial Services and Fintech so keeping an eye on things like the stock markets was important to us in helping us understand how our specialist industries might be impacted. As it transpired, we were not as badly hit as others
4. Screening candidates
When you have someone in front of you, it is much easier to read their body language and ascertain someone’s interest for the company you are representing them to. It is very different over video or phone. This can make our lives a little trickier but also highted that we should choose video over voice first for many reasons
5. Ability to use and integrate with various technologies
We were immediately able to move all of our meetings to zoom. We use Trello and Slack to keep track of our daily work. Our phones are VOIP. We spend a lot of time on digital channels, especially LinkedIn. We all have laptops and we were already working from home one or two days per week. All of this meant we were able to perform our daily work schedule online from day one
6. Assessing our communication skills
Relationship building is different over zoom but we have adapted quickly as have our candidates. It is more important than ever to listen to someone more actively on why they want to leave where they are and what they want next. Listening skills is something we have developed on hugely from our coaching training, so it has been easier for us to adapt to this new environment
Generally, once a job offer is made and accepted, our work is complete. We have found that our clients have adapted well to the new environment and onboarding digitally and remotely has not phased them. Some managers have highlighted that they have never met some of the new people on their team in person – the reality is, this is the new normal and regardless of when a vaccine is released, how we all work has changed forever.
Need help filling vacancies or any questions on the above?
Contact info@ttrmail.com.
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https://www.toptierrecruitment.com/employers/resources
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