To quote the iconic John Lennon song Nobody Told Me, we are living in ‘strange days indeed’. And they may get much stranger before they settle down. Some industries are in serious trouble, whilst others can’t hire enough people. And through it all, the wheels of basic infrastructure must continue to turn.
If you are one of those people who has been asked to work from home for the foreseeable future, how do you continue with your BAU recruitment needs? We’ve put together this checklist to help.
- Don’t panic. Tech recruiters have been advertising, sourcing, screening, interviewing and testing candidates based all around the globe for well over a decade. You are definitely not the first person who’s tried to do this.
- Ensure your recruiter has robust working from home infrastructure and protocols in place so that they can support you. Clicks was the first IT recruiter to achieve the 2015 ISO accreditation and is one of very few recruiters to have a dedicated quality manager, and our systems are backed by our $4.5B global parent company.
- Talk to your HR department and understand what their onboarding strategy is if everyone is required to work from home. Some organisations are bringing new starters into the office only for day one, some are couriering hardware to their homes – just ensure you are able to explain it to your high-potential people. If you’re uncertain, they will be too.
- Be tech ready. Make sure you’ve got a camera, speakers, sound, a decent headset…whatever you need to be fully collaborative in a remote environment.
- Select your weapon of choice. By weapon, of course I mean collaboration platform. It may be Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, GoToMeeting, Zoom, Facetime, Google Hangouts…
- Brief your recruiter on your hiring needs in exactly the same way as you always have. Only instead of a face to face meeting, use Teams/Zoom/Facetime.
- When your recruiter sends you a shortlist, it’s time to interview. Once again, this can happen via your collaboration platform. If you haven’t interviewed by video before, it is not quite as good being in the same room as someone, but much better than being on the phone. The technology has improved out of sight in recent years, so it’s not like that awkward delay when you were forced to speak to your overseas relatives once a year at Christmas as a kid.
- Clicks already has fully integrated platforms for checking references, right to work, technical and psychometric testing, police checks and just about any other pre-hire items you need. We will get this all done for you.
- When you’re ready to make an offer, Clicks will use its existing fully online onboarding platform to complete your new contractor’s work-readiness. If you are hiring a permanent employee, we’ll work closely with you to support your own onboarding process, utilising our suite of tools, eg DocuSign. Then our award-winning post-placement care program will commence.
- Get up from your home office chair, do some stretches, make a cup of tea and eat a biscuit because you’re all done!
The key point I’m trying to make is that, with the right basic technology, your ability to stick to your recruiting plan should be unimpeded. Don’t let your team’s productivity suffer because you simply weren’t aware how easy it is to recruit remotely. The Clicks team is more than happy to share their insights into what others are doing in these unusual times, and give advice or feedback on any hiring strategy you run past us. If we all stick together, getting through this will be that much easier.
