As companies around the globe have adopted social distancing measures, many have quickly turned to virtual interviewing as a way to maintain business continuity while safely and efficiently filling critical roles.
In particular sectors containing key workers have seen very large spikes in virtual interviewing in recent months with the grocery industry up 450 percent, as supermarket giants raced to fill hundreds of thousands of newly created roles, and the healthcare industry up 345 percent as demand continues to grow for staff to respond to the growing number of coronavirus infections.
Other badly hit sectors of the global economy have of course fared very differently when it comes to recruitment. Many are holding off on expanding their workforce, while others have significantly reduced their headcount. Attributable to uncertainty around the pandemic itself, changes lockdown brought to our day-to-day lives, and the resulting impact to the services and products we consume.
However, many of our customers in badly affected industries, like travel and hospitality, are busy planning ahead for the reopening of national economies. They know that as their industries open back up that they will need to hire quickly and do so in a way that places candidate and recruiter safety, first.
Taking inspiration from the speed of hiring across key worker sectors, these industries are themselves turning their attention to virtual hiring solutions to enable them to rapidly and safely hire or rehire thousands of employees, once restrictions start to lift.
At HireVue, we are well prepared to help our clients transform their recruitment efforts, in order to meet the increase in demand for their services, as economies around the globe reopen.
Having hosted nearly 15 million virtual interviews since 2004, our focus is on enabling recruiters to bring the important ‘human-touch’ to the process, building strong and lasting relationships and with their candidates, while our platform handles the parts of the process that need to operate with absolute consistency – and at scale.
In one recent example we supported a large grocery chain to virtually interview over 22,000 candidates in just 48 hours, through on-demand access that enabled candidates to interview for positions at any hour of the day.
This is transformative for organisations as it not only simplifies the hiring process but it creates a new age of equal opportunity. HireVue enables recruiters to cast a much wider net and to identify the most talented candidates from a very diverse pool.
By providing easy access to virtual interviews and by focusing assessments only on competencies related to the job role, recruiting teams can more fairly interview and evaluate a broad range of candidates, whether neurotypical and neurodiverse candidates, those with disabilities, and people from many generations and ethnic backgrounds.
During this continued period of social distancing, we believe that organisations will be able to transition from holding large, in-person careers fairs at exhibition centres and to adapt these into 100 percent virtual hiring events, allowing interviews and assessments to happen anywhere, on any device, at any time.
There is a lot of work to be done over the coming months, but one of the most exciting aspects of the next wave of hiring and rehiring is this: organisations have a once-in-a-career opportunity to transform in how recruitment and hiring are done for good.
Looking ahead further, this digital-first mindset is set to continue long after the pandemic is over. Having witnessed the many advantages virtual hiring can bring, when businesses return to the office, hiring managers and recruitment teams may never look at their hiring processes the same way again.
We predict that virtual interviewing will remain a permanent part of the hiring process, not only making it more efficient, structured and objective, but by enabling businesses to transform their recruitment to be more rapid, fair and objective.
Cover image: Shutterstock
This article is contributed by HireVue.
