How Can Businesses Hire New Staff During COVID-19?

 

When we went into lockdown, everyone’s daily life came to a halt – but life must go on.

Businesses still need to continue to better themselves, and need the staff to do so. Many companies came to a stand-still on Monday 23rd of March, but a few weeks later, and they have begun to gear back up to return to business life as normal (well, as normal as they can be).

To continue to improve, develop, and expand a business, it takes skilled employees to do so. This is where a problem comes in – the hiring and recruitment becomes a lot harder when you can’t meet up with them.

Or is it?

The answer is no. In fact, hiring new staff has never been easier for businesses that are prepared to adapt to remote working.

In this blog, we’re going to discuss just how any business can continue to recruit new staff during these uncertain times.

Remote Working

From what used to be a distant dream for some employees has suddenly become a cold-hitting reality. We’re well into the lockdown now (hopefully nearer the end than the start), and the majority of businesses have been able to adapt to working from home.

Now that businesses have had time to put the necessary infrastructure in place, it’s a lot easier to onboard new employees. Whilst the first couple of weeks were a mad rush enabling current employees to work from home, at least we all know how to do it now.

Before you can even think about hiring new staff, you need to be able to set any newcomer up to work from home.

So, you’ve got the infrastructure in place, and you’re ready to start finding your new star employees, let’s have a look at how you can do it.

The Job Advert

We’re not going to be in lockdown forever (hopefully), but ask yourself – is this a job they could do from home even after this is all over? If so, it might be a good idea to not worry about where the candidates are applying from?

Not only does this mean your office won’t be getting any more crowded, but it also means the pool of talent you choose from, has just increased significantly.

After all there’s no such thing as having too many good applicants apply.

The Interview

You’ve found a potential candidate, it’s time for the dreaded interview. A chance for you to look them in the eye, into their soul and see if they’ll fit into the puzzle you’re completing.

There’s nothing quite like sitting a meter or two away from them as you separate the bullshitters from the honest, hard workers.

When you’re miles apart, it’s harder to do this, so you’re left with two options:

Telephone

The classic, and you don’t have to worry about what you’re wearing when you take the call (unless you’re already in the office). This can be harder for both you and the interviewee that opposed to face-to-face. As an interviewer, you can’t see their list of prepared answers, and the interviewee often doesn’t know whether or not to keep talking. Body language is a wonderful thing!

A positive from the phone interview is that everyone knows how to use a phone. If they don’t, question why they’ve made it this far.

Video Chat

Thanks to technology you don’t need to be in the same room as someone to see the whites of their eyes – depending on the quality of connection and webcam.

This adds a much more personal touch as you can see the interviewee presents themselves, and make sure they’re 100% focused.

However, because of internet speeds, you often lose out hearing everything that’s said, as well as beginning to talk when the other does. In these video calls there’s often lots of “Oops, go on… Sorry, say that again?”.

Of course, not everyone is as well adapted towards using the computer as you and me. Is it always worth the hassle? I’ll leave that up to you and your faith in their abilities.

Training and Monitoring to Make Sure They Do Their Job Properly

When you hire someone, no-matter how much you like them, or what experience they have, you can never guarantee that they’ll be doing the job right. It’s important to be able to monitor what they’re doing, whilst making sure you don’t look like an over-paranoid, micromanaging boss.

This is especially important with “customer facing” employees that can make or break your company’s reputation depending on how they respond to a situation. But it’s no good waiting until you get a complaint to look into matters – the damage is done then!

With Cxceed, you can monitor, control, and improve what your employees are saying to your customers, whilst keeping them involved in the process. Whether they’re in the office, or working at home, our software seamlessly integrates with your telephone and email systems. No complicated installations are needed – just log into our online software, and you’re good to go once it has been set up.

You can assign your employees previous conversations to evaluate, which not only gives them a taste of what to expect, but can also give you an idea of their current standards.

As well as this, you can assign a percentage of their communications for evaluation, which helps keep a close track of progress they’ve made whilst at your company.

If you’d like to read more about the benefits of Cxceed, you can click here.

Not only this, but it's now possible to make training courses for your employees. Applications like Coassemble allow you to easily create training courses, which can include a multitude of questions and tests to make sure they're learning what they read and see.

Meetings

It’s never been easier to host meetings with your team thanks to the wide variety of applications and programs out there. From Zoom (link), Skype (link), Microsoft Teams, to even conference calls using your VoIP system.

Meetings are a vital part of keeping the team together and singing off the team sheet. Even if you’re only having a meeting once a week you can use this to catch up on your employee’s thoughts, ideas, as well as what they’ve been doing.

Having these online/over-the-phone are just as good as face-to-face meetings, as long as everyone’s Internet holds up!

Keeping Them Involved

It can be hard being on the outside looking in.

If you have hired someone that’s outside of a reasonable travel-to-work time frame, it’s important to keep them involved and feeling part of the team.

Whilst we are in lockdown, there is no easy solution, apart from keeping them involved in meetings, encouraging groups to work together, as well as making sure you always invite them to any online events your business is having.

Once we are out of lockdown then, whenever your company is having any events, make sure you always invite them, even if you don’t think they will be able to come. If you have a few employees away from the central office, you could always hold an event that is more accessible and local to them.

Continue To Better Your Business

We may be in testing times, but that doesn’t mean we can’t continue to better our businesses with new recruits.

This doesn’t have to stop when the pandemic is over either. As devastating as COVID-19 has been on our society, we can take what we have learnt to pave a path for a better tomorrow. One where you can hire talent from across the country, or even the world, safe in the knowledge that you operate just as, if not more, effectively than you can in an office.

Why limit yourself to hiring the closet fit from your city, when you could find someone better a little further away?

Let us know what you think, and how your business is recruiting in the comments below.

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