Now More Than Ever, Virtual is a Certainty When It Comes to Hiring

iCIMS’ CEO, Steve Lucas, recently shared his reaction to the coronavirus pandemic on LinkedIn and how he is leading the company and our community of customers through this transition to the “new normal” and in preparation for the future of work.

As the market-leading HR cloud platform for recruiting, here are some of our best practices for virtual recruiting:

• Reinvent your recruitment events. We’re in career fair season and organizations are (responsibly!) cancelling in-person recruitment events. You can’t wait for next season – ensure you move forward quickly by hosting your next career fair virtually. Events can be hyper-targeted: students who attend a specific school or local veterans, for example, with automated outreach. Your branding remains at the forefront and human touch is always present in addition to artificial intelligence (AI) assistance through chatbots, so you can engage with candidates virtually, at scale.
• Conduct video interviews and virtual assessments. Whether because candidates are already employed and cannot regularly take time off work to interview for a role, because your talent isn’t local to your office, or because of current travel constraints, in-person interviews are tough. Make it easier for your recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates by implementing video interviewing and assessment software – they will thank you for the added level of convenience. Select members in our partner ecosystem community – including Modern Hire, OutMatch, ConveyIQ by Entelo, VidCruiter and HireVue – have a 90-day free offering of their video interviewing tools to optimize your remote hiring operations.
• Don’t let communication fall through the cracks. Whether having a remote workforce is temporary or a part of your company’s DNA, multi-faceted, trackable communication channels are needed to keep everyone in the loop and compliant, across various time zones and languages. We rely on texting as one of our primary forms of communication for updating employees, in addition to providing a stellar candidate experience. Many of our customers, especially healthcare providers, retailers, restaurant chains, amusement parks, financial services, hospitality, and transportation companies, rely on texting technology to get candidates to quickly and easily inquire about a job and apply from their phones. Human recruiters, paired with AI-powered chatbots, can offer 24/7 support, answer questions, provide interview reminders, status updates, and more. Last year alone, more than 1 million applicants used texting to apply to a job through our software, and our platform managed more than 110 million texts. This is growing year-over-year, as applying via text skyrocketed more than 142% from 2018 to 2019. Our chatbot answered more than 172,000 questions and set up approximately 17,000 interviews in 2019. Imagine how many hours that saved human recruiters!

Remember: You don’t need to shake someone’s hand to hire them, and you don’t need to be sitting next to your colleagues to get your job done. Develop a business continuity plan with an agile approach, test all systems and tools regularly, and overcommunicate with your leaders, employees, and job candidates throughout the entire year, not just in challenging times that we are presented with today.