Month: January 2022

 

When it came to their recruiting function, which is change, it took a worldwide pandemic for a few employers to beat their biggest fear.

Their talent acquisition strategies, resources, and technology, in the wake of COVID, are what HR professionals are forced to re-examine. For the recruitment process and candidate experience, many of those changes have raised the bar. There’s no turning back and expect these changes to stay around long after the threat of COVID diminishes, some HR professionals say.

Before the pandemic, Pega was desirous to reduce the value and time constraints of traditional hiring by pivoting to virtual hiring. However, given what they saw as potential risks related to hiring candidates without in-person interviews, the corporate introduced an Employee or Manager Opt-out program: Employees hired virtually can leave the corporate after 30 or 60 days on the task with two months’ salary if they feel they’re not a decent fit. Their boss also can let workers go at 30, 60, or 120 days—giving them the identical amount of severance pay—without being penalized for prime turnover rates.

However, the number of managers who took advantage of the program was within the single digits. But since COVID, it’s doubled.

Bokel Herde, adding that even the company’s CEO, Alan Trefler, virtually hired a chief sales officer, says “I don’t think we’ve ever had this much trust with virtual recruitment as we’ve had within the past. [People] think if the CEO can hire someone to guide our sales organization, maybe I can, too. This has been a positive of COVID.”

 

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Bokel Herde says COVID’s footprint is everywhere recruiting. Which was 35% paperless pre-COVID, the recruitment process at Pega is now 100% paperless. To raised understand the challenges facing job candidates applying for remote or hybrid jobs, most (98%) of the company’s 900 managers have completed empathy training.

Rarely mentioned to candidates was Pega Academy, which offers free, online classes to employees in the past. But last year, recruiters started promoting it timely within the interview process. Because of the pandemic, she says, that they had longer and desire to complete professional development courses since some candidates lived alone and were homebound.

Last June, to assist candidates navigating the interview process and better understand Pega’s culture, the corporate selected employees as talent ambassadors. HR is additionally now considering whether to allow job candidates to interview questions before so that they can record their answers. She says this can allow hiring managers to match candidate responses to identical questions.

Rise of automation

Technology has been key to helping employers sustain employee and candidate expectations.

Matt Alder, producer, and host of The Recruiting Future Podcast and one in all HRE’s Top 100 HR Tech Influencers for 2020, says that COVID has accelerated the creation and adoption of recruiting automation tools by a minimum of several years.