Employment Brand Live! – is a weekly gathering of employment brand leaders who get together to share ideas & best practices, and discuss current events impacting the market. For the latest in the weekly series featuring brand leaders from across multiple industries, host Doug Hall was joined by Betsie Hundt, Employer Branding Specialist from Dynatrace, and Orlando Haynes, Talent Acquisition Manager for Sykes.
The topic of conversation last week was best practices for preparing to take on fully remote hiring situations where the new hire may not get a chance to actually meet anyone at your company or step into your office until after they’ve been hired.
“We’ve implemented using Hirevue since COVID,” said Haynes. “We need a very high touchpoint for our candidates, because we do a lot of high volume recruiting. Anyone of our clients can ask for a ramp-up to 100 or so people in a two week period. So we have to be able to pivot and make that happen very quickly, So with Hirevue we’re able to do a mass blast of recruiting. We have a couple of questions built into that platform so they’re prerecording and answering those questions for us. So that’s the initial thing that we’re doing now as an organization globally that’ll help us stay innovative and ahead of the curve.”
“We’re connecting a virtual experience and staying connected to candidates through video,” sais Hundt. “And we are using that to share our employee experience through our current employees’ quotes. I’m just asking them simple questions about their role and what they think about our culture, just to give candidates an inside look at us since they can’t necessarily come to the office to do so.”
Among the main points made by our guests and other brand leaders during this installment:
It’s important to remember the responsibility that HR has in regards to economic discrimination based on potential hires having access to the same level of equipment and research as someone who is already prepared for remote interviewing.
In order to defeat hiring biases, craft a message that says yours is an open organization that is looking to hire the best people regardless of race, creed, or color. Establish instead that your company’s message is one of culture, and that culture is what bonds your employees.
Candidates will be doing plenty of research in lieu of coming in to for an in-person interview. To get a sense of a company’s reputation, they will be looking at external employer brand sites like Glassdoor, Comparably, or BuiltIn.
Use interview scorecards to make up for the inherent differences in a remote interview from a standard one. Your potential talent may be sitting at home with dogs and kids, and you yourself may have had a bad day. There’s no denying that remote interviews are a less precise way of gauging interest between an employee and the employer, so lean into those scorecards to make up the difference.
Be candid with talent about whether the position in question is being filled now or will be filled at some point in the future. Be honest about timeframes.
Employees who interview remotely will be already wondering why they can’t also simply work the job remotely. Many of them have now experienced the benefits of remote work, especially considering the potential savings on daycare for employees with young children. The idea of more readily available remote work in on the table for everyone in the wake of COVID-19, so companies will have to have their reasons for potentially needing in-office employees sorted out before the questions come.
Make doubly sure that hiring managers are educated as to what HR and company leadership want in terms of conduction of interviews, online or otherwise. There should be a clear series of steps hiring managers can follow without having to shoot much from the hip.
How your company has reacted or continues to react to the Covid-19 crisis will be a quick and easy shorthand for job seekers looking to find what kind of company yours is, fairly or not. Companies have been put through a major stress test over the last months, and any existing weaknesses will now be more obvious, as will any strengths.
Leadership still has to lead the charge on culture and brand. The best HR, branding, and marketing plans in the world won’t work if leadership isn’t walking like you’re talking.
Harvest invaluable information from your own employees by asking them what drew them initially to the company, how their time there has been, why they’ve made it their current work home, etc.
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