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

Steve Lucas, Chief Executive Officer, iCIMS

Without a doubt, the coronavirus pandemic is the most disruptive global event I've experienced in my lifetime and I'm sure many feel the same way. While some businesses across the world are facing challenges greater than others, one thing is certain: all organizations are planning and responding in real time, as this is anything but business as usual. Workforces are moving to near or fully remote operations to ensure employee well-being and we now find ourselves searching for ways to successfully maintain productivity and morale.

The question is – how can businesses continue to operate effectively in this new normal?

Above all else, recruiters must have a business continuity plan to ensure candidate engagement, pipeline optimization and hiring remain a priority. Every single hire you make this year has become more critical than ever before. In other words, hiring will continue, back-fills will happen and we need to work more diligently to find amazing talent, but we must be profoundly more precise in our execution. The best leaders are listening to what recruiters need right in order to do just that: after all, hiring is the funnel that matters most to business success, especially in challenging times.

As the CEO of a large cloud software business, I’m personally inspired by how quickly our employees have helped clients pivot to remote recruiting practices using our HR cloud platform for recruiting. I have no doubt your company has acted similarly. Our community of customers is counting on us to seamlessly continue their recruiting efforts with virtual tools to engage and hire the people they need, from anywhere in the world, in any situation they may encounter.

One operating point I'm personally focused on is ensuring that we deliver consistent service to our customers. Each of our 4,000+ worldwide customers are counting on iCIMS to support the ever-growing 75 million job applications and 4 million hires we empower businesses to drive every year.

As leaders for talent in your organization, I'd suggest that rather than sacrificing your momentum in recruiting, find ways to focus and refine it. I've asked our team here at iCIMS to provide critical and timely best practices to you, to help ensure business leaders and hiring teams don’t miss a beat simply because they’re working from home. 

In my discussions with people leaders over the past few weeks, several common themes have emerged that are absolutely worth sharing. Those include reinventing recruiting events using virtual career event technology, moving to video interviewing and virtual candidate assessments and lastly, increasing communication with candidates through accessible mediums like chatbots and SMS.

As we all are refining our business continuity plans company by company, ensuring we have the systems and processes in place to effectively engage employees and candidates alike is paramount.

Challenging times call for us all to come together, and we are here for you, ready to help.