Unfortunately, the pandemic has thrown a serious wrench into many companies’ interview and assessment processes. As firms try to navigate a path forward, it’s worth figuring out where coronavirus has dented your recruiting infrastructure. Here are 4 of the most important elements to consider: 

1. Posting the Job

Job hunting has been a primarily digital affair for years now, but the pandemic has taken the importance of tech in the process to new levels. Job fairs, conferences, and in-person recruiting opportunities have all but vanished, making recruitment sites the de facto job fairs of today. 

Technical recruiters need to keep in mind that this shift is exactly what they’ve been waiting for: an opportunity to take in resumes from as few funnels as possible, reduce travel costs, and maximize efficiency throughout. The impact can be positive for your entire business, too! Candidates recruited from LinkedIn are 40% less likely to leave than employees recruited through more traditional means. The shift to a fully digital recruiting process may have been sudden, but be prepared for it to stick around for the long term. 

2. Technical Assessment

Perhaps the single most crucial aspect of technical recruitment is the technical assessment. Before you hire a candidate, you need to know if they’re up to the tasks or not. While you might have once held technical assessments in your office during prospect visits, Covid-19 has mandated a new way of doing things. If you don’t want the quality of your technical assessment process to tank, you’ll likely need a bit of help.

There are a number of firms out there capable of facilitating remote technical assessments for tech hires. Platforms such as Coderbyte can reduce the cost per hire by up to 25% by maximizing efficiency and effectively vetting candidates. This makes the initial investment easy to earn back over time. 

3. Identifying Need

How do you determine when it’s time for a new hire in the first place? Likely after consultation with team leads and balance sheets, you feel comfortable enough to make a call either way. The new world of remote work has turned the water cooler into the project management platform, meaning that you can be more precise than ever about potential areas of need. After a given development cycle, go back through the data covering the process from start to finish. Is there anywhere that lagged behind expectations? Any snags that employees ran into repeatedly? Any complaints about crunch or resource misallocation? The more concrete your answers to these questions are, the more informed your decisions about technical recruiting will be.

4. “Fit” Analysis

How do you know whether a potential employee will fit well with her future team? More importantly, what steps can you take to come up with as definitive an answer as possible? During normal times, this involves conversations between top candidates and existing team members. These discussions likely entails questions that get to the heart of key issues. Now that the interview process relies almost entirely on email, Zoom, and phone calls, fit is no longer something that can be determined on the fly — you need to search it out. 

Find other ways to determine fit ahead of time. An increasingly popular method is by combing through candidates’ social media. A survey from CareerBuilder found that 70% of businesses now check the social media pages of applicants, and 54% have rejected someone because of what they found. In this day and age, that number should be quickly approaching 100. It’s not easy to coax sociability out of someone over a video chat, so look for its manifestations in other places. 

The age of Covid-19 has not made technical recruiting any easier, but that doesn’t mean a thorough recruiting process is impossible. By using the tools, platforms, and methods at your disposal, you can effectively attract and vet candidates in a way that ensures no one slips through the cracks. 

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