Virtual recruiting is helping talent acquisition teams break down barriers to diverse recruiting, prioritize candidate experience and broaden employers’ talent pools. The aftermath of COVID-19 will usher in a hybrid workforce and hybrid recruiting that will reshape how job seekers engage with career opportunities, writes Ed Barrientos, CEO of Brazen.
 COVID-19 has offered disruption to the corporate workforce that is unlike anything we have seen in 30+ years. We are at an inflection point that will help determine what the next 30 years of the U.S. workforce will look like and how it will operate, and a few significant trends are emerging. The workforce of the future will undoubtedly operate by leveraging digital systems and recruiting will be no exception. With that being said, I believe that recruiting will also have an in-person component to complement the virtual. There is still a significant level of relationship building that occurs in-person that cannot be replicated virtually. However, this will likely only be for later stage candidates who have digitally connected with recruiters, future colleagues, and hiring managers. The aftermath of COVID-19 will usher in a hybrid workforce, a hybrid method of recruiting for talent acquisition teams, and an increased reliance on technology that will reshape the way job seekers engage with career opportunities and recruiters.
New Challenges With Recruiting Top Talent
The workforce of the future will have virtual and in-person components, which means recruiting and hiring efforts will need to be hybrid to meet the needs of each unique job seeker. AdventHealth, a healthcare company based in Alamonte Springs, Florida, which employs over 65,000 team members at 50+ hospitals and healthcare sites across 9 states, began leveraging Brazen for hybrid recruiting efforts before the pandemic. AdventHealth shifted away from an in-person-driven approach to a hybrid recruiting model that also uses virtual hiring tools to provide an incredible candidate experience for every job seeker, regardless of physical location or stage in the hiring process. Because AdventHealth already had a hiring event platform and hybrid recruiting process in place, the company’s hiring efforts were not hindered by the pandemic. Rather, its talent acquisition team was able to quickly scale its hiring strategies to deal with the fluctuations of hiring in the healthcare industry, catalyzed by the pandemic.
As more and more companies make the transition to permanent remote or hybrid models, competition for talent will become increasingly difficult. Companies that are moving to remote workforces offer employees a chance to relocate (now an in-demand benefit), and these companies can tap into talent that is located anywhere in the world. This means more competition for top talent in traditional talent pools, but it also breaks down barriers to broader talent pools regardless of physical location. Talent acquisition teams will instead need to find new ways to compete and attract talent, such as offering highly engaging interview experiences to prospective candidates and remote or hybrid work models to new hires.
Virtual Recruiting Will Continue to Grow in 2021
Virtual recruitment technology, such as virtual career fairs and interviews, are allowing HR and talent acquisition teams to reach, engage with and hire more job seekers from various cities across the country with more diverse backgrounds. COVID-19 has motivated many companies to break down regional barriers that previously prevented them from hiring candidates who didn’t meet certain criteria, particularly their proximity to an office space. Technology offers a real-time solution to improving DEI initiatives, exploring different channels and verticals for recruiting, giving companies access to larger and more diverse talent pools.
In 2020, Brazen’s platform facilitated 1,000,000+ conversations and hosted almost 15,000 virtual events. This totaled approximately 60 virtual events per day and 4.18 years of virtual events hosted, that is some serious career matchmaking. Virtual recruitment strategies allow companies to engage with more talent than ever before and accelerate the time to hire, offering countless benefits to companies and job seekers.
As the workforce becomes hybrid, so will the recruitment tools and methods. For example, a platform that allows a job candidate and recruiter to video chat, then schedule an in-person meeting, and houses the data from their virtual and in-person touchpoints all in one place will be a transformative tool for talent acquisition teams.
For a company based in San Francisco interviewing a candidate in New York, the recruiter can make initial touchpoints via virtual event and interview, then can decide to coordinate an in-person interview if they sense a strong fit. As more conversations take place virtually, employers can feel confident and empowered to make the time and financial investments to fly candidates out to meet in-person if they have been thoroughly vetted leveraging virtual tools. While the in-person aspect is important to recruiting, COVID-19 has demonstrated the need for a virtual component to complement in-person hiring, and I anticipate this trend will only become stronger in the years ahead, especially with university recruiting and on-campus career fairs.
Candidate Experience Will Remain a Top Priority
Building trust and relationships come naturally to most of us when we are in person, but as recruiting makes a major shift to virtual, recruitment teams will need to find ways to ensure candidate experience remains a top priority. This year, Brazen partnered with Florida Troops to Teachers and six K-12 Florida school districts to connect transitioning military service members and veterans with education career opportunities and offer these candidates the best recruiting experience possible. The participating schools pride themselves on a personalized virtual event experience, striving to offer the best attendee experience possible to former military and their spouses. Using an intuitive, interactive virtual platform, Florida Troops to Teachers has been able to engage with almost 300 event attendees and has hired almost one-third of those attendees thus far.
More robust virtual recruiting tools like virtual career fair platforms that contain a suite of features like pre-screening tools, video interviewing, and seamlessly follow-up features will likely be a more effective option. Virtual recruiting allows organizations like Florida Troops to Teachers to connect their diverse, qualified military service members and veterans with schools through virtual hiring events, career fairs, video interviewing, and more, with a goal to drive personal human connection and conversation in an otherwise virtual world.
With so many companies allowing employees to permanently work remotely, and others re-evaluating work from home policies to offer employees more flexibility and choice, a hybrid work model and method of recruiting is a trend I anticipate will become commonplace in the next few years. For recruiters and talent acquisition teams, identifying and retaining top talent will be crucial in 2021. This job now comes with a new set of challenges and barriers in our remote and hybrid-remote work environment. Recruiters will have to promote competitive perks and benefits that offer flexibility and a choice of preferred work model, in addition to having the technology in place to support it. Not only will recruiters have to sell candidates on great work culture, but they will also need to deliver on the promise of a seamless hybrid or fully remote work experience, should that be what the employee prefers. The future of work is distributed, and recruitment will have to reflect this shift in workplace culture moving forward by transitioning to a hybrid model.