Selecting, Hiring, and Onboarding at 6 Feet (or Hundreds of Miles!)

How can we do it all while maintaining social distancing and mutual safety?

In the world of Covid-19, some of us are hiring, and more will soon be. HR workers are already stretched thin, with lots of new demands and (sometimes) reduced staff. How in the world can we find the time and means to interview, select, and then do all the busywork (critical, but it feels like busywork!) of properly onboarding our new hires?

Have you ever stopped to think of how many different pieces of paper you fill out, or get signed, in the process of bringing a new employee on board? Do you have a way to do that efficiently, while still maintaining social distancing and mutual safety? What if the new employee isn’t even in the same general location as your work, or home office?

In this evolving world of remote work, distant selection, hiring, and onboarding is more and more of a reality; it can be a serious burden, or a real opportunity, depending on how you approach the process.

Fortunately, many of the same tools that allow us to work remotely, and their offspring, can help with that whole set of challenges…and, in the process, give us back some of our scarcest resource: Time! Better yet, every solution I list below is available and cost-effective, even for the smallest business.

Getting applicants for our jobs: You would think, with unemployment approaching 25%, that we’d be flooded with applicants, even if we didn’t look for them. Unfortunately, for many reasons, we don’t hear that to be the case. Applicants, good applicants, are still scarce…but they are out there, if you can reach them.

Solution: A simple, affordable online hiring and applicant tracking system that you can learn to use in an hour. It can post your jobs, ask job-specific questions, schedule interviews and assessments, automate background checks, communicate with your candidates, and lead to onboarding new hires.

Getting the kind of information that will produce good hires: Applications, resumes, references…all produce information, but it’s often false or irrelevant to predicting success in your jobs. (A SHRM Study showed that more than half of applicants just lied on their application!)

Solution: Scientific pre-employment assessments, on the other hand, produce information that will predict success in your specific jobs. For less than the cost of a half-hour phone screening, you can learn what kind of employee they are likely to be.

Interviews: How on earth can you safely interview job candidates? Sure, you can schedule and use Zoom, or Facetime, but who has time to do a good job of that?

Solution: Video interviewing platforms allow you to preprogram your questions, and allow the candidate to complete the interview from anywhere, safely distanced, on their own time.

Onboarding: We use robots to build cars, electronics, and design new products. Why should we continue using valuable human time to complete the repetitive and necessary tasks of onboarding?

Solution: Online onboarding programs, integrated with your online hiring solution, can complete those repetitive tasks efficiently, and for far less cost than having a human do it…and they can do it from anywhere, with the candidate somewhere else! I-9, benefits forms, payroll information and deduction elections, custom forms unique to your business, they can do it all!

The time of direct contact in the recruiting, selection, hiring and onboarding our employees has gone for now, and perhaps forever. Using the tools described here can accomplish the job, do it better that we’ve ever done it before, cost less, and free up our time for other, important tasks.

Let us know if we can help you put any of these to work!