As of 2024, the world is still dealing with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic which shut down borders across the globe. In the wake of its onset, businesses across the world suffered staggering quarterly losses, lost employees, and the global supply chain was nearly severed.
Today, COVID-19 is still hindering business operations around the world. In the United States, many of the issues surrounding personnel shortages have been blamed on government stimulus funding, resulting in many employees choosing not to return to work. But some businesses have begun to work around this by offering incentives to work, and by modifying their recruitment strategies.
Recruitment and staffing is largely a joint responsibility between HR professionals and a company’s brand marketing team. Basically, if you want to bring in quality job candidates, you have to seek them out and make sure your company is an attractive option for employment.
Recruitment strategies in 2024 have gone through numerous changes. Here, we’re going to focus on the strategies that have proven best during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Temporary Staffing
One way many businesses worked around massive worker shortages in 2024 and in 2024 was through the use of temporary staffing services.
The use of these services saw an uptick in the summer of 2024. And though temp staffing companies themselves were struggling to find candidates to place in positions, these services became a vital lifeline for many businesses across the country.
Temporary staffing allows for a business to continue operation without slowing progress due to worker shortages. Even businesses in the hospitality industry utilized these services when many of their long-term employees fell sick with COVID-19 or chose not to return to work.
Additionally, temporary employees often get the opportunity to stay with a company on a part-time or full-time basis if they prove themselves as an asset to the company.
Basically, you can look at temp services like a pool of potential candidates that you can “test out” for a period of time. And you might just find a few valuable team members via this approach.
Recruitment Services
During the pandemic, small businesses, as well as large corporations with understaffed HR departments, saw the value in using recruitment service providers as a great method for bringing in new job candidates.
These services, such as those provided by nasrecruitment.com, have proven to be invaluable at modifying existing strategies when it comes to employment branding and recruitment marketing campaigns.
Recruitment services allowed for several businesses to branch out and tap into candidate pools that they were otherwise unable to access while operating under a particular strategy. By placing focus on employment branding, companies were able to update their image and present a workplace culture that was attractive to a larger swath of job applicants.
Additionally, recruitment services provide smaller companies or corporations with small HR departments the tools they need to access the quality job applicants that they desire by doing all the critical legwork.
Assessment Screening
Employers can benefit from assessment screening in a variety of ways. But during the onset of COVID-19, many companies saw the value of assessment tests not only as a screening tool but as a safety measure as well.
Assessment tests act as a deterrent for those unqualified job candidates who may still apply for a job, even if they know they don’t possess the proper qualifications. Assessment testing also deters those less motivated candidates who would rather not take a test to prove his or her skills.
But at the end of the day, pre-employment assessment tests measure the ability of a candidate to perform a particular job, and a candidate’s overall knowledge of critical job functions.
In fact, job search sites such as Indeed offer employers an array of online assessment tests to choose from so that a company can screen potential job candidates before ever viewing the application or resume.
Remote Interviewing
Interviewing for a job remotely was becoming a popular way to screen potential job candidates long before the COVID-19 pandemic began. But since the onset of the pandemic, remote interviewing has become the preferred method for many companies across the country.
Remote interviewing also allows for a company to reach across boundaries and tap into candidate pools that exist in other parts of the country and across the globe.
Today, with more job candidates willing to relocate for a better quality of life and better pay, this makes having a remote interview process crucial for finding the right person for your company, even if this individual lives over 1,000 miles away.
In addition, many companies have utilized the remote interview process not only for hiring remote employees but as a pre-screening tool prior to a final interview.
Company leaders are able to form a decision based on a series of questions and the candidate’s responses, and this can help a business to further narrow down to the perfect job candidate.
Probationary Hiring
Perhaps the last step in the hiring process is known as the probation period. This is typically a timeline of 30 to 90 days during which a newly hired candidate has to perform at a specific level otherwise his or her employment will be terminated at the end of the probationary period.
This has been a popular method for many businesses to ensure that those they hire will live up to expectations. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses have shortened their probationary period due to safety reasons and have opted for a more rigorous version known as a stagiaire, or “stage.”
A stagiaire is popular in the service industry, and usually entails a new hire working for free for a given length of time, sometimes a day or for as long as a week or two. During this time, company leaders and managers can evaluate a candidate’s job performance, and come to a decision of whether he or she is the right fit for the role.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became a critical safety function to modify personnel recruitment in a variety of ways. End while remote team management isn’t anything new to the workforce, remote recruitment is quite new, especially since the emergence of COVID-19.
But at the end of the day, recruitment is about building the right team with the right people. And it’s the right people who will ultimately make your company successful. Taking the necessary steps to ensure the safety of potential candidates as well as your team, will be a large part of your business being successful.
