Recruiting in the ‘new normal’

Hello, everyone, and welcome to week two of the course. I hope you’re feeling great about everything you did last week getting yourself set up to go hiring in this new world. And this week, we’re going to put some practicality behind that, thinking about sourcing candidates, but also about interviewing and selection tools, and making sure, obviously, that we’re baking inclusion into that process all the way through. Absolutely delighted to be joined by Hung Lee. Hung, you may have come across runs one of the best reads and recruitment Brainfood, which I heartily recommend. This message does come endorsed by me. And Hung, just thank you for joining us.

And let’s just kick off a little bit with start at the start of the week for learners. They’re going to be thinking about how different is recruiting in this post-COVID world. What would your observations be from what you’ve heard back from Brainfooders over the last few months? I think it’s a changed world, Neil. I mean, I think we’re all kind of very cognizant of the significance of the kind of epochal change that we’ve encountered. It is not something that is casual and it’s not something where we have a rubber band style bounce back to where we were before. I think all kinds of business is going to change.

All kinds of business functions will change and definitely recruitment is going to change as well. So we have to kind of brace ourselves to really challenge in the legacy processes and practises we did before COVID, and really think, do we need to do it now in the same way, and can we reimagine this, and can we actually do it better, and use this opportunity to do it better. And there’s lots of little aspects to that we need to pick up on, aren’t there? Earlier on, you were saying to me about what post-COVID means for candidate care being a particular early key point. Absolutely. Everyone is stressed.

Everyone’s like, hugely and sort of our anxiety levels have really kind of risen as a result of all of this. I think we’ve all felt it. You know, globally, we’re all in that situation. And that obviously impacts how candidates behave. When people are feeling confident about the economy, about income security, about market, about of all those types of things, their behaviour as a candidate will be different, because they will feel as if there’ll be opportunities that are quite easy to gather, that they’re in demand, that the cost security and all the rest of it. That’s completely changed. We’ve got candidates or individuals now that are really withdrawing from the market in an active sense because they feel very defensive.

And the baseline psychology we have, I think, when you’re dealing with a candidate is that they’re going to be individuals that are under massive amounts of pressure because of they either lost their jobs, or they’ve been furloughed, or feeling the threat of redundancy. Therefore they’ll be highly motivated. Are they really interested in the jobs or capable in the jobs that you’re recruiting for, or are they just super motivated to get something? So there’s that kind of psychology going on, which, again is different from what we had before.

And then is the other psychology, people who are currently in work that are probably grasping very hard at the jobs that they have and thinking, hey, I’ll look for a job next year or a year after that. I’m going to stay on this one as long as I can. So they’re resistant to move. That’s fascinating. And I know Anna from Russell Reynolds, who will join us later in the week, will have views on that as well. And we’re thinking about kind of the passage that those candidates who are under a bit more stress are taking through the process, doing digital interviews, a lot more online assessment and verification. That’s a different skill set as well, isn’t it? Entirely.

Your kind of video game is now like your new suit. Back in the day when, you know, recruiters used to coach this. Make sure you have a nice pressed suit. Make sure your wearing polished shoes and all this type of stuff, first impression. Now first impression is all digital. It’s all about what happens when the camera comes on, and again, none of us are used to this. We have to think about background. We have to think about lighting. We have to think about audio. All of those factors will actually have the subliminal impact on the impression that you’re making, which by the way, Neil, goes both ways.

From the candidate side, they’re concerned that presenting themselves in the best possible light. They have to think about all of the lighting environment, and the noise environment, and all the rest of it. But guess what? You’re recruiting. You need to think about how you are presenting your business, suddenly. You know, you need to think about camera angles also. You need to think about how you employ a branding is now kind of existing in the frame of the window of a webinar type of format. So these are new skills we all have to learn. Hung, thanks very much for joining us. And everyone, enjoy this week on the course. There’s lots of really rich content.

And we’ll look forward to hearing your feedback and your ideas in the discussion boxes as we go forth through.