It’s hard enough to virtually replicate a staff meeting among co-workers who already know each other. But to meet and interview job candidates by video call and decide whether to hire a complete stranger is an even greater challenge, and one that companies of all sizes and industries are grappling with amid the new work environment brought on by COVID-19.
“It is much harder to read body language, even ask questions [over video] than it is face to face,” said Christian Cowan, Polaris MEP’s center director. “The personality aspect just doesn’t translate.”
Programs to help local manufacturers hire and retain talent have long been a backbone of Polaris MEP’s offerings. In-person interviews and recruiting events are critical components, not only for employers trying to gauge prospective applicants but for the applicants too, Cowan said.
“The ability for people to see the environment is often critical to finding the right match,” Cowan said.
While manufacturers in Rhode Island, for the most part, stayed open during the state’s stay-at-home orders, the facilities were off-limits to outside guests, including future employees. And large, recruiting events were a definite no-go.
So Polaris worked with partnering manufacturers to adapt, creating photo collections and video tours of their factories to give applicants a sense of the environment, and offering tips on virtual interviews.
‘The ability for people to see the environment is often critical to finding the right match.’
CHRISTIAN COWAN, Polaris MEP center director
Virtual tours were also among the new features rolled out by The Providence Community Health Centers Inc., which like many manufacturers, continued to recruit, interview and hire as the virus raged on.
Jacqueline Scungio, the human resources operations director, also emphasized the benefits of showing applicants the physical sites, particularly those involved in direct clinical care. Prior to the pandemic, the nonprofit would fly in physician candidates from across the country to spend half a day meeting with staff members and seeing patients across its 12 clinic sites.
“We really like our candidates to see the diversity of our patients, to make sure that’s something they’re comfortable with,” Scungio said.
Like Cowan, Scungio found virtual tours and video interviews to be, at times, a poor substitute for face-to-face interactions.
But there were also benefits to the “new normal.”
Particularly for recruiting, Scungio said it was much easier to find and reach candidates during daytime hours, since many were working from home already. She was also able to pull from a wider geographic area for jobs that could be done remotely, growing the potential pool of applicants and creating a more competitive process.
Virtual interviews also eliminate unnecessary travel time for candidates, said Jeffrey Lackey, vice president of talent acquisition for CVS Health Corp. Unlike other companies, CVS has had no trouble with the switch to virtual recruiting, hiring and onboarding for the 50,000 new employees it has brought on since the pandemic, Lackey said.
This is in no small part due to the technological investments the company made prior to and since the onset of COVID-19. Among the 38 recruiting technologies in the company’s repertoire are those that allow virtual career fairs and specialty video-interviewing software.
Asked if he thought small businesses without the wealth and manpower of CVS were at a disadvantage when it came to virtual hiring, Lackey insisted that cleverness, not budget, was the prime determinant of success.
“You can use Zoom just as effectively as any of these fancy [softwares],” he said.
Vanessa Volz, executive director of Sojourner House Inc., disagreed. The small Providence nonprofit that aids people who have experienced domestic and sexual abuse, definitely struggled more than a large corporation might – though that was true in probably all aspects of business, Volz said.
Complicating Sojourner House’s hiring attempts was its lack of a human resources manager – one of the six positions currently open. That meant Volz was juggling the day-to-day demands of running a nonprofit, coordinating the switch to remote work while enacting safety protocols for its in-person shelter and resource center, while also figuring out how to find, interview, hire and onboard in a pandemic.
“We’ve just been kind of piecemealing it together as we go,” she said.
So far, it’s been fairly successful – she’s hired three people and the virtual training events have gone “surprisingly well.”
But the process has also driven home the importance of having a dedicated HR person to oversee the increasingly complicated details of hiring.
Scungio, a member and the former interim leader of the workforce-development board for the Rhode Island chapter of the Society for Human Resources Management, stressed the importance of letting hiring managers lead the process for their companies.
And with this new way of recruiting, interviewing and onboarding here to stay – perhaps even after the virus retreats – Scungio encouraged companies to look at the challenge as an opportunity.
“What we thought was going to be a detriment is actually, in some ways, a benefit,” she said. “There’s always a bright side.”
Nancy Lavin is a PBN staff writer. Contact her at Lavin@PBN.com.
