Coronavirus has taken a devastating toll on employment, with many industries forced to downsize and rethink their business strategies, but as employers look toward recovery, remote recruiting can be an essential tool to hiring efficiently and safely.
So says Tim Ihlefeld, CEO of
“Right now, HR departments are dealing with the downsizing of their organizations, so they're not thinking about ramping up,” Ihlefeld says. “But we're leading with more of an optimistic view, which is that this is going to end, so prepare your businesses and look at how technology can help ramp that back up in a safe environment.”
Harqen provides live and on-demand videos for job interviews on one’s computer or mobile device. Each applicant is then given a score and ranked comparatively to others in the hiring pool, allowing recruiters to quickly assess and compare their options.
“It’s easy for us to align our technology with the business goals of an organization and use metrics to measure performance in terms of recruitment and engagement to provide analytical stats for each candidate,” Ihlefeld says. “Ultimately, the recruiters and the hiring managers make the decision — we're just trying to compress and advance the process and provide a best recommendation for them to act on.”
Ihlefeld in a recent interview shared how the technology can be adapted once employers begin searching for talent, and why businesses need to think about the future before they’ve fully recovered from the effects of the pandemic.
When it comes to the recruiting process, what are some of the challenges businesses are facing due to coronavirus?
From the recruiting and talent engagement perspective, the world has changed permanently in terms of how [businesses] are going to go about doing that. And although there's lots of technology out there like Harqen, which is an on-demand digital interviewing platform, companies have been reluctant to engage in change or adopt this type of technology in the past. With the coronavirus crisis, that has absolutely forced the issue and has compelled organizations to really look at this technology aggressively. While Zoom and Google Meet and all these other programs are great conferencing platforms, they're not built for recruitment. They're not built for technology talent acquisition.
How does a remote recruiting platform life Harqen change the traditional hiring process?
Our platform was built really to do two things: to increase candidate engagement as well as compress the hiring timeline associated with evaluating and assessing talent that you're reviewing for employment. One of the things we're releasing in the next month is a full suite of predictive analytics powered by machine learning algorithms. We built that to enable companies to analyze candidate responses during the interview and match those against prior candidates that pass through the process. That really helps to streamline the talent for the recruiters and allow them to focus on the most qualified candidates. We're compressing steps that normally took days, if not weeks to complete. At the end of the day, the recruiting team and the hiring managers still make the decision, but we want to give them more information that maybe they hadn't considered in the past.
How will remote recruiting help workplaces adapt to new changes predicted in the workplace once we’re back at work?
I think companies are still holding onto the belief that we're just going to go back to the old way of doing things. Right now, HR departments are dealing with the downsizing of their organizations. But as we reach out, we’re approaching it from a continuity perspective of, “Hey, once the crisis ends, we've got to ramp back up. There will be a competition for talent and you can use technology to win and be efficient.”
Our technology provides a safer way of interviewing and assessing candidates then done in the past. Where typically, you might have a first round phone call and then they're coming into the facility to meet you and other colleagues, that's not going to be the reality moving forward. While it may ultimately come back to that, by then the technology will have taken hold, and once there's adoption, like most technologies, you don't go backward.
Looking toward the future, do you see remote recruiting becoming the normal process for business?
I do see it becoming a norm. We're still in the weeds right now in the malaise of uncertainty of what's going to happen with the economy, and that creates uncertainty. But that's eventually going to end and businesses will start understanding how they will move forward. We will return to offices, but it's not going to be like it was. I've talked to so many businesses, and they're completely reworking their strategies as it pertains to the office environment. They're reengineering everything, and this is just one tool out there being evaluated as part of the new business process.
It’s a win-win for both sides. From the employer perspective, remote recruiting is very efficient, and it's allowing them to do more with less. And if I can expedite the hiring process, that's a total win for the candidate. They're going to work faster. They're earning a paycheck faster. They're advancing their career faster, and they're with an organization that isn't fearful of technology and that's looking to embrace technology to improve their business performance.
