🔒Pandemic forces more CT employers to adopt remote recruitment

Before the COVID-19 pandemic put a hold on most in-person gatherings, CVS Health had already been ramping up its use of online platforms to recruit and hire prospective employees remotely.

Still, a majority of the approximately 150,000 workers CVS Health hires across the country each year — including at Hartford-based health insurer Aetna — interviewed for their job in-person before the pandemic, said Vice President of Talent Acquisition Jeffrey Lackey.

“Our interviews were about 60% to 70% in-person,” Lackey said. “Now we’re at 100% virtual.”

Like many aspects of business, the pandemic appears to have sped up an already-existing trend toward using online platforms to recruit and interview job candidates remotely, rather than spending the extra time and money to do so in-person, said Tony Lee, a vice president of the Society for Human Resource Management. Amazon, for one, often recruits and hires programmers entirely through online interviews and tests, Lee said.

“That’s something they were doing before the pandemic, and I guarantee you it is something that has worked well in the pandemic, and other companies have noticed,” Lee said. “The cost of flying candidates around for an interview … is frankly kind of silly.”

In a situation where nobody can reliably predict how long social distancing will remain a necessary reality, recruiters and experts in Greater Hartford say the increased use of online tools to recruit new workers remotely has benefits and pitfalls. Companies have an easier time reaching more people, but once they hire someone, onboarding can be difficult when it’s not done in an office with other team members.

“It’s not so much the difficulty in recruiting, but the orientation process,” said Mark Soycher, human resource counsel for the Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA), the state’s largest business lobby. “Those subsequent steps with someone who’s not as attuned to the company don’t get filled in as richly as maybe they should [when done remotely].”

Shifting to digital

CVS hired about 44,000 new employees between March 23 and July 21, Lackey said. But the company began investing in a slate of tech platforms to find, test and interview job candidates online about five years ago.

To gather information on job candidates the company uses the chatbot app Olivia, and hosts virtual job fairs through Virginia-based online event platform Brazen. It also uses HR technology software from Massachusetts-based CareerArc to assess candidates, Lackey said.

In expanding its use of these platforms, CVS has been able to widen its net of applicants, partly because it’s a lot easier to interview several candidates in a single day without having to get everyone in the same room. Lackey said attendance at virtual internship fairs has skyrocketed since the pandemic started. Since March, up to 90% of students who signed up for virtual fairs actually attended them, versus about 30% who signed up and attended them pre-pandemic.

“In many ways this is an exciting time for our university recruitment,” Lackey said.

CVS could also save money opting for digital interviews, especially for higher-level positions for which the company might alternatively fly the candidate in for a sit-down, Lackey said.

A study by Questionmark, a Trumbull-based digital assessment platform and professional services firm, said companies pay an average of about $7,600 to find and hire an employee, but even successful recruiters expect an error rate of about 40%.

That shows the significant costs and risks associated with hiring.

Global staffing agency Mackin Talent, which is headquartered in Ireland and plans to open a Hartford office, hasn’t seen a slowdown in business since the pandemic forced worldwide office closures, said Chief Marketing Officer Leniece Lane.

The company, which specializes in tech, bioscience and financial services talent, already did most of its recruiting online because oftentimes candidates for a single position are geographically spread out. But fully vetting candidates and helping clients onboard new workers has been a challenge in recent months.

Between March and May it was taking Mackin about three weeks to do criminal background checks that typically take days, because so many public offices that hold that information were closed.

“We just couldn’t get that information,” Lane said. “With so many government offices closed, and companies closed, it was hard to get employment verification.”

Onboarding was also challenging during this period, Lane said, with Amazon taking about three weeks to fill laptop orders for new employees who have to work remotely.

Problems with bringing new workers into the fold extend beyond logistics, said CBIA’s Soycher. It’s hard for employees to become part of the team when they don’t see their co-workers, and it’s harder for managers to assess how effective that employee is without seeing them working at the office.

SHRM’s Lee said companies are looking at various methods to fill that void. Some human-resource professionals are hosting virtual cocktail or coffee hours, and are also doing more in-person meetings that adhere to social-distancing and mask mandates.

Desire for child care

While companies are altering how they interview and onboard workers, prospective employees are also seeking new benefits, Soycher said. An increasing number of job candidates are seeking coverage for child care and mental health, and are asking for flexible work schedules.

“The traditional standards [for benefits packages] … are getting upended a little bit,” Soycher said. “With an increasing younger population coming into the workplace … child care is certainly going to be a critical component.”

Meantime, when the pandemic first hit, CVS’ Lackey said he thought online interactions would be short-lived. But now that people have had months to get more attuned to the technology, he doesn’t think it will go away if and when COVID-19 does.

“As people become more and more used to doing it virtually, they appreciate that creating a virtual experience actually speeds up the [recruiting] process,” Lackey said. “I believe people will continue to want to use it.”