Our company believes that the pandemic will create new opportunities within certain industries and the workforce will re-organize in order to meet the new demand. We want to continue recruiting, so it would be great to hear how others are maintaining engagement with potential new hires.
[Update] We're Software Consultants/Contractors. Our team is based from an office and we work remotely with our clients. Currently, we're all fully remote (from home) due to COVID-19.
With difficulty. I doubt it is worth it for the time being.
The process of acquiring someone new isn't the real issue here. You can handle all the paperwork, the interview process and so forth remotely.
However, once you've gotten someone new hired in, you need to get them set up with everything they need, train them to get used to your system and with their new colleagues. Doing that remotely is time-consuming, difficult and it is doubtful they can get much done over prolonged periods of time. That is, of course, assuming they are a good fit for your company in the first place. Making a proper judgement of that during the first weeks of employment is very difficult.
Your clients may have far less work for you due to the Coronavirus, so hiring someone new may not be necessary.
If they're all working from home as well and/or have less work going on due to their own clients, and whatever else is going on down the line,your services may be needed less. Maybe there won't be any new projects for a while. Do take that into account.
Recruit from those who haven’t been sent home
It wasn’t until yesterday that my company finally relented and sent people home. There are still companies that refuse to do that. Many of those companies have also thrown contractors out of work due to VPN and IT security policies.
Lots of those people are looking to move as a result.
I think it's fair to say that the current situation is unprecedented - hiring right now may be difficult. When things start to change, our speed of decision making slows down.
From my personal entirely anecdotal experience that mainly comes from startups - a lot of businesses across sectors will have layoffs and smaller concernes with cash flow issues may disappear completely. Even firms not experiencing a major downturn are probably very afraid and that decision making speed is slowing down and they will probably slow their hiring intake. My main point - if you are in an industry that will see an upturn in coming months there should be no shortage of skilled workers looking for employment.
