‘It’s difficult to join a company when you’re working virtually’: the challenges of recruiting during a pandemic

Hiring the right people, in the right roles, at the right time is a challenging process for any organisation. But PwC’s workforce team faced an unprecedented situation one Monday in March, when the coronavirus pandemic caused a nationwide lockdown, leaving more than 15,000 people in the firm’s recruitment pipeline.

“We had candidates phoning left, right and centre asking what was going on,” says PwC director of experienced recruitment Sam Ellis. “There were CV reviews where someone had applied for a role and we hadn’t yet looked at them, right through to candidates who were almost at offer … some people were ready to start [work] in the UK but because of travel restrictions, couldn’t physically get here.” The first priority, she adds, was to move all of the interviews scheduled for the following day, online.

It will be a familiar story for many of the business leaders still trying to recruit in the midst of a pandemic, albeit not necessarily at the same scale. Recent research found a surge in new practices over the past three months, with 59% of talent acquisition teams interviewing candidates over video, 65% making offers to people they hadn’t met in person and 67% inducting new starters virtually. Many have found the new changes positive, opening up new talent pools, and minimising the time it takes to move from application to offer.

That was very much the case at PwC too, says Helen Hopkin, head of workforce strategy. Video interview technology is already being used in some parts of the business to pre-screen candidates. This has made it possible for more hiring managers to watch pre-recorded videos of candidates who typically answer set questions and record their responses at their convenience. “Having this technology readily available has made it easier to pivot and respond quickly to the sudden changing needs of the business driven by the pandemic. I suspect lockdown fast-tracked the roll-out of this tool to 10 weeks rather than 10 months,” she says.

Lockdown has also helped change some minds on the benefits of flexible working, as overnight 22,000 PwC employees across the UK had to start working from home. Despite the firm’s everyday flexibility programme for employees, and the flexible talent network for candidates, Hopkin says there were still some assumptions made about who could or couldn’t work flexibly. “A lot of people within the organisation have been juggling work, childcare, looking after dependent relatives,” she adds. “I think everyone has been more open minded, a bit more flexible about how people get their work done, and as a result we’ve seen how people can work effectively under extraordinary circumstances.”

There have, of course, also been challenges. The first three to four weeks of lockdown were spent reorganising the recruitment team’s priorities as the business’s needs changed rapidly, says Ellis, deciding which roles to keep open and which to pause.

“We had to work really closely with the business to make sure we were using staff who had capacity and redeploying our people to where they were needed. There were areas of our business that had suddenly gone quiet and other areas that were really busy, so all open roles had to be looked at to assess whether they were still needed,” she says.

Some promising candidates would be redirected to the PwC talent pool, others would be given “intent to offer” letters to show the firm’s commitment once the current situation improved, which has had its benefits. “We’ve been able to be much more proactive about communicating with potential talent because we’ve now got the benefit of time, whereas it can [usually] be quite transactional because our volumes are so high,” says Ellis.

The team had to wait for practical guidance from the Home Office around how to conduct right-to-work checks (which are usually always done in person), move all induction sessions online, change the necessary graduate programmes in order for recruits to start their professional qualifications early (rather than receive on-the-job coaching in the office first) and organise the courier of laptops to new starters, of which there were a few hundred in April alone.

A virtual desktop interface (VDI) was rapidly rolled out for contractors. “With our supply chain of laptops coming from China – and with no idea on how long the pandemic would last – as well as 1,500 graduates joining in September and several hundred experienced hires still to join there was a concern that we would run out of laptops, so we needed a contingency plan,” says Ellis.

Ensuring there’s still a human element to the recruitment process has also been at the forefront of the workforce team’s minds. Ellis says her team has been picking up the phone to speak to candidates more than usual, and the role of the buddies and career coaches assigned to new starters has been even more important. “We’ve done a real push with the buddies to say here are 10 examples of things you could do with your new team member to make them feel welcome and included,” she says, adding there have been virtual lunches, quizzes and step-count challenges to name a few. “I think everyone realises actually how difficult it is to join at a time when you’re working virtually.”

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Despite the challenges, it’s been a positive few months that will change the way the business recruits candidates in the future. There are plans to expand the use of technology in the process, from conducting pre-screening and some first interviews via video, using more game-based assessment and situational judgement tests, and honing the use of artificial intelligence to identify potential talent in the market. “I think some of the recruitment processes will definitely stick – they’ve suited candidates and suited the firm,” says Hopkin.

“Location and where you actually do your work may be less relevant in the future. I think we’ll still come together as a knowledge based organisation to share and collaborate but maybe not all the time.”