Hiring during COVID and beyond: How to hire the people you need, not the people you want remotely.
Osterus can analyse thousands of CVs from employees in seconds, as we have done for APX, the venture arm of Axel Springer and Porsche, to provide data on the skills and demographics of the firm. The software can then benchmark your firm against competitors and identify gaps in your employees capabilities.
To demonstrate the capacity of our technology we analysed 2,400 resumes of entrepreneurs who had received millions in funding. We saw that 86% of the founders had a Bachelors degree, 67% had a masters and 8% had a doctorate. Over 90% were bilingual and the founders had an average of 4.4 years work experience before starting their firms. Osterus makes it so that heads of business will be able to see the skill gaps they need to fill to become more competitive and recruiters will understand exactly what a candidate has to offer within seconds of uploading the data.
COVID-19 and the prospect of permanent remote working
Remote working is a trend that won’t disappear. Even after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides and global vaccination programmes are rolled out many workers want to remain remote and a stunning 72% of those surveyed wanted a hybrid model of working. So, remote working is here to stay.
How do you understand who will be the best hire for your organisation when you’re all working remotely?
To understand who will be the best hire you need to understand two things. You will need to be able to understand CVs from diverse candidates as I’ll outline below, but you’ll also need to understand what skill gaps exist in your organisation. When hiring, HR executives and recruiters might have a candidate ‘in mind’ or there may be an ‘image’ of someone who has the ideal skill set you think you need, but, what if you’re wrong?
Working remotely may mean managers and C-Suite employees have less understanding of what’s happening ‘in the trenches’. Nobody can be in the trenches all together during these times so it’s feasible that those higher up in an organisation may lose sight of what’s happening lower down. This is where you need a software that can compare you to the best companies in your field, or your direct competitors, and tell you what skill gaps you need to fill to become a more competitive business (that’s us ;) )
Moreover, communication between team members may become fractured and an employee without strong soft-skills could end up causing more friction within the team and be less productive. Firms may need a candidate who can self-discipline and are less likely to procrastinate. You’ll need a candidate who can work independently and has the communication and social skills to achieve tasks within a wider team but on their own. The candidate who has more soft-skills, may become more important to your organisation.
So what does permanent remote working mean for businesses hiring?
Three points become immediately obvious:
- You don’t need to hire applicants from your immediate area. Companies will be taking applicants from candidates all over the world.
- Working across various time zones will be seen as less of a problem. The legacy of presenteeism will fade as fewer people return to the office.
- Workforce dynamics will change rapidly. For example, demographically we already see a real shift. There has been a 170% increase in the number of candidates 65 years old or above compared to the same period last year, iCIMS reports.
Why does this mean businesses will have to change how they hire?
In short — recruiters will not have the capacity to analyse the merits of all candidates. I’ll expand on the two stickiest points here:
HR executives will have to become accustomed to not understanding the background of candidates. Understanding the caliber of their education, status/regard of the institutions they’ve had work experience with or the relevance of extracurricular awards will become more difficult as sourcing candidates internationally becomes the norm. A microcosm of this change can already be seen in the USA where data shows over 25% of all applications came from out-of-state candidates in Q3 2020, the highest percentage of any quarter in the past two years.
HR executives will need to understand the merit of CVs from various, possibly unexpected, demographic groups. The candidates applying for positions are becoming more diverse across a range of verticals as how we work changes. We are set to see more applicants with surprising or unexpected demographic backgrounds. Candidates from different demographics will display different sets of skills. Older candidates may have more experience but lack certain academic qualifications — this does not mean they are automatically better or worse for a position. Osterus can also provide data on the cost of living, quality of life and even information on the internet quality in the applicants location — all of which are important factors in making an offer to a candidate.
Osterus: Hire who you need, not who you want remotely.
My team and I have been working on a software that will solve both of these problems. Our software will analyse CVs and translate data points so that a HR executive or recruiter doesn’t have to look up thousands of different universities and courses in tens of languages for every hire. It also means businesses will be able to see who they need to hire, rather than thinking of who they want to hire. Recruiters can then see exactly which candidate provides what they need rather than presenting what they might want.
