The threat of continuous disruptions caused by pandemics, lockdowns, and the likes of them is far from over. The most remarkable outcome from these times would be to build on its learnings. One of the focus areas where we can implement these learnings is how we plan for the organizations of the future. 

Every organization has to scale itself to include the below virtual recruitment strategies in its arsenal to be better prepared for the future and a post-COVID world:       

Virtual campus hiring:

Most of the teaching and learning in schools and colleges have shifted online now. Educational institutions and companies have to shift campus hiring online too, to avoid large gatherings. Fortunately, for the times we live in, the entire end-to-end campus hiring management can be shifted online.

• Campus Selection and Engagement: Physical campus hiring entails investments such as venue booking and hiring of invigilators apart from other logistics costs. The online campus hiring replicates the step-by-step campus hiring process and shifts it to the online space. It can be effectively leveraged for data-backed and high insight-driven campus intelligence and subsequent campus selection. Companies can also engage students in pre-placement engagement talks through online activities and events such as Hackathons and Ideathons on new-age platforms where students can ideate, work together, and innovate solutions for complex and real-world organizational problems. 
• Campus Screening and Interviews: By screening students through remote online assessments, organizations can measure the candidate’s skills and make data-driven hiring decisions. The screened students can be called in for interviews via structured interview platforms that allow them to interact one-on-one with the candidates avoiding any limitations of the physical campus hiring. Such interview platforms also take out the hassles of structured data storage, data analysis of each and every student, and future referencing.    

Virtual lateral hiring:

The lateral hiring strategies in a post-covid world also have to be aligned to remote and online settings with the help of the right strategies and tools in tandem.

• Job-mapping: The most pressing challenge for organizations with lateral hiring is to sift through a massive pool of candidates who apply for a job, understand their fitment for the job role, and hire in a streamlined and efficient manner. Job-mapping analysis and matching the job roles with the organizational requirement will help remove all other candidates who wouldn't be the best fit against the job role. 
• Virtual talent assessments: By employing talent assessments such as aptitude, behavioral, and psychometrics tests, organizations can comprehensively understand a candidate’s core technical skills and cultural fitment on self-manageable integrated platforms. The modern hiring tools and digital platforms can be customized to suit the job requirements; and accordingly, tests can be set, send to candidates, results measured, and data collated for each candidate for better visibility and comparison. 
• Assessing candidates for the future of work: The nature of jobs is ever-evolving, and so is the future of work. According to the World Economic Forum, about 150 million new tech jobs will be created in the next five years, and the five most sought-after skills will be analytical thinking and innovation, learning agility, complex problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity.  Companies have started using Skill Proximity Analysis and Learning Agility Assessment to understand how close or overlapping in their abilities are the potential hires to new skills.
• Real-time coding simulators for IT hiring: IT candidates are in high demand in an age of digital transformation; and testing candidates for skills like Java, CSS, HTML, Python, and SQL needs specific mention. IT hiring cycle is long-drawn as IT roles take 50% longer to fill, according to 2019 Benchmark Report: Hiring Tech Talent for CIOs and CTOs. There are tools available in the market, adept with a plagiarism checker and coding playback, which has expansive skill coverage, framework, and technology testing available in real-time. The HR manager, IT manager, and interviewee can hop on a call, and they can see how a candidate is coding and their approach to a problem.             

The present health crisis highlights the dire need for resiliency and readiness of our infrastructure and people- the factors that keep the processes intact and don’t throw our understanding of normalcy haywire. The organizational adaptability of modern tools and technological innovations will define business sustainability for today and what lies beyond the COVID.