Hartford Business Journal

10 Hartford Business Journal • August 10, 2020 • www.HartfordBusiness.com By Sean Teehan steehan@hartfordbusiness.com B efore the COVID-19 pan- demic 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 approxi- mately 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 inter- view 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 fly- ing 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 re- cruiting, 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 em- ployees 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 candi- dates 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 plat- forms, CVS has been able to widen its net of applicants, partly because it's a lot easier to interview several candi- dates 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 recruit- ers 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 ser- vices 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 cli- ents 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 infor- mation were closed. "We just couldn't get that infor- mation," Lane said. "With so many government offices closed, and companies closed, it was hard to get Virtual Staffing Pandemic forces more CT employers to adopt remote recruitment Prospective CVS interns participate in a remote recruiting/information event. IMAGE | CONTRIBUTED PHOTO | FIZKES, SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

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