Talent Management teams across the globe had to undergo a huge change in the way they conduct their screening and recruitment processes in their respective organizations during the pandemic. From face-to-face interviews, they had to completely move to interviews and screening processes which can be done remotely.
Even the induction and on-boarding processes happened through zoom or MS teams meetings. Jobs in talent management space became focused towards those professionals who could quickly adapt to these new changes and propose better ways of sourcing and recruiting during these challenging times.
The employees irrespective of their nature of job had to do it from the confines of their homes. And now since the world is recovering from the clutches of the global pandemic and most of the organizations have made room for a hybrid workforce, the post-pandemic trends in talent management strategies are evolving.
Fostering Employee Wellbeing
The employees had to undergo multiple impacts of the pandemic which included salary cuts, cuts in incentives, bonuses, pay-outs, prize money etc. Many employees and their loved ones were infected with the disease and they had to go through the trauma of their treatment, and in an unfortunate situation their death.
The stress, anxiety caused due to the uncertainty of the pandemic weighed high on many employees. McKinsey, the reputed consulting firm conducted a study about ‘’Overcoming Pandemic Fatigue’’ which showed that 75% employees in the USA, and 33% in Asia-Pacific regions reported burnout due to various reasons during the pandemic.
- The organizations reviewed their medical insurance plans and included benefits for employees and their dependents if they are infected with COVID-19.
- Counselling sessions from reputed organizations like Optum were conducted in many organizations across the globe. Many organizations set up 24 hour hotline services for employees to reach out to the psychiatrists.
- Distressing activities like yoga, breathing exercises, meditation, and Zumba sessions were organized online to keep the employees happy and stress-free.
- Organizations stepped up to involve themselves in the vaccination drives and encourage their workforce to get vaccinated. Some organizations covered the costs of the vaccination too.
- MNCs across the globe geared up their learning and development teams to ensure that they continue with the skills enhancement sessions through Zoom and other video conferencing tools.
Recruitment Team- Skills and Execution
- Since the unemployment rates quickly rose in multiple sectors like aviation, construction, fitness-spa, travel and transportation, FMCG, manufacturing sectors due to the national lockdowns in most of the countries, the recruitment teams had to scale up to other ways of hiring. In many companies, professionals from other industries who lost their jobs during the global pandemic were welcomed. The recruitment teams had to find the right fitment of roles and look at their adaptability into the new roles. Imparting them the right kind of training and equipping them with the right skillsets was one of the major challenges which the recruitment teams faced. For example, flight attendants were hired for desk jobs in contact centers as they had good customer services skills.
- The e-Commerce and healthcare sectors saw a huge bump in hiring during the pandemic due to the nature of their jobs. Overnight people started taking up crisis management, basic healthcare courses to be recruited in those sectors.
- In the organizations, global talent managers started looking for diverse workforce irrespective of their physical location to be hired and made productive.
- Cyber-security threats increased manifolds and since employees were working from home, the monitoring of their work-time, productivity etc. became crucial. A demand for these professionals too increased in the last one and half years ever since the world started facing the challenges presented by the global pandemic.
