How SMB’s can collaborate and hire remotely with a modern ATS

While we can expect some backward correction of this remote working trend post-pandemic, 70% of hiring professionals  surveyed by Linked-In believe a ‘hiring process that combines virtual and in-person processes will become increasingly standard due to the associated cost and time savings’.

To remain competitive, companies are now having to adapt their legacy hiring processes to suit a post-pandemic environment where remote team collaboration and hiring is now the norm.

Download our Ultimate Guide to Hiring Remotely, full of  practical advice and guidance to help you and your team adjust your process to hiring remotely. 

Challenge

One company that has proven to be a shining example of this kind of business process transformation is PrepayPower, an energy company who transitioned to a fully remote environment during C-19 and maintained a smooth hiring process using Occupop, which enables online collaboration in team-based hiring.

PrepayPower’s transition was triggered by a legacy hiring process that was struggling to deal with the challenges of a modern candidate ecosystem and covid-19 pressures. As a result, time to hire was much longer than it should be and there were several reasons for this.

1. A skilled hiring team was struggling with admin-heavy processes to recruit for their ever-growing workforce.
2. Setting up interviews and managing the whole hiring process was one of the biggest drains on time because there were many busy people across different business functions involved in each hiring process.
3.  Positions were attracting a high volume of candidates and much time was wasted in email battles and phone calls trying to schedule candidates for interviews.
4. The hiring team lacked any visibility on the progress and status of each stage they were at in each process.
5.  Hiring managers spent a large part of their day inefficiently managing multiple inboxes to try and track progress on hiring and manually forwarding the roles and applicants to relevant people.
6. Reporting was all done manually in spreadsheets and this was time-consuming to both collate and report on data to get a real-time picture of what was happening.

This situation was being exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic and the remote working mandate that sent a shockwave through the industry.  Legacy business processes, particularly HR were creaking under the strain as they had to adjust to an immediate remote working environment where employees, recruiters and candidates would for the most part need to be processed on-line. 

Solution

The most forward-thinking companies were adapting their processes quickly and PrepayPower were able to stay ahead of the curve by deploying Occupop, a cloud based digital recruitment solution.

Within days of installation, PrepayPower’s hiring process headaches were replaced with concrete solutions at every step of the way. PrepayPower had 3 clear goals around improving their hiring process which they were able to achieve using Occupop’s powerful recruitment automation system features.

Goal 1: Improve Recruitment Collaboration

“With the onset of COVID-19 and swift move to fully remote working, you are no longer able to doorstep members of the hiring team to get updates on hiring progress.

Like many other firms during the pandemic, PrepayPower was required to take its operation to a fully remote status. It had to adapt its legacy face-to-face and email based collaborative process, (which was completely unsustainable in this new world). PrepayPower highlighted  the following features from Occupop’s online recruitment solution which enabled a smooth transition to online collaboration.

•  Easy to use system, allowing you to move through each step of the hiring process very simply.
• You can adapt processes to each role, and it's so easy to manage the number of stakeholders involved in the process.
• Cross-functional people, (outside the recruitment team) can use the system and no prior experience in candidate management tools is necessary to onboard any staff member.”

Goal 2: Maintain and improve time-to-hire during turbulent covid-19 pandemic.

With the onset of COVID-19 and the swift move to fully remote working, companies had to adapt their recruitment methods fast to maintain high-volume hiring and positive time-to-hire metrics.

• Occupop was a completely transparent hiring system which, ‘allowed movement and activity to be easily identified’ online allowing recruitment activity to continue unabated as the business processes were forced to go remote overnight.
• Occupop’s remote working features ensure a seamless shift to a fully online hiring process and maintain high-volume hiring process throughout the C-19 pandemic for PrepayPower.

As a result of the implementation of Occupop, PrepayPower experienced faster hiring manager review times and a reduced time to hire.

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Goal 3: PrepayPower needed complete visibility into the hiring process for all stakeholders

“Having the ability to report on progress is so important for us – e.g. hiring time and getting into where exactly our candidates come from.”

Occupop was able to provide PrepayPower with the hiring process visibility that they desperately needed, through the deployment of the following features.

• A core feature of Occupop is its centralised on-line location for all hiring activity from job posting, shortlisting, interviewing and onboarding.
• Each hiring team member was granted an account on Occupop, where they can log in and see exactly where a candidate is within the process, along with any notes associated with their active roles, a candidate scorecard report, browse other applicants and view all communications to and from the candidate.
•  Occupop allowed the PrepayPower hiring team for the first time to clearly see the efficacy of different sourcing channels (such as different job boards and referrals) to better hone their recruiting process. 

“With Occupop I’m able to see which sourcing channels are most effective and this information feeds into our hiring strategy.”

PrepayPower have demonstrated how organisations can seamlessly transfer a face to face hiring process into an innovative remote collaborative hiring process using technology.

‍Read the full PrepayPower Case Study to understand how they used Occupop to reduce time to hire and boosted collaboration in recruitment during covid-19 and beyond.

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Meet Occupop

Occupop is a beautifully simple recruitment software built for small and medium businesses. We empower our customers to become great at hiring through our smart hiring technology and suite of solutions that almost anyone can use. So whether you're a team of five or fifty, it only takes a few minutes to onboard your team members, set permissions, and start recruiting. If you think Occupop could be a good small business recruitment software solution for you, try it out today with a free 14-day trial.

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