As an HR professional, you have two main priorities. The first one is to win top specialists for your company; you are to find them and convince them to join you. The second one is to ensure that people, who are already members of the team, are satisfied and happy. Your task is to provide them with proper training and any information they need to be well prepared for their job.
You will surely admit that there are quite a few challenges in HR professionals’ daily work.
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Challenges HR people have to face
In HR, you always work with other people. Evaluation meetings, job interviews, onboarding and training sessions – you have to attend them every day.
In today’s world, it may present a massive challenge for HR professionals. More and more companies operate globally, and with offices scattered around the world, they often set up virtual teams whose members work from many different locations. The main communication channels used daily are Skype or Slack.
According to a survey done by XpertHR, in an American company providing HR solutions, over 64% of HR professionals claim their biggest challenge in 2019 is to look for top quality applicants.
No wonder they think so. It has become a common practice that to find the best experts recruiters look far beyond their local job markets. Today, they search for them in other cities or countries.
That’s because, in many industries, outstanding professionals are very few and far between. As such, they are incredibly sought-after. If you cannot find them on your local market, your task is to look further. You start your average day at work from looking through interesting LinkedIn profiles and sending a few InMail messages.
The digital nomads era
You aim to get in touch with users whose experience matches the profile of the vacancy you are supposed to fill. You don’t care where they currently live as you know many of them will be glad to relocate to start a new job.
After all, we live in an era of digital nomads.
Many people, especially young ones, don’t feel attached to the place where they live or work these days. They don’t have mortgages and don’t own houses or cars. They have no commitments. Instead, they can work from anywhere where they have electricity and WiFi.
Others are ready to put everything in their backpack and move to another town or country where an exciting job opportunity awaits them.
As a result, HR professionals need to take into account the following issues:
- the necessity to travel to the company’s offices around the country/world
- the costs of these travels and time that needs to be devoted
- the need for tools to effectively communicate within distributed teams and to applicants from various, often remote locations.
There is one more challenge they have to face. A huge one. It’s Millennials and their specific attitude towards work.
Job-hopping Millennials
Millennials are people born between 1980 and 1996. The younger ones within this group don’t remember the times before the Internet era. Their lives are strongly connected with the online world.
According to a survey done in 2018 by Pew Research Centre, Millennials are the largest generation in the U.S. labour workforce. They are called job hoppers as they are willing and ready to change their jobs often.
This represents both an opportunity and a challenge for HR professionals. An opportunity – as it may be pretty easy to persuade Millenials to leave their current job and join your team. A challenge – as it may be a relatively difficult task to convince them to leave their current job within your organization and join another one.
That’s why it’s essential that you take good care of such employees. When communicating with them, you should use the tools they love using – digital online solutions.
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Some time ago, we published an article on our blog in which we discussed the ways our staff uses our own webinar platform, ClickMeeting. We showed you how it helps our employees to pursue their goals. One of the teams mentioned was our HR team.
Today, we want to show you in more detail how HR professionals can benefit from webinars in such tasks as:
- remote job interviews;
- communication with the staff and the management board;
- staff training.
Read on to find out more:
How to effectively use webinars in HR communication
Webinars are a great tool if you are looking for support in your HR communication. They are interactive, and you can run them in real time. What is most important, however, is that they let you get in touch with applicants, employees, or managers without having to waste time or money for travels.
Below, you will find examples of meetings you can hold on webinar platforms and benefit from the features they offer.
Remote job interviews
As we have already mentioned, companies need to look for great professionals worldwide these days. And similarly – prospective employees search for great job offers outside their local job market too.
That’s why it’s a common practice to host the initial recruitment meetings, the so-called screening, remotely. Recruiters either call applicants or they invite them to online meetings.
Often, during initial meetings, you may want to verify whether or not the applicant’s skills and experience match the job profile. You can ask them to perform a recruitment task right away or run a short presentation about your company and the team the applicant will join.
If your company has its product, you need to showcase it to the applicant during your conversation.
Can you do all these things over the phone? Not really. On Skype? You may try, but you will quickly realize you need tools these communication channels don’t offer.
Where to find such tools? On webinar platforms such as ClickMeeting. With webinars, not only you can reach out to applicants all over the world, but you can manage the entire recruitment process. If you invite them to a remote job interview on a webinar platform, you can run a productive meeting thanks to such features as:
- Presentation – it lets you show some slides during your webinar;
- Screen sharing – it’s very convenient when you want to show participants your screen and present, e.g. how an app or a piece of software works;
- Discussion mode – to have a conversation in real time;
- Whiteboard – it lets you sketch, write and draw things to explain more complicated topics.
With these features, your online meeting will be engaging and much more authentic than a phone or Skype call.
Onboarding for newcomers
When you have already convinced an applicant to join your team, it’s time to make sure they are appropriately introduced to the company, new tasks and responsibilities.
In other words, it’s onboarding time.
If you are an HR professional at a company that has a distributed team, operates on international markets and has offices in many different locations, onboarding for new employees can be a challenge.
You may not be able to bring them all to the headquarters or to travel long distances to meet them, especially when several people join at the same time, but in various locations.
A series of onboarding webinars will be a good alternative in this case. Choose a day and hour and invite your new people from all the branches of your company.
If applicable, remember about time differences, and check if everyone is available at that time. Step by step, introduce them to your company’s work culture, procedures and regulations. Make effective use of the following tools:
- Whiteboard – to sketch the organizational structure of your company;
- Presentation – to show the photos of the managers, team members, and CEO;
- Discussion mode – to have a conversation with the newcomers as if you were in a traditional meeting room;
- Q&A session – to let them ask you questions – and we bet they will have many – and to answer them instantly.
Remember you can record every webinar you host. You can then make them available from your Intranet. Newbies can go back to the whole series or to selected webinar whenever they want to brush up on the new rules they need to follow.
Training for the staff
Regular training sessions for your staff can be a challenge similar to the one related to onboarding. Long distances, distributed teams, no time to travel, inability to gather everyone in the same place for a training session – all these make it difficult for HR people to share essential knowledge with the team.
Such training is obligatory, like Workplace Health and Safety for example. There are also non-obligatory, but important topics to cover with your team, such as employee evaluation or giving and receiving feedback.
Don’t worry that it will be difficult to run training for team members scattered around the world or that a topic you need to present is too complex for a remote meeting.
Host a webinar and invite employees to participate. Use the features we discussed in the previous passage to engage them and provide with excellent training experience.
Employer branding activities
Employer branding is an essential part of every company’s HR strategy. It lets you present your company to prospective employees and ensure the current ones are happy and satisfied with the conditions and atmosphere.
Webinars are a convenient employer branding tool. You can use them to:
- Promote your current job openings;
- run “open days” for prospective employees or trainees online.
- Organize online meetings with selected members of the team to let applicants know people working at the company;
- Host regular Q&A sessions for your team;
- Invite your team to online meetings where you present new employee benefit programs, sports activities they can join, etc.;
- Do employee satisfaction surveys;
- Improve internal communication.
Remote meetings with the management board and managers
Apart from ensuring effective communication with the members of the team, you need to get in touch with your CEO and management board on a daily basis. You may want to:
- provide them with reports on your employer branding activities;
- discuss your recruitment strategy and current openings;
- provide them with some data on the employee evaluation process, etc.
If members of the management board are located in different branches of your company, webinars may come in handy again. You may want to run regular meetings for the stakeholders mentioned above, for instance, every Monday.
Send them an Invitation from the webinar platform. Prepare an Agenda and make it available in the Webinar Waiting Room before you start.
Don’t forget to use the Custom Branding feature to make sure the layout of the webinar room is consistent with your brand’s visual identity. Your audience will surely notice and appreciate that.
Don’t be scared with challenges awaiting you in your HR jobs – use webinars to reach your goals!
Communication within distributed teams and the necessity to search for top quality professionals far beyond your local market – don’t worry you won’t be able to rise to these challenges.
Choose a good pricing plan on a good webinar platform, like ours, and let it support your daily HR tasks.
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