Lever – Continuity Planning for Recruiting with Sarah Nahm" cover_image_url="https://recruitingdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/continuity-planning.png" bgcolor="#f5f5f5" txtcolor="#1a1c1d" accent_color="#1899ff" font_family="Roboto"]

Introduction

We are continuing our podcast series where we have a virtual chat with some of the best and brightest in Recruiting and Talent Acquisition.

I’d like to give a warm virtual welcome to Sarah Nahm, CEO, and Co-founder at Lever.

Sarah tells me that she studied engineering and design at Stanford University. She then went on to work at Google for a while, so it’s not surprising that she has a self-described passion for technology. Her career focus is on the full talent lifecycle, continuity, and resilience.

continuity planning with Sarah Nahm

 

Continuity During Quarantine

With the constant change in the world and the workforce, especially right now in this era of COVID-19, things can get a little intense.

Sarah has been interested in the response of talent leaders during this crisis. Her takeaway is that talent leaders are using their resilience and creativity to manage.

My question to her is, how does one maintain continuity right now with recruiting? Especially now with COVID-19 and so many changes?

Her answer brings up the biggest challenge to continuity, related to candidate experience.

She says, from interviews to the onboarding process, all of these are typically in-person activities. With quarantine this became impossible.

If you think of the shipping and healthcare industries, they especially need to meet their hiring needs now, more than ever. So those customers had to adapt and see how to continue to provide that same level of continuity, by running their processes through technology.

 

Also, Lever has had to make a lot of internal changes. We have made the shift to fully remote interviewing and hiring. At the beginning of this pandemic, R&D noticed that remote interviewing grew overnight by 50%. These were interviews scheduled through our integration partner, Zoom.

R&D had the foresight that this would become even more critical. So, they switched their focus to develop a complete remote interviewing set of tools, powered by Zoom.

Their foresight enabled us to launch Lever with Remote Interviewing, about a week and a half ago. These are tools that we are using ourselves, internally, but have also offered them to our customer base. We want to help ease problems as much as possible for our customers. With that mindset, we made the decision to make this upgrade free for all our customers through May 31st. For companies we don’t work with yet, we are hoping we can assist them as well.

 

On The Talent Lifecycle

Some people look at recruiting as a funnel. In reality, it’s a circle.

If you start with sourcing, you nurture that relationship. You move to the interview and then extend an offer. After a hire, those recruiting relationships are now in your database as employees. It doesn’t have to stop there. These employees can be hired for their second or even third job within your company.

We work on helping people with tools that handle rediscovery algorithms and data tracking on that candidate record. This enables us to assist sourcing from within. There’s so much opportunity with that vision of talent.  Sarah also mentions that coming soon from Lever is a software solution that will help automate this.

 

For more, listen to the full podcast

Closing it off, I ask what Sarah’s best advice is for recruiters to prepare themselves the next time something like this happens.

Her answer is to learn, evaluate, and be engaged. Ask for feedback and evaluate your systems and processes. Nobody could have seen this coming, but it will be a mistake to not learn from any weakness that is revealed.

Something we embrace at Lever is to “Choose Reality.” If you want to come out of this period stronger, get really honest feedback from your team and stakeholders. Learn from that feedback and make changes. After this ends, continue that feedback cycle every year or quarter (and not just during a pandemic) to make resilience a habit.

 

This was a great discussion that I hope you enjoy as well.

What do you think? How can we prepare ourselves for another major disruption? Tune in, and then let us know what you think.

 

Playing time: 40 minutes

The RecruitingDaily Podcast

Authors
William Tincup

William is the President & Editor-at-Large of RecruitingDaily. At the intersection of HR and technology, he’s a writer, speaker, advisor, consultant, investor, storyteller & teacher. He's been writing about HR and Recruiting related issues for longer than he cares to disclose. William serves on the Board of Advisors / Board of Directors for 20+ HR technology startups. William is a graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a BA in Art History. He also earned an MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.


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