With an unemployment rate in excess of 13%, the overwhelming majority of industries find themselves unable to maintain their pre-COVID employment numbers.

Yet, while many companies have experienced a considerable contraction in their workforce over the past few months, a number of large corporations–Amazon, CVS, Albertsons, and others–actually expanded their hiring efforts in order to address the increased demand for their services.

Unable to utilize traditional hiring processes, these companies found creative and efficient ways to identify and hire quality candidates. With more states and business re-opening, the need to successfully re-hire or hire furloughed talent is imperative.

So, if your organization is fortunate enough to be hiring during the pandemic, looking for furloughed employees may be a good place to start. The question becomes how to do so most effectively. This article covers some of the most fundamental considerations.

What is a Furlough?

Before we get started, it’s worth defining what a furlough is and distinguishing a furlough from a layoff. Fortune magazine has a good answer to these questions. 

A furlough “is an unpaid leave of absence. While furloughed employees still technically retain their jobs, the furlough itself means that they cease working for their employers and do not earn a salary.

The idea is that this is a temporary arrangement, and workers will one day be able to return to their jobs.” While furloughed employees typically do not earn a paycheck, they do maintain their benefits, like healthcare. Furloughed employees are also eligible to collect unemployment benefits.

Furloughs vs. Layoffs

And therein lies the difference between a furlough and a layoff: “While a furlough is meant to be a temporary arrangement, being laid off is quite the opposite: a permanent termination of one’s employment, including salary and benefits. The door is open for one’s return when furloughed; when laid off, that’s very rarely the case.”

This distinction is essential. Hiring a furloughed employee means that you are likely hiring a temporary one. Furloughed workers remain employed and often expect to return to their employer once the furlough period concludes.

But during an economic crisis like the one we’re experiencing now, this arrangement may be mutually beneficial. Just as a furlough is temporary, it’s likely that the boost in demand for your goods and services are as well.

Since furlough periods will likely conclude once businesses are allowed to open and social distancing policies are eased or lifted, the furlough timeline should map nicely onto your period of increased demand. 

In other words, furloughed workers are likely looking for temporary jobs for roughly the same amount of time as you need them. 

The CVS Model of Recruiting and Hiring Furloughed Workers

So how do you hire them? Well, it’s useful to start with the strategies major corporations are already utilizing. 

Hilton: Hilton Hotels has furloughed over a quarter-million workers. 60,000 of those work directly in corporate offices; the other 200,000 work at Hilton franchise hotels. 

As numerous news outlets have reported, Hilton has partnered with a number of corporations, including Amazon and CVS, to find temporary work for their furloughed workforce.

This partnership has enabled both sides to implement procedures that have eliminated bureaucracy and promoted greater connectivity between organizations to allow Hilton employees to quickly and easily transition into their new temporary roles. 

The major component of this partnership is the creation of a “shared online resource center.” Providing further detail, CVS describes the partnership as constructing a “technology-enabled hiring process that includes virtual job fairs, virtual interviews and virtual job tryouts.”

CVS’ success is remarkable. They’ve hired more than 60,000 new employees, far in excess of their goal of 50,000. The increase marks more than a 25% expansion in their workforce.

“We went to virtual almost overnight,” said Jeffrey Lackey, CVS’ VP of Talent Acquisition. “We have something that would normally take a large corporation months, years potentially…In 48 hours, we created an accelerated hiring process.”

The other key component in this partnership is an agreement on shared competencies, skills, and experience between Hilton and partnering corporations.

Explaining why corporations were willing to partner, Nigel Glennie, vice president of corporate communication at Hilton, in an interview with USA TODAY, stated, “The recognized quality of our team members, including their hospitality and service culture training, make them ideal candidates to quickly step in and assist organizations in these temporary assignments.”

As the Hilton case study reveals, the two most important components of constructing systems and methods to hire furloughed employees are:

1. Finding workers with shared skills, competencies, and experiences.
2. Designing technologies that streamline the identification, hiring, and transition from furlough to temporary worker. 

How to Proceed with Talent Communities

We think there are three basic steps to begin the recruitment of furloughed workers. They are:

1. Identify desired workers
2. Forge partnerships with appropriate organizations
3. Strategize streamlining the hiring and transition process

Start by identifying the workers you’d like to attract. An important early distinction is whether there are furloughed workers within your industry. Ask yourself questions like:

1. Are there furloughed workers that work in our specific field and industry?
2. If not, are their furloughed workers in related industries, which require similar skill sets and knowledge bases?
3. If not, what industries are furloughing workers and how can we leverage their skills and experiences to help meet our increased demands?

Additionally, keep geography in mind. A competitor may have furloughed hundreds of ideal workers for you to hire, but if they’re located on the other side of the country you’re out of luck. Workers are unlikely to relocate for temporary work. So look locally when examining the previous three questions.

Building Recruiting Partnerships

From there you can forge partnerships with appropriate organizations. The Hilton case works so well because there is mutual benefit on both sides. Amazon isn’t trying to poach Hilton workers and Hilton isn’t trying to offload healthcare costs onto Amazon.

In other words, everyone wins— Amazon, Hilton, and workers. As you identify organizations you’d like to partner with, be sure you approach them with a plan detailing how all sides will benefit. This is, after all, a partnership, not a competition.  

A Platform for Talent Redeployment

Lastly, once you’ve established partnerships you need to find creative ways to identify, attract, and hire furloughed workers. As the Hilton case shows, a shared database of some kind is particularly useful.

In fact, SmartRecruiters has released a talent redeployment platform to minimize the impact of layoffs and create talent communities for employees to enjoy priority hiring by recruiters in, across, and/or outside of your organization.

The tool enhances in-placement and outplacement functionality, and improves the overall experience by enabling employees to opt-in to the talent communities of their choice.

The platform helps promote greater visibility to the internal skills of your employment, more accuracy predicting the skills you lack, and helps rapidly mobilize and redeploy talent to mitigate loss of functions. 

Conclusion

Remember, in order for hiring furloughed workers to work most effectively, it has to benefit all sides. Each organization should find the arrangement desirable. More importantly, workers should feel comfortable that the pursuit of temporary work with a partner organization is encouraged by their employers and will in no way have an adverse impact when they are able to return to their employer. So do your homework and be creative!

P.S. there’s no better time than the present to reassess your ATS. For a limited time, SmartRecruiters is offering eligible companies a below-market-rate offer for a complete and flexible talent acquisition platform. Designed to drive technological change, this stimulus package will help businesses that want to take advantage of the hiring slowdown to upgrade their ATS and reduce costs. Benefits include:

• Contract buyouts and zero transition costs
• Significant savings on technology, people, and sourcing costs
• An accelerated path to Hiring Success

Hiring talented interns that make an immediate impact on your company is a challenge when they lack experience, which is why these job boards are great resources for hiring top-quality students today.

It’s hard to argue against the economics of hiring interns. Employing free or very cheap labor is a low-risk solution for organizations that need workers, and internships offer recent grads or new professionals opportunities to gain valuable work experience.

Many companies historically hire interns on an unpaid basis in order to save costs on jobs that would otherwise go to entry-level employees, but unpaid internships have come under scrutiny as being ethically questionable. Few young professionals can afford to work for free, and arguments that unpaid internships exclude millions of low-income candidates from the workforce are gaining traction. With recent lawsuits escalating arguments on both sides of the issue, companies now shoulder the legal responsibility to know if and when an intern needs to be financially compensated according to the Federal Labor Standards Act (FSLA).

Tabling the legal and ethical debate of unpaid internships for the moment, hiring interns can have a positive impact on your organization, so you shouldn’t shy away from hiring young professionals who offer a fresh perspective, are eager to learn, and help cultivate mentorship and leadership skills among existing employees. To connect your company with fresh talent, check out these job boards and career resources for interns.

1. WayUp

The standout feature of WayUp is its appealing and user-friendly layout. Internship and entry-level job seekers can create personalized profiles that include their prior work experience and highlight extra criteria like volunteer experience, hobbies, and skills that demonstrate candidate value to employers.

With over 4.5 million candidates in their database from over 6500 different schools, there is no shortage of talent waiting to be discovered on WayUp. As an employer, you can create and post jobs via the company’s marketplace, and feel confident in WayUp’s representation of underserved minorities, who currently constitute over 35 percent of the total candidate database.

2. InternJobs.com

With its simple website design, InternJobs.com offers an affordable pricing plan that starts at $15 per posting for 30 days. What’s more, InternJobs.com has over two decades of experience connecting young professionals to employers. If you’re looking for a no-nonsense and regularly updated job board to post your open internships, then this is one resource you shouldn’t overlook.

3. Internships.com

Internships.com is the world’s largest student-focused internship marketplace, boasting its network size right on the site’s landing page: over 300k entry-level jobs and 5k internships from over 140k companies located in 10k cities across the US. The site offers free job posting for employers and a wide range of career resources for candidates, from how to write cover letters and resumes to interviewing advice.

Internships.com uses a powerful algorithm that allows students to search for opportunities based on major, industry, city, and company. The site even has an “Internship Predictor” that matches candidates with internships according to their personality and character references.

4. LinkedIn

You likely already use LinkedIn as a major sourcing tool for open positions at your organization, so why not leverage the world’s largest professional network for internships as well? Few other job boards can compete with the LinkedIn’s expansive network of members, companies, and educational institutions. With over 560 million active users on the platform, the likelihood of meeting a candidate through your existing network is high, making this a no-brainer for many companies.

5. Idealist

If your organization works in the non-profit sector, you may be in need of like-minded workers who share your passion for taking action and making an impact. With 1.4 million monthly visitors to the site’s English and Spanish sites, Idealist posts opportunities across the globe from nearly 130k organizations, and posting a new listing is as simple as logging in with a Facebook or Google account.

6. College Recruiter

College Recruiter was founded way back in 1991, and in over the last three decades it built a 7400-strong network of one-, two-, and four-year colleges across the country. Posting an open internship on the site starts at $75 per listing but can be tailored to target specific schools, majors, graduation years, GPAs, languages, or diversity requirements. College Recruiter also offers custom advertising solutions at various price points and hosts regular College Recruiting Bootcamps where HR professionals, hiring managers, and college relations professionals gather to network, brainstorm, and share ideas about how to attract the next generation of talent to your organization.

The average job description is a breeding ground for meaningless corporate babble, but it’s mostly these six overused, vacuous phrases that steer candidates away rather than hold their interest.

To excel at anything requires a finely honed BS meter, and few things fail the smell test like overused corporate jargon in the workplace. Seeing the same phrases in your company job descriptions is equally groan-inducing for candidates. Writing job descriptions can feel like a time suck for recruiters who are pressured to quickly fill multiple positions, and this often results in job postings riddled with office lingo that end up discouraging qualified candidates from applying. More words do not equal more meaning, and a word salad can hinder the process, taking three times longer to fill the open position.

You want accurate and engaging job descriptions to attract high-quality talent, improve your organization’s time to hire, and drive more candidate traffic to your company. Job seekers read a lot of job descriptions—natch—and can see through hollow jargon, so before you put anything out there, take a break, read it again, get a second pair of eyes, and purge your JD’s of the following howlers. You’ll only look better in the end.

1. “The fast-paced environment”
This all-too-common phrase in the startup world tries to mask the reality that a new hire will start his or her first day weeks behind schedule with no one available to train them. A common excuse for this is a lack of “bandwidth”–another word to avoid unless you’re hiring at an internet provider–means that no one has the time or motivation to invest in training a new employee. If your organization needs to hire someone who can get up to speed quickly, outline what the candidate is expected to learn and accomplish within the first few months of the role.

2. “Excellent interpersonal/communication skills”
A recruiter should be able to tell from a quick glance at a candidate’s resume and cover letter whether or not he or she is organized and articulate. Instead, listing these “soft skills” suggest a new hire shouldn’t be abrasive or disagreeable with other employees. Instead, give practical examples of how public speaking, presentations, or collaborative projects are major functions of the role, and how candidates can succeed in these areas.

3. “Self-motivation”, “self-starting”, “proactive”
Translation: We want someone to predict the future, to know exactly what management wants, when they want it, and without them asking for it. Rather than these descriptors, use the job description to define expectations for the role, establish clear metrics for success, and goals that demand high-level job performance.

4. “Amazing, fun company culture”
Beyond the meaningless superlatives that do nothing to describe the company’s function or culture, phrases like this show that company leadership has only just discovered the concept of employer branding. Some companies will praise their office perks as a way to distract from underwhelming salaries. Employees are a company’s greatest brand advocates, so find ways to highlight the workplace culture through testimonials and other positive messages, rather than throwaway BS no one can define.

5. “Competitive salaries”
While salaries can be negotiated with respect to a candidate’s prior work experience, this term mostly means a company will ask for your expectations and cull the CVs asking more than they can pay. Financial compensation is one of the top concerns for prospective candidates, and with job aggregators like Glassdoor advertising estimated salary ranges in candidates’ search feeds, companies are much more likely to attract and convert candidates with an accurate salary range.

6. Hashtags. Stop it with the hashtags—you’re a grown-up
Job descriptions can feel dry, but it’s far better to err on the side of formality than feign cool, and using hashtags to convey a sense of playfulness. This doesn’t impress serious candidates. Even if you’ve been dying to trend #spreadsheets4lyfe, odds are candidates will take you less seriously if your job description reads like an Instagram caption. Make a strong statement with your company brand— it speaks louder than even the choicest of trendy hashtags. #tryharder

Hiring Success 18 Europe bedrocks itself on the three topics your TA team should be most thinking about: innovation, inclusion, and hiring success.

No longer powered by fax blasts into the great unknowable aether, Talent Acquisition has become an industry at the crossroads of inclusion, technology, and business strategy. A place of organizational importance unimaginable to the backroom resume-shufflers of yesteryear is now our reality. We asked for a seat at the table, we got it, and now we have to bring it.

Business leaders now have begun to view the people-function of their companies as a strategic asset, as they should. The challenge then becomes to keep abreast of the ever-shortening cycles of innovation, and that’s what Hiring Success 18 Europe, September 19th-20th in Berlin, is all about. Two days of non-stop workshops, demos, interactive presentations, and collaboration for practitioners to engage with the latest in best-practice for tech, diversity, and on-the-ground recruiting.

We’ve broken it down into three most challenging topics facing TA today, check out our full agenda here!

Innovation: big data, bots, blockchain, and AI.

In our exploding age of hyper-data, learn how recruitment advertising is poised to take over traditional job posting in “The Future of Job Advertising.” Watch chatbots battle it out live to answer your questions and prove their language-processing chops in “Battle of the Bots.” Will blockchain create a new gig economy, and how can this crypto-tech be the answer for data security compliance? Find out in “Blockchain in Recruiting.” Talk AI, or demo rather, with interactive presentations that illustrate just how far we’ve already come in “The March of Artificial Intelligence.”

Also: augmented reality, assessment, and analytics!

Inclusion: leverage social media, refugee candidates, and remote work.

Sure, you have candidates, but how do you turn this random group into a community? Find out how in “The Art of Community Building.” Tap into marginalized talent markets with “Have Your Hired a Refugee.?” If you are short on candidates, maybe your bias is blinding you: in “Ageism at Work” recruiters learn to root out irrelevant judgments so they can hire the best people. Go remote without losing engagement with these tips in “Inspire Your Remote Workforce.”

Also: why unlikely applicants make great hires and gender parity!

Hiring Success: leadership strategy, employer brand, and zainy campaigns.

Get on the same page as leadership in “Aligning the Board with Your TA strategy” and anything is possible. Your company is great to work at, so make sure the candidate knows it too in, “How to Pitch Your Company.” Or get inspired by the innovative recruiting campaigns in “Creative Recruiting Combinations,” spoiler – someone uses Tinder.

Also: hyper-growth, scaling through IPO, recruiter brand, and internal mobility!

Are you ready for the future of recruiting? Get to know some of our featured speakers here!