Welcome to StaffingREEL, the podcast for everything staffing. We look forward to sharing highly relevant content from across the staffing ecosystem. Let's welcome our guest, John Bemis, President of Benchmark IT. John speaks to us about virtual hiring and onboarding, a topic that the entire staffing industry has had to take into consideration in these unusual times.

 

Transcript:

00:00:00 - 00:05:03

Welcome to StaffingREEL, the podcast for everything staffing. I'm your host Larry Hemley from S.J.Hemley Marketing. We have all been going through one of the most bizarre times in history. But there's a lot that we can be thankful for. We are all hopefully surrounded by our families and while we're separated from each other, we're all still working together. Today we're going to talk about how to hire and onboard virtually. Many of our staffing clients have been addressing a variety of issues to truly be a partner to their clients. With everything that we're all experiencing, this is an area that the entire staffing industry has had to take a long look at in order to keep our businesses moving forward. I'm joined today by John Bemis, President of Benchmark IT and a veteran of the staffing industry. John How are you doing today? Doing Great Larry, TGIF. Right back at ya. Well listen before we get into the topic and all that I really wanted to just give you a chance to share a little bit with our listeners your background. Thanks really appreciate the opportunity to be with you today. A little bit myself and my company. I've been recruiting technical recruiting for about twenty five years. All here in northern New York suburbs we're based in Stamford Connecticut. And I started out my career with Robert Half worked there for five years. Worked for another company called the computer merchant out of Boston for five years here in my area and then Together with some former Robert Half people we started benchmark searching Benchmark IT back in 2007. And I've always been very focused on IT recruiting benchmark is high touch company. We pride ourselves in always meeting our candidates before we ever send them to a client. We've historically because we're local met everybody in person and augmented with video conferencing video skype when we needed to when we couldn't meet someone in person but of course all in person things changing which is why we're we're talking today so. absolutely. yeah. So you've gotten a little bit more exposure to the the video world over your time but when we talk about clients you know I think most of the staffing industry has been trying to eliminate phone screens from the entire interview process. And what's funny is that as we talk about that, now we're dealing with video interviews. How many of your clients are used to doing video interviews? I would say it's still novel for most of them. The normal mode is to do a phone interview and then later on in person or a series of in persons so A few clients that hire especially contractors who might need to who can't come in in person, Maybe because they were gonna, They're located remotely better going to move to the client site for the job. They'll interview via skype. But that's about the only time clients have been willing to do a video interview in place of an in person Up until now when the in persons are virtually impossible. well and I think that you know you said well virtually impossible. I think that some people are figuring out some novel ways to do things but as a whole I mean we're definitely moving towards having to hire someone through a video interview and a lot of the clients haven't ever done this before. They were so set in the way they were doing things. Have you been hearing any challenges that they're having with doing the video interviews and how are they resolving some of those challenges? Well I think there's one challenge in that they're so used to doing a telephone interview th...