The recent years have noticed increasing market demands for App Developers compared to the other employments. With these competing demands and high expectations of employees for compensation and benefits, the employers find it challenging to hire promising app developers.

Moreover, since the lockdown due to the corona pandemic, people’s lives have changed to a greater extent. Not only the ordinary citizens, but the way of working in the corporate offices have changed to reduce the risk of contamination. It took a few moments for the employers and employees to hide behind the mask. More or less, the pandemic outbreak did affect the functions of the recruitment process. But ultimately, it is a human tendency to find an effective way out of hurdles.

With a more outstanding market of app developers and the rising effect of COVID, employers should be powered with the new strategies to hire the right talent satisfying the needs of the company. Compared to the previously handled recruitment processes, many of the stages have experienced ups and downs as per their usability, which the image highlights. The effect of this in recruitment was intense, giving recruiters challenges to conduct interviews on zoom and onboarding and working directly from home.

From surveys, it is found that before coronavirus, 44% of companies never entertained the thought of remote working or work from home, but now forcefully they have to entertain it. (source)

Image(source)

To overcome this, even tech recruiters are advised to seek various resources and tips to attract and connect with their talents. In this article, we have included some strategies useful during the pandemic.

What is the impact of the Corona Pandemic on the recruitment of App Developers?

Since the lockdown, the companies have experienced a downfall in the economy, which includes all the basic functions like recruiting, payroll, attendance and leave monitoring, etc. Here are the major challenging employers went through while hiring app developers.

  1. More firing, less hiring

Due to the downfall, employers find it hard to keep up with the actual payroll and accounting even when the business is shut, which resulted in laying off many employees. Whereas on the other hand, the amount of hired app developers kept reducing. 

But then some companies have turned this challenge into an opportunity because even if the hiring was low all over, there are many brilliant candidates in the employment search.

  1. Difficulties in filling vacant positions

Even if, during the lockdown, your company’s activities and services were active and you haven’t stopped the hiring process at all, you might have felt difficulty in filling up the vacant positions. According to reports, in February 2020, a downfall of 47% in the recruitment applications was noted across many industries. (source)

Though you allow working from home, the candidates may not want to take even a single percent of the risk and don’t fill out the applications. On the contrary, the already employed workers may leave temporarily or permanently just because of the pandemic effect.

  1. Recruitment digitization 

Due to the restrictions on running a company physically in the lockdown, it was challenging to continue the recruitment processes even while at home. Manually checking the qualifications of app developers and calling them individually was a hassle. 

One solution to this could be the digital transformation of the processes to a completely seamless integrated and automated recruitment software. Even while working remotely, the cloud-based nature of the software helps you access the major details like collecting data from the website page, job boards, LinkedIn, etc. 

  1. Cut Out the hiring costs

The coronavirus pandemic outbreak created a decreasing economic condition worldwide. During such situations, it is already hard to continue the customer services and payout the employees like before. And recruiting app developers may consume much of the economy of a company, which can be frozen by cutting down the costs. But then you might be thinking how. Investing in recruitment digitization can be a solution to this. Not only during the pandemic but for a longer time, such solutions help save a good amount of cash as compared to the manual processes.

All the needs of printing papers, managing resumes, assessment tests can now become paperless with digitization, which is totally cashless.

What are the strategies to boost the hiring of app developers during the corona pandemic?

Definitely, many companies, regardless of the decrease in productivity, experienced it challenging to pay complaints. While for others laying off the unproductive employees and finding the right talents was hard to gulp. Under such conditions, having a step-by-step guide/ checklist of strategies may help the recruiters in the process. Be it app developers or other employment types, recruitment run with proper planning can turn out to be much use even in the pandemic.

Strategies you can apply during such time are listed below.

  1. Monitor layoffs in the technical department

The changing and empowering labor market makes it challenging for the tech-savvy recruiters to pick up the best talents beneficial for their company. Every recruiter needs to be well-versed with the ups and downs of the market. With every fluctuation in the market demands, the methods and analysis used by the human resource should be updated.

The companies have the option to show their hiring surge in the times of COVID-19 on the websites like Glassdoor, with the proper listing of the entire employment vacancies. This assists the companies in getting in touch with the talents of eligible technical aspects.

The number of tech layoffs of a company should not be neglected. Even in the pandemic, the companies were forced to lay off workers with low performance to balance their economic condition. According to reports, around 10.8 million jobs were wiped out during the time of the coronavirus pandemic. (source)

Analyzing the turnover data accurately can source out the problems and help find a better solution to reduce the rate of it. Many companies combine such data and design a list, which can turn out to be easy to scroll down the resumes quickly and onboard the talents.

  1. Highlight your work from home culture

A highlighting profile of the company in the market, be it social media, can go a long way in attracting the talents anytime the company is on a hiring surge. Any company with a growing culture and technical advancement assurance which is beneficial for employee growth attract well-qualified candidates. Hence showing your work culture and atmosphere can be a boon for recruitment in the times of corona pandemic. 

Before calling for the interviews, start by mentioning on the job board and public profiles why working with your company is advantageous to the workforce. List down such points as well. It may include your technical aspects, cultural habits, and work from home culture and requirements. This pandemic has affected the working environment and habits of the employees, and showcasing how you assist them during work from home can be effective in engaging with them.

For the beginning, develop a team that may look after improvising the work from home functions. Such a committee helps in resolving the concerns of employees to avoid the connection drop from a remote place. 

As we discussed, this is the perfect time for you to update your profile on LinkedIn and other professional media to highlight your deeds and establishments to support your staff. This also helps in maintaining and building up the company brand in the market. Working from home can also include your wellness programs, specially built to encourage your employees when all the communication and interaction is attempted virtually. Make your hiring process look like you actually care about your employees and motivate them regularly with vivid strategies.

If you have an enthusiastic team of app developers, encourage them to go for virtual contests and hackathons to apply and increase their knowledge. As a whole team, the company can participate in volunteering activities to help the pandemic affected lives. Working together as an entire team, even for community purposes, can have a positive effect on the candidates searching for jobs.

Well-experienced with working from home can be more fruitful to the companies hiring such employees during pandemics. Some solution in the market offers an overview of such people and helps build a recruiting process to attract candidates’ similar capability. It will help to analyze the best candidates who cannot work in the distractions of coding at home or the ones who cover the target.

Work from home actually helps you highlight the benefits an employee can receive while working with you, just as shown in the image.

image(source

  1. Use advanced technologies for recruitment.

Recruitment isn’t an easy and one time task to perform. Every day calls, management of scheduled screening rounds, analysis of the candidate pool, searching the social media options like LinkedIn, and the list goes on. These tasks handled by HR may give chills to normal people. Not all organizations are well-established with high revenue that can invest in advanced technologies that alleviate the routine burden of HR. Though with the rise of hurdles like COVID, there came out many options in the market that can be used by all business scales.

Once setting up the company brand, monitoring the tech layoffs, and showcasing your remote work culture is accomplished, you can approach screening the candidates. And blending the interviews with a touch of technologies is the most used technique for recruitment. Because surveys say that about 94% of the hiring professionals have experienced a positive impact on recruitment software. (source)

With technological advancements, recruiters and candidates can avoid the physical and virtual screenings during the initial rounds and arrange the option of remote video recording for the set questions according to the candidate’s convenience.

The AI-enabled chatbots can be used during recruitment to assist candidates with their queries with minimum human intervention and time given. This offers the real-time behavioral analysis of the interactions, which can be useful during the process to identify the personality. If the attitude is not in line with the company, such candidates may not go a long way. In need of finding remote working capability, such solutions reduce human work up to a significant extent. With instant replies from the chatbot functionality, candidates can save time and build an enhanced communication with the company.

For the primary stages, the recruiters can include various free or discounted assessment services for testing the logical ability and basic understanding. Online tests can be designed and arranged at schedules for such rounds. Such online tests hand over instant results, thus saving a considerable amount of time.

For further stages like the technological assessments, the company can arrange live interviews in the form of virtual meetings through the mediums like Google Meet, Hangouts, Skype, and Zoom. Though not every candidate likes to give virtual interviews due to self-doubt, ultimately affecting the results.

  1. Show empathy for the hard-working employees.

The situation of COVID-19 was harrowing for the workers due to the unwanted layoffs and shattered communication with the colleagues. This affected their mental health as many of the respondents have reported degrading morale in work even while working from home. With social distancing measures, employees are suggested to work from home. The effect of being locked in the home and working as usual from home gives rise to uncertainty, anxiety, depression, and other disorders to tackle with.

It becomes the duty of employers to keep their employees stay connected with each other, help lift up morale, and support them mentally under such conditions. One idea that can be implemented is organizing wellness activities for the teams that can reduce their anxiety of staying locked behind the doors. Such activities may include volunteering, games, imparting motivation, virtual dinner meets, campfire, etc. 

If not for the work from home in the pandemic, such wellness programs can be implemented on other days also. According to reports, about 14.7% of the employees suffer mental health issues at the workplace. (source

Moreover, you can highlight this even on social platforms and job boards to show how much you actually care about your employees, which will eventually target the right block of candidates you wish to hire. 

Summing it up

The recruitment process for app developers seems to be overwhelming when done manually. Checking the qualification, running assessment, and scheduling interviews are what every HR goes through every day. This work was more challenging during the pandemic outbreak. But with proper planning and the right solution at hand, any situation can be tackled. 

With changing workplace environments due to coronavirus, the strategies to plan and execute processes also need to be updated to avoid possible interruptions. Recruitment is one such function. Many companies are struggling to fill out the vacant positions, but meanwhile, with proper strategies in hand, you can stand out steadily without struggling. 

In a business, challenges come and go, but learning to fight those is something a leader should do. Along with fighting such challenges, it should be an employer’s prime duty to look after their employees’ concerns during work from home and support them with wellness programs because no one can code for a significant time without their colleagues beside them in an interactive working environment.

Author bio:

Divyang Metaliya is a Business Consultant working with factoHR. Apart from managing and improving business processes, his hobby is to spread his vast area of knowledge to the people out there. He loves to create content that is innovative and engaging for the readers.



Sudeep Bhatnagar
Co-founder & Director of Business
Sudeep Bhatnagar

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