Moncton Company Doubles Its Team As Online Hiring Grows During Pandemic
MONCTON – Sean Fahey and his team at VidCruiter have been busy this past year helping organizations staff up. That included the hiring of contact tracers in Baltimore, and 1,400 traveling nurses in just 10 days to help New York City fight Covid-19.
“It was a record for the fastest people hired using our product,” Fahey, the company’s founding CEO, said.
VidCruiter is a video recruiting software company whose various products help organizations hire large numbers of people in a easy and customizable way. The products can also be used in virtual job fair settings.
But the pandemic has made remote hiring a necessity for many, and that means “a huge change to our business,” said Fahey, adding that more businesses in Atlantic Canada are also using its products.
“One of the things that we saw was that the pandemic accelerated the use of technology so we’re already getting some use of our products, but it just accelerated the use around the world,” he said.
VidCruiter itself had to hire a lot of people to meet demand.
“In Canada, we went from 19 employees last December (2019) to now 39 employees, and our overseas team also basically doubled as well. So we basically doubled our team in the last 12 months,” he said.
Fahey says more people are now looking for jobs, so organizations need screening tools.
“We see a lot of people that may have lost their job trying to jump into a different industry and so our tools help screen people when there’s a surge of candidates,” he said.
And when the economy rebounds and stabilizes, many companies will need to hire again.
“Then there’s going to be…not enough candidates, so you want to be hiring as fast as possible because people are going to take the first job they can get back when they want to go back to work,” he added. “That’s not specific to Atlantic Canada, that’s globally we’re seeing these trends are going to happen.”
VidCruiter now has 75 staff members globally, and Fahey expects that number to surpass 100 by the end of this year, with the Canadian team expected to grow to 50-to-60 people.
In Canada, VidCruiter’s employees are mostly located in New Brunswick, where its head office is, while some are in Ontario, B.C., Quebec, and Nova Scotia. Its international team is mostly based in the Philippines.
“We are lucky to be one of the businesses that was positively able to help during these times for hiring,” he said. “So we were lucky to be able to stay open and hire more people and, continue to grow our business.”
As vaccinations begin around the world, Fahey believes trends that surged during the pandemic, including remote and virtual arrangements, will remain even after things return to normal.
“Our prediction and what we’re seeing is that at least 30 percent of what is in place now will stay, basically forever,” Fahey said.
While headquartered in Moncton, VidCruiter is an exporter of its services, with up to 70 percent of its market being the U.S., followed by Europe, the U.K. and Canada with 10 percent each. Fahey expects the high growth experienced last year to continue for another year due to the effect of the pandemic. He’s expecting sustained growth over the long term as video use has become more common.
“It’s a lot more normal for people to do video than it was before this happened. So we see a lot more adoption,” he said. “And now people are looking for tools that are more geared towards recruiting like ours, which has a whole bunch of features specifically to recruit people.”
“I do think this next year is going to still have quite a huge shift. And then after that, it probably [shifts] back to more normal growth, which is still good but it would just not be as fast,” Fahey added.
VidCruiter’s name has also risen among global HR companies, with Fahey recently joining the HR council for the business magazine Forbes. The council is a fee-based, invitation-only group for senior HR executives and leaders, according to Forbes.
Earlier this month, the company released a global hiring predictions report. In it, VidCruiter noted five hiring predictions for the next year:
- Remote work and video interviewing are set to stay, with 74 percent of companies planning to shift some of their employees to remote work permanently. Prior to 2020, only 37 percent had remote work policies in place. Meanwhile, 77 percent of remote workers say they’re more productive at home, and 80 percent say they would turn down an offer that didn’t have a flexible work arrangement.
- There’s a greater emphasis on diversity and inclusion, as companies with higher racial and ethnic diversity outperform their less diverse peers by 35 percent, and gender-diverse companies outperform by 15 percent. Employees are also more attracted to such companies, with 67 percent of job searchers looking for work with diverse companies.
- Virtual career fairs will be more common, with most (83 percent) in-person hiring events canceled, postponed and/or made virtual, and 92 percent of event professionals planning to invest in virtual events.
- The speed of recruitment will be more important than ever. It takes companies an average of 42 days to fill vacant positions, while top talent is off the market in as little as 10 days, and
- Crafting a pleasant candidate experience is important.
Fahey suggests businesses be ready for the rise and fall of labour supply. While there might be a surge in job searchers as the economy rebounds, businesses need to be ready for the shortage of job applicants later.
“If you have the resources, hire sooner for things that you’re planning later,” he said.