No turning back: More companies switch to hybrid hiring

At a time when workplaces are going hybrid, an increasing number of companies are making candidate recruitment hybrid too.

An exclusive study by HirePro, a tech-enabled hiring platform, shows that a large number of firms, across sectors such as as IT/ITes, BFSI, services, FMCG and retail, ecommerce, telecom, manufacturing, healthcare and education, are adopting e-recruiting process as it saves cost, reduces time taken, as well as opens up a much wider talent pool.

The findings of the study, which reached out to about 300 HR managers and talent acquisition leaders at large, medium and small companies across 12 industry sectors, shows that majority of the companies that adopted remote hiring during the pandemic are now shifting towards a combination of digital and physical hiring across hierarchy levels.


For hiring at junior, middle and senior levels, 85-90% of the process continues to be partially-to mostly-to full remote. Only in campus hiring, one-fourth of the organisations continue to have limited-to-no remote processes.

"There is an increasing adoption and movement towards remote recruitment in companies across industry sectors," said Anshuman Das, CEO of HirePro Consulting. "Phygital - a combination of physical and digital - hiring, which has seen a tectonic shift, is expected to make the recruitment process more efficient, cost-saving, time-saving and open up access to a much wider pool of talent."

Pandemic Effect
The study shows that organisations that have adopted some form of remote methods of hiring do not foresee going back to the old ways of recruitment. About 60-70% organisations said that recruitment will continue to be partially-to mostly-to full remote. In campus hiring as well as senior level hiring, 30-40% of the companies anticipate limited to no-remote recruitment. In an interaction with ET, Vishesh C Chandiok, CEO, Grant Thornton Bharat, said the company has adopted a combination of remote and personal/physical interactions to interview candidates across levels. "We are doing the majority of our non-NCR-based interactions with candidates online and it includes senior partner level hires too," he said.

According to the HirePro study, before the pandemic, 70-80% of the hiring at companies was limited to no-remote. Only 10% of it was mostly-to-full-remote before Covid-19 struck. With the onset of the pandemic, recruitment process moved online with 80-90% of the organisations conducting their hiring mostly to full remote. However, the major concerns in remote recruitment include malpractices in assessment (38%), lack of human connect (30%), infrastructure challenges at candidate's end (17%) and lack of employer branding (14%).