“Cloud recruitment” becomes trending amid COVID-19

By Ye Xiaonan, Zhu Runhua, People’s Daily Overseas Edition

College graduates and job seekers were joining job fairs, sending resumes and taking examinations and interviews at this time of the previous years. However, job fairs are moving to the “cloud” this year due to epidemic prevention and control.

Li Xiang is a fresh graduate from a university in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei province, who started seeking jobs online since the end of February.

His instructor told him in late February that an online mutual selection job fair was scheduled on March 6, in which students can browse recruitment information and submit resumes after registration. Li immediately signed up for the fair and to his surprise, he found that the system would automatically recommend companies to him after he selected his major and preferred industries.

On March 9, Li had his seventh online interview at home. In about an hour, he learned the general situation of the company and job duties from the interviewer, shared his career plans, showcased his expertise, and inquired about the salary.

“Compared with traditional job seeking, online recruitment is simpler, because I feel more relaxed when having online interviews . I didn’t run into a lot of troubles during the whole process,” Li told People’s Daily.

Li received an offer from the company three days later, and came to the last step of the “cloud recruitment” – online signing. They finished preliminary procedure after Li clicked “agree” on the screen, which marked a successful completion of Li’s online job seeking.

Li’s story was just an epitome of Chinese colleges’ efforts to help students graduating in 2020 secure jobs .

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and related departments established a national online recruitment platform in March. Earlier this spring semester, Peking University officially launched a system for online recruitment sessions and mutual selection. As of April 23, 7 online mutual selection sessions had been held, with each attracting an average of nearly 200 enterprises. Besides, the university had also hosted 55 online recruitment sessions.

Enterprises are also trying everything to make online recruitment more capable. Interviewers are livestreaming the recruitment, introducing enterprises’ working environment, job responsibilities, salaries and career prospects through slides and promotional videos. Some are even resorting to artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality technologies. In AI interviews, human interviewers are replaced by AI robots which are able to assess and analyze the tones, wording and facial expressions of the interviewees.

“Online recruitment is offering more options to job seekers,” said Liu Wenbin, deputy director of Wuhan University’s career center. “During the peak time in previous years, there were always six to seven enterprises coming to our university on the same day, so the students were not able to attend all. Now it’s not a problem when job fairs are moving online,” he added.

Liu believes that online interviews will become more regular. When the outbreak of the COVID-19 has forced enterprises to move recruitment online, both enterprises and job seekers have to adapt to the new trend and get prepared, he said.

An employee of an enterprise located in Haigang district, Qinhuangdao, north China’s Hebei province releases job recruitment information on an online platform on April 2. Photo by Cao Jianxiong/People’s Daily Online