The Digitalization of Personnel Recruiting in Romania During the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The existing literature argued that online recruitment is the future, assessing that online interviews will be appreciated by both recruiters and candidates. The central aim of the paper is to analyze the changes made possible by the COVID-19 pandemic in the recruitment process. The research method used in this article was the individual interviews made on a sample of six former candidates for a job who made an online interview in the last year and four recruiters from Human Resources companies. Three research hypotheses were tested in the research project and only two were confirmed by the data. The results showed that candidates who apply for certain positions prefer that the recruitment interviews be conducted via the Internet because they consider that as an easily accessible means. On the other hand, the results stressed the fact that recruiters declared that they prefer to make face-to-face interviews, the argument for this option being that offline interviews allowed them to create a connection with the candidates and enabled them to analyze the non-verbal behaviors of the candidates. As regards the future of recruiting this is uncertain now and only the passing of time could tell us if the digitalization will succeed or not.