“Cloud recruitment” becomes trending amid COVID-19

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.