Covid-19 has all but rendered conventional education and concrete campuses redundant. The consequences of this disruption are felt by jobseekers and employers alike. On the one hand, first-time jobseekers have been deprived of effective learning and skilling. And, on the other, employers are at a loss as to the evaluation of the skills the candidates possess. As offer shopping by candidates has become the new norm, many employers are cynical of hiring freshers given the lack of academic rigor and the learning loss during the graduating year. Add to this the inadequacies of remote hiring, training, and performance management, and the skepticism seems justified.

Here are the top 5 concerns the employers have with hiring freshers:

• Lack of professionalism, competence, and skill validation among freshers due to a lack of academic rigor during the last year

  Freshers lack work experience in a business setting because they enter their workplaces directly from academic institutions. There are various reasons why freshers cannot offer up to the mark performance at their jobs, ranging from a lack of understanding about workplace etiquettes and a lack of exposure to a collaborative setting to an inability to fulfill deadlines.

• The diverse skill-based demands of a job role cannot be measured in a few online interviews

  Certain people skills cannot be examined in a few rounds of online interviews. It is easier to check for technical skills using various assessment mechanisms. However, it is much harder to gauge a candidate's interpersonal skills, how they respond in challenging situations, conduct themselves around other people, and many such things.

• Offer rejections by candidates are at an all-time high. Compensation and Benefits become a predominant deciding factor

  Offer rejection is at an all-time high as candidates accept one job offer and then use it to negotiate for another. After accepting an offer, there are occasions when candidates do not even show up on the day of joining, causing firms to have a lot of personnel planning challenges, and the cycle of seeking another candidate continues. It negates the recruitment goal because the entire process fails, and hiring someone who subsequently refuses the offer was a waste of time, money, and resources.

• Challenge of efficient onboarding of thousands of individuals remotely

  Online recruiting is merely one step in the employment process. Remote onboarding may also be required in the current scenario when offices are not completely functional and a majority of employees are still working from home. New hires typically need to meet their colleagues in person in order to properly integrate them into the organization and team. However, due to the pandemic and the takeover of the home office, this has recently proven difficult, necessitating the development of interim solutions. This sometimes leads to teams not bonding with the new hires and companies not being able to integrate them into the company culture which is critical to performance and continuity of company values.

• Deferred onboarding/hiring of fresher’s due to uncertainty in the business environmen

  Companies have started to stagger the hiring of new employees throughout the year in order to be more responsive to the changing business environment. Because of the uncertainties in the market environment at the start of the previous fiscal year, some organizations postponed the joining dates of campus hires and some even rescinded the offers leaving thousands of freshers stranded.

  Thus it’s reasonable to say that 2020 was a one-of-a-kind year and that 2021 will be different from past years. Many companies are now making full-proof arrangements to combat these obstacles, thereby creating more robust HR practices. The pandemic has undoubtedly left an imprint that will be carried forward in the coming years, and that will be the new normal that everyone will have to accept eventually.