Onboarding in a pandemic

One of the many challenges to emerge from the series of pandemic lockdowns has been what to do with recruitment. How do you onboard your latest cohort of trainees when no one is allowed into the office and some form of remote working looks set to be a permanent feature of corporate life?

And once they are on board, there is the ongoing challenge of training, not only so that they are able to pass their professional examinations, but also learn the softer skills – communication, leadership and teamwork.

Every year, thousands of graduates and school leavers joining the accountancy profession as trainees, and 2020 was no different. For many of these new trainees, this will be their first real experience of working life. They may have had internships, work experience and the opportunity to shadow senior business people, but this time it is for real. Unfortunately, for many of them, this reality will in fact be virtual.

It is a challenge that the big accountancy firms in particular are facing head on, with thousands of graduates and school leavers yet to meet their managers, partners and peers in the flesh.

As Hywel Ball, EY’s UK chair, says: ‘I’m incredibly proud that we have continued our focus on recruiting young talent at a time when many students are facing a challenging jobs market. We hired 1,000 graduates and apprentices last summer and honoured all the conditional offers we made to students ahead of A-level results, despite the Covid-19 pandemic. We felt it was the right thing to do.

‘Onboarding a large cohort in a virtual world is not without its challenges, but we’ve worked hard to ensure that our new recruits receive more one-to-one virtual time with their line managers, alongside online learning and opportunities to get to know each other and EY through networking sessions and peer support groups.

‘Our priority has been to ensure that students are supported to work in a virtual world, while still receiving the experiences and skills they need.’

Training the trainers

Part of the challenge is to train the trainers. Ball admits that on-the-job learning, which would naturally have taken place in an office environment, can be more difficult in a virtual world, as it takes conscious thought.

‘We’ve been working with our teams to ensure they are thinking about the behaviours they need to adopt,’ he says. ‘This can be as simple as making sure students are updated and involved in discussions that would perhaps normally have taken place ad hoc around the water cooler, but which now need to happen on virtual calls. Or by helping them build a network of internal contacts to ask for help, advice or expertise.’

It is a similar story at PwC, one of the largest private sector recruiters in the UK. Kevin Ellis, the firm’s senior partner, says: ‘Despite the disruption caused by the pandemic we have onboarded more than 3,000 graduates, school leavers and experienced hires during the crisis as we continue to invest for the future.’

Prior to the first UK lockdown in 2020, PwC took on 1,348 graduates and school leavers, plus 281 ‘Flying Start’ students who combine training at the firm with studying for a university degree.

As soon as it became clear that the firm was not going to be able to welcome them in person, PwC set about creating an entirely virtual onboarding process. This involved redesigning induction events and processes to become completely digital. The firm even employed a fleet of couriers to deliver laptops to individual homes so the new recruits could be welcomed via a livestream.

Bite-sized training

Phil Verity, senior partner at Mazars, says his firm has overhauled its training in light of the pandemic and lockdowns. ‘We are looking more at bite-sized training as it will take the pressure off our seniors who are coaching as well as dealing with their own workload,’ he says. ‘We are also working with our managers on how to manage remotely, creating “families” that connect on a weekly basis,’ he says.

And it was not just the biggest firms that faced having to deal with the onboarding process in a virtual way. During the pandemic, even during lockdown, boutique accountancy firm flinder, co-founded by Alastair Barlow FCCA, managed to grow its staff roster by nine, from 19 at the start of 2020 to 28 by the end of the year, including six who were taken on during the first lockdown.

‘We are now hiring for another three people,’ Barlow says, ‘but it is just harder when you interview someone on Zoom. The biggest risk to not meeting our objectives is not getting the right people on board.’