A New Match for Recruiters: Contact Tracing
By Jane Buescher
Across the U.S. organizations are on the search for people with the following skills and attributes:
Comfortable cold-calling strangers
Strong communication skills
Firm and persuasive enough to get the information needed
Empathetic
Comfortable using apps, databases, and technology to augment tasks
Able to get up to speed quickly on a specific industry or lingo
Trusted with personal information
Persistent
Bilingual in English and Spanish
Having interviewed, hired, and trained recruiters for the past decade, this sounds just like a job description I might have posted! Seems like recruiters are needed, right? Well actually, these are from job descriptions for Contact Tracers. Contact Tracers, aka Disease Detectives (yes the parallels to recruiters or “talent detectives” are abundant), are being deployed across the nation to help stem the spread of Covid-19.
The job of a contact tracer during the Covid-19 pandemic- a method that has been used to contain the spread of infectious diseases for decades- is to:
a) make contact with those infected with Covid-19
b) gather information from them to help identify and contact all individuals who had contact with the infected person
c) encourage those who had contact with the infected person to quarantine and get tested, thus limiting further spread of the virus.
Less than a month ago, it was estimated that ~36,000 contact tracers were employed in the U.S. Experts estimate that as many as 300,000 will be needed to fight Covid-19. Many states are training and redeploying government employees, volunteers, and students to take on this work, but to scale up quickly, hiring enough workers will require creative thinking about who is qualified to do this work.
Despite being around in the world of public health for decades, “contact tracing” has only become a known term for most of us as part of this pandemic. The scale needed for current tracing efforts is huge – many public health departments lacking the time and resources to hire and train thousands of workers at once have turned to third parties for help. The outsourcing or privatization of this work has come with its fair share of criticism, but in my opinion, it again is not dissimilar to the way companies turn to recruiters to outsource hiring. Given how crucial the contact tracing infrastructure is to our cities and states, the issue shouldn’t be who is doing the hiring and how are they profiting from it, but instead it should whether our health departments are hiring the right people for this important role. These third parties can also make concerted efforts to make sure minorities are represented on contact tracing teams to ensure cities can connect with and earn the trust of all members of their communities.
Why are recruiters well-suited for contact tracing? Successful recruiting combines a certain set of skills with very good timing. Apart from the VERY similar job description, the timing is just right. The pandemic has laid waste to our economy and continues to claim the health and lives of thousands of people daily. In most cases, companies are doing more layoffs than hiring these days, leaving recruiters unemployed and under-employed. Recruiters can be redeployed to this crucial effort and, as the virus loses steam, the economy rebounds, and companies begin to hire and utilize recruiters more frequently, the need for contact tracing should begin to diminish. In addition, recruiters already have the right experience and soft skills for the job, and going through training to understand the nuances, lingo, and needs of a specific industry is something recruiters do whenever they begin recruiting for a new company or position.
So what’s next? I am not personally hiring recruiters or contact tracers…but having recently run a recruiting company I couldn’t ignore the feeling that recruiters are well-equipped to become the team of contact tracers we need across the nation. I care about the role of contact tracing because I believe this is a key piece of the pandemic puzzle that we need to solve to safely open up our society. As a mother to two young children who has more questions than answers when it comes to returning to schools and activities, and as a transplant living in the Bay Area with family spread across the nation who I long to visit, effective contact tracing is a key initiative that needs to succeed before restoring parts of pre-pandemic life. On the recruiting side of the equation, having been in the industry for 10 years I see my Linkedin feed filling up each day with recruiters looking for work. And the truth is in the majority of cases, the economy and country would be better served right now with them in contact tracing roles rather than recruiting.
There are some great people reviewing contact tracer applications, creating training programs, and determining how to assist states in fighting Covid-19. I encourage you to check out the links below and apply if you can!
CONTRACE - a social enterprise that is helping health departments across the U.S. recruit contact tracers. Application link here.
Santa Clara - the county is currently asking for applications for volunteers. Application link (survey midway down the page) here.
National Academy for State Health Policy - has created an interactive map detailing how each state is tackling its contact tracing initiatives.
CDC Foundation - database of open jobs (can input “contact tracer” etc to search openings nationwide).
If you’re so inclined, send me a message if you do apply or become a contact tracer- I would love to hear if this begins to happen!
Contact Jane via email here.