6 Things You Must Know Before Hiring Candidates For Remote Work
As thousands of companies embrace remote work throughout the world, there's no doubt that recruiting will also be the same. Remote work is here to stay. Remote workers are not only potentially saving money but also protecting the environment while working from home. You'll have the pleasure of sourcing and hiring someone from a completely different city or geographical area with the help of an Applicant Tracking System and maintain stable communication and relationships with the use of a recruitment CRM. This process can very well happen online.
More than ever, it's needed now because of social distancing. As a result, recruiters will need to hire entirely remotely with a digitally enabled, technically-backed process. Here, in this article, we've mentioned six tips recruiters must follow before hiring a candidate for remote work.
6 Tips For Recruiters Before Hiring For Remote Work
As the unprecedented pandemic makes its way through the globe, remote recruiting is taking its position up high in the staffing sector. Let's look at 6 such things recruiters must know.
1. Re-evaluate Your Entire Hiring Process
It goes without saying that the entire transition will take time but to make the process a bit smoother, recruiters can reevaluate their interview and recruiting process to make sure they are saving up on time and providing one of the best candidate experiences. Besides looking into the relationship you and your hiring manager/client share, remember to reduce your interview time. Leverage the use of technology to prioritise high-value tasks and find a system that provides the same amount of opportunities to all candidates.
2. Use Proper Technological Tools
Using proper technological tools is necessary when it comes to remote recruiting. Since you're hiring for remote work, you need to ensure all your devices are right in place to provide top-notch candidate experience. Think about it this way. Suppose your prospective candidate has joined the interview call and you're unable to login because of last-minute connectivity issues or your interview tool has suddenly started malfunctioning. How would that look? Indeed not good, right? This is why the usage of proper technological tools is crucial. Ensure you do the following:
- Make sure you're testing your audio properly
- Give your interview assessment tool a proper check
- If your candidate is facing interview issues, give them some grace time
- You need to be aware of any form of bias. There are statistics to prove that if there's only one woman in your candidate pool, the chances are high that she won't be hired. You need to understand that interviewing someone via video call and in-person interviews are very much different. We are all subject to bias in some form or the other.
As a professional recruiter, make sure all these steps are happening at the recruiter level because it will very much affect your recruiter brand and other core metrics. Usage of advanced recruiting tools, for example— Applicant Tracking Systems can be extremely helpful when it comes to sourcing the right candidates for open job roles and resume parsing tools to parse resumes.
3. Pay For The Work Assignment
When you're hiring remotely, a work assignment is one of the things that you might consider asking the candidates to see how well they perform when put under pressure. This might also be one of the steps you take to prevent unconscious bias. This is one such step that you can introduce towards the end of your recruiting process and make sure you pay for the assignment as well. Specific candidates might feel that they're being burdened when the employer won't be hiring them at the end of the day. There are instances where startups and other established companies ask assignments from candidates but end up ghosting them after they submit their work. This not just is an example of a negative candidate experience but also results in the spread of negative word-of-mouth.
4. Prioritise Your Relationship With Your Hiring Manager
The relationship that you share with your hiring manager might indeed be flawed in many ways. There might be times when your hiring manager is not respecting the work you're doing, speaking different languages, sometimes the recruiter might think, "why can't we raise the salary for this open role?" and so on. So, most notably, what you and your hiring manager should aim towards is collaborative hiring. This means you involve two sets of people— one the hiring manager and the second a pre-existing team. Of course, the candidate would be joining that specific team, so why not give these team members a chance to weigh in as well? It would help if you decided upon these main criteria while hopping on a meeting with your hiring manager.
- The salary range
- Must-have qualifications
- Nice-to-have qualifications
- Remote work requirements
- Traits of the previous employer or effective traits they would like to see in this candidate
- Team culture
- Any upcoming projects they'll be handling, and so on.
5. Always Keep Your Candidates Engaged
Even if it's afar, make sure you're keeping all your candidates engaged. Half of the candidates claim they're never updated about their application process, which honestly turns them off. Therefore, to stay organised, use a good recruitment CRM that will help you maintain and build relationships with candidates at every stage of the recruiting cycle. If there are hiring freezes, ensure that you're informing the candidates about the same and mention that you're adapting and evolving your recruitment process. Most people appreciate transparency, and so will the candidates if you're honest. Millennials and Gen Z comprises mostly 75% of the working demographic in the United States alone, and trust us the only thing they care about standing in 2021 is a positive candidate experience. They care about their mental health, work-life balance and wouldn't want to work in a setting that makes them hustle for long hours. Therefore, the more flexibility and automated repetitive manual tasks are, the more quality candidates you're going to attract.
6. Build Trust & Data Privacy
Candidates interviewing for remote work need reassurance and trust from their employers. A significant concern for most candidates is data privacy, especially in this digital age. Make sure you're meeting data privacy laws such as GDPR and others. This might differ from country to country. All the technological tools like an Applicant Tracking System, CRM software, video assessment tools, interview scheduling software etc., that you're using should be compliant with data protection laws and establish the fact that all data exchanged between the parties is secure. Protecting the privacy of both candidates and companies is vital while recruiting remotely.
In final words, recruiters need to know one of the most significant things is-- evaluating and adapting your hiring strategy in a very reasonable manner for remote work. At the end of the day, being proactive and involved in a remote recruiting process will make you tech-savvy, efficient and prepared for the future.