Introduction
According to our recent survey, 80% of HR professionals globally have shifted to remote methods for their interviewing and hiring process.
Remote hiring is quickly becoming the most sought-after method for recruitment, given how it solves almost all the problems that the talent acquisition industry has faced over the years such as increased cost of hiring, talent shortage, long hiring processes, etc.
To add to this, remote hiring helps you optimize the three most important metrics of recruitment: time to hire, cost of hire, and quality of hire. Being one of the most efficient ways of hiring, remote recruitment not only helps recruiters be more productive and save time from mundane HR tasks, but it also helps streamline the entire HR process. This enables organizations to save on their overall cost of hiring while improving the quality of new hires.
Per our survey report, we also found that 79% of respondents believe that remote hiring could help improve diversity in their organizations.
This could be a result of either not being limited to hiring locally, or that online interviews and assessments create a standard benchmark for incoming talent, shielding the hiring process from the interviewer’s subconscious biases.
As Manu Rekhi, Managing Director at Inventus Capital Partners, puts it:
…There is, however, a correlation between diverse teams and superior performance. These biases have unfortunately kept minorities and women from jobs they were well qualified for. Removing these biases is hard and training is not consistent… AI video interviews take out the implicit bias and focus on the candidate.
With so much to learn and gain from shifting to remote methods of hiring, making this shift becomes the obvious next step for every organization that struggles with challenges in their recruitment process.
We understand that making the switch to remote hiring can be a bit challenging in the beginning. So, in this blog post, we’ve put together the key tips and best practices of remote hiring and how to implement it in your organization.
Six Remote Recruitment Tips to Hire Like a Pro
1. Use Technology for a Faster Candidate Screening
For volume hiring, you receive hundreds if not thousands of resumes. Instead of going through these resumes or candidate profiles manually, an online screening tool can automate your screening process. All you have to do is feed in your job requirements for a particular role into the tool.
The resume screening tool then shortlists all the candidates who qualify based on your benchmarks. This way, you do not have to spend hours trying to understand who can fit the role and focus your time only on the ones who qualify.
Resume scores of each candidate after the screening round on Talview’s platform
By benchmarking the skillsets you’re seeking with a resume screening tool, you are achieving two things: 1) saving time by standardizing how job applicants progress through your hiring process, and 2) ensuring that the highest quality candidates move onto the interview round.
One-way video interviews are a great way to improve your screening process. These are video interviews where the candidates are sent written or video recorded screening questions that they have to answer in video form.
This way, your recruiter records the screening questions just once and shares it with hundreds of applicants. These answers can further be shared with all your decision makers seamlessly.
From a candidate’s perspective, they are able to record their responses multiple times, ensuring that they display their best side to the potential employer.
An asynchronous video interview recording on Talview’s hiring platform
TA practitioners are also using online proctored assessments for automatically screening talent.
These online assessments can test the candidates’ skills or aptitude and can be proctored remotely. Once employers create the online assessment, they share them with the candidates.
As the candidates take the assessment, the tool will automatically filter out candidates who don’t meet your requirements, enabling you to focus on those who should proceed.
2. Implement Automated Workflows for Faster Hiring
The purpose of automated workflows is to simply automate certain smaller but important steps in the recruitment process. Some remote hiring tools provide you with the capability of doing just that to speed up your hiring process.
These could be sending invitations for the next round of interviews or an email after assignment submission, scheduling interviews, tracking and following up using scheduled reminders, and more. With the right recruitment automation software, you can create automated workflows for any task to ease your workload.
Talview Hiring Solution - recruiter’s view showing the workflow of a particular role
Such tasks compound as the number of assessed candidates increases. Having automated workflows as a part of your remote recruitment process saves you the time and resources you never thought you could save before.
Moreover, you can also create elaborate recruitment workflows that help you automate the entire hiring process with minimal human intervention — from inviting candidate applications through a chatbot to providing them online assessments and holding on-demand video interviews as they qualify. You can avoid manual intervention until a candidate progresses through all the rounds.
3. Be More Strategic with Online Pre-Hire Assessments
We spoke about having online assessments for screening your candidates earlier. These online assessments are usually basic, preliminary assessments, not very specific to the role that the candidates apply for.
But online assessments can be very effective at the qualifying stage once the candidates have been shortlisted. Online skill-based assessments help recruiters to assess a candidate’s skill, knowledge, and ability in a specific role or function.
Skill assessments today can assess a candidate’s written communication, essay writing, typing skills, or technical skills. This acts as a huge asset for recruiters in industries where they hire candidates in high volume.
Candidate’s response page of a coding test on Talview
Similarly your recruiters can also use behavioral assessments for the qualifying round. Behavioral assessments help employers to assess and predict how the candidate will perform in the workplace and if they are fit for the role.
An example of one such behavioral assessment is Talview Behavioral Insights or TBI. It is a job competency measurement tool that uses psycholinguistics to create a behavioral profile of candidates. TBI categorizes skills according to every role into critical, essential, and desirable.
Read this eBook to learn more about the science behind Talview Behavioral Insights.
Such assessments help recruiters to hire the best candidates even when hiring in bulk.
4. Reduce Your Interview Time With Video Interviews
An online interviewing tool allows your recruiters to hold recorded or live interviews when it’s convenient for them or your candidates. While a live interview is just like a face-to-face interview taking place online, in a recorded interview, the recruiter or hiring manager can record their questions one by one and upload it on the interviewing platform to share it with the candidates.
A recruiter’s screen with a candidate’s recorded video interview
The best part is that once these questions are recorded, they can be used for multiple candidates being hired for the same role. This saves hours spent in coordinating schedules with your panel and allows you to view more candidates in a short time by removing multiple interview rounds.
These are quite versatile and can be used in various ways, such as one-on-one interviews, panel interviews with multiple panel members, group discussions with multiple stakeholders, or for the final round of interviews.
From screening to final evaluation round, from lateral hiring to campus recruitment and volume hiring, you can strategically use video interviews to replace face-to-face interactions with your candidate and provide better interviewing experience to both candidates and recruiters than in-person interviews.
Finally, video interviews can promote a fairer hiring process, since each candidate is asked the same questions.
5. Increase Collaboration for Your Recruiters
Hiring remotely can be tricky without proper communication between all stakeholders: recruiters, interviewers, panel members, and more. Poor communication or collaboration among hiring managers and panel members are sometimes the reason for lengthy hiring processes.
From waiting for the hiring manager’s approval, finding open time on the panel members’ calendars, to waiting for them to provide feedback of a candidate via email — poor collaboration can delay the process and cause you to lose your best candidates to competitors.
And when you leave your candidates hanging without any updates, you can damage the candidate’s experience with your organization and brand.
Collaboration tools for hiring help exactly with this. They become the key communication platform where all conversations and exchanges related to calendar schedules, finalizing, updating, feedback, and panel reviews take place with all the company stakeholders included.
For example, Talview partnered with Microsoft Teams to add Microsoft’s powerful real-time collaboration capabilities to our hiring platform.
This allows recruiters, hiring managers, and interview panel members to schedule and reschedule interviews through a simple and intuitive interface requiring no training to use.
Recruiter and panel members discussing the next steps to hire for a position
A hiring manager can schedule a meeting directly with the candidate after meeting them without having to coordinate with the recruiter. This eliminates collaboration bottlenecks that create hiring lag.
The platform also becomes the one place where the interviewer and the panel members can add their feedback after each round. This way, candidate feedback will be available in one place for all internal stakeholders to access any time and take hiring decisions.
By streamlining communications among all your stakeholders, you can act faster with top candidates and reduce overall time to hire.
6. Ensure Data Privacy with Reliable Proctoring
One big apprehension around implementing a remote assessment or online interview solution is the candidate’s concern around data privacy and intrusion.
Remote interview and assessment software uses the candidate’s video stream to either to identify unacceptable behavior with video analytics, or a human proctor viewing or reviewing the video to identify malpractice respectively. This can appear to be intrusive to some.
A reliable proctoring service will provide you with full transparency regarding all the data being used, where it is being used, why it is being stored, and how it is managed after a test is over.
To ensure that you are abiding by all security and privacy regulations, your solution should be non-invasive and have a detailed privacy policy. The proctoring solution should be legally certified to hold proctored exams and interviews on its platform, and comply with all the privacy laws and regulations applicable in your operating country.
Hence, the last virtual recruitment tip is to do a proper and thorough background check before investing in a remote proctoring software.
Conclusion
Starting on the road to remote hiring may be daunting at first. Based on our work with thousands of recruiters in over 120 companies, these expert online recruitment tips can aid your online transition and enable you to hire the best candidates with ease and comfort.
Check out our free Remote Hiring Starter Kit Course that includes informative and actionable sessions by industry leaders to help you understand the facets of remote hiring and equip you with the skills needed to hire in a new age of digital hiring.
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