The pandemic and its ensuing global health crisis proved to be a catalyst for the swift and worldwide adoption of remote work. And today, these work models are no longer a choice or privilege for most of us.
Even recent reports confirm that a large number of organizations have encouraged or required their employees to work from home, and among them, most of companies have even started the transition to shift to remote work in the post-COVID permanently.
Recruitment being one of the significant functions in an organization, recruiters now need to innovate and reinvent recruitment processes and start paving the way to the future of recruitment- Remote Hiring! And in this regard, technology can enhance and automate recruitment processes and enable enterprises to hire candidates not only completely remotely but also significantly faster.
What is Remote Hiring?
Remote hiring or remote recruitment is the process of sourcing, assessing, shortlisting, and selecting candidates through online or remote methods such as automated sourcing and screening, online assessments, video interviews, behavioral tests, and more employing intelligent hiring solutions that enable remote hiring. Though remote hiring is not an entirely new concept or practice, remote and hybrid work models are now realizing the significance and need of remote hiring and the massive role of technology in it.
Intelligent hiring solutions like AI-based applicant tracking systems and more guarantees:
- Anytime-anywhere hiring & onboarding
- Access to large number of global applicants
- Automation of routine recruiting tasks saving time and costs
- Maintenance of candidate database that can be reused
- Collaborative hiring
- Easier & quicker hiring decisions
How to Get Started with Hiring Remotely?
Here are the essential remote hiring best practices and tips to help you start hiring the talent you need from anywhere in the world.
Candidate sourcing
Begin with sourcing, and one of the easiest methods for that is to have a recruitment chatbot in the career section of the company website. This ensures that prospective candidates are never missed and if the candidate qualifies, a chatbot can even begin the recruitment process by automatically sending them a pre-recruitment assessment for the position they applied for.
Automated screening of large number of applicants
One of the biggest advantages of automating the applicant screening process is that a screening software can efficiently and swiftly skim through hundreds and thousands of profiles, with no human intervention to look for the right skills and experience that matches the profile.
Automated workflows & processes
Automated workflows simply automate certain smaller but important steps in the recruitment process that the recruiter has to do making it extremely convenient. From candidate emails to interview scheduling to panel reminders and more, automated workflows ease the workload.
Skills and Behavioral Assessment
Skill and behavioral assessment tools are also highly useful when hiring for bulk roles. Some of these tools even provide a report of all candidate performances after they have attempted the online exam. Such mechanisms play a huge role in cutting down the risk of a bad hire and increasing the chances of your organization, as a whole, to out-perform its competitors in the long run.
Video Interviewing
Platforms like Zoom or Skype are not a recruitment or interviewing tools and do not suffice the need for a platform that has features and capabilities that enhance your interview-giving and taking experience.
An interviewing tool gives you the freedom to hold recorded or live interviews as per your and your candidate’s convenience, where, in a recorded interview, the recruiter or hiring manager has to record their questions one by one and upload it on the interviewing platform to share it with the candidates. These questions recorded once can be used for multiple candidates being hired for the same role, saving both time and cost.
How to Move to Technology-Driven Remote Hiring?
Here’s how organizations can resort to technology to help iron out recruitment process and catapult hiring efficiency to newfound heights.
- Receive comprehensive and detailed analysis and report on candidate skills
With technical assessment tools, you’ll never be in the dark. You will have the right tools to gauge a candidate’s performance through comprehensive reports that can provide you with an in-depth understanding of a candidate’s strong suits as well as their weaknesses. Also, you can easily stack candidates’ results against each other to create a leaderboard and evaluate using nuanced performance-related metrics.
- Increase your bandwidth by assessing multiple candidates at the same time
Amplify your reach by sending out email invites that will allow candidates to take up virtual assessments remotely, at their own convenience. Potentially, hundreds could take these tests simultaneously; after which the system will automatically evaluate and shortlist desired candidates based on your preset benchmarks.
Conducting interviews of this magnitude manually would prove to be a herculean task, demanding a good chunk of your valuable time and resources. For subsequent rounds, you can also choose to virtually connect with the selected candidates over video interviewing platforms that are specially designed to facilitate technical assessments.
- Automate & standardize hiring processes to overcome unconscious bias
Research has shown time and again that traditional hiring processes are biased. Unconscious ageism, racism, and sexism play a big role in determining who gets chosen. Automating your hiring process ensures lesser human intervention in screening and selection, thus reducing any conscious or unconscious bias that may have crept into your evaluation. AI-based assessment tools are your best bet at objectively screening candidates based on skill alone.
- Adapting to new technologies is no longer just a choice, but a necessity
Replacing in-person interviews with automated assessment platforms should not be seen as a sign of regression, but rather a clear indication of business evolution. Even though remote hiring might seem like a forced necessity due to the current pandemic, it is definitely here to stay.
Since recruitment software is made to do most of the heavy lifting, it might seem that the role of the traditional recruiter is reduced to that of an ancillary. But it in reality gives us ample cause to celebrate since this would translate to better focus on the more crucial aspects of the hiring process- building concrete human relationships. Automation has finally enabled us to do this.
