10 TIPS TO HIRE REMOTELY

The role of a recruiter can be intimidating for the kind of valuable asset they bring to the organisation. Employees are the make and break of any organisation and hence a good team is always needed by any organisation. Recruiter/ HR departments are always under some kind of pressure where they are contemplating their decision, questioning their judgements and amidst all this, virtual recruiting can be even more challenging. Initially virtual recruiting was only done by organisations hiring remotely. But the Covid-19 pandemic has made everybody try out ways they never imagined to try before. It’s nearly a year since the world is working from home, organisations are hiring remotely, unaware when things will go back to normal life. 

Recruiters around the world are under the constant struggle of shortlisting the best of candidates, bringing in valuable assets to the company and also the ones who are loyal. There’s a set of expectations that are desired to be fulfilled to have a smooth sailing business even in such tough times. The traditional way of hiring has been practiced for decades but hiring remotely is a fairly new concept. We have listed down a small guide that will help you be a little more confident with the remote recruitment process and ensure that you’ve covered all the necessary factors before shortlisting any candidate.

1.Prepare a short but detailed ad.

Since the whole process of hiring may get tedious with endless virtual follow ups you might want to ensure that you don’t receive unnecessary applications. Start off with writing a small yet detailed ad about the job profile your organisation is looking to hire. Make a separate column about the required qualification and a separate section explaining their job role. Make a pointer based ad so it's easy to skim through and only the relevant people will apply after reading it. A dedicated amount of ad preparation will save you from hours behind unnecessary job applications.

2. Design questions to gauge candidate’s potential.

It’s a lot easier to evaluate a person’s potential when interviewing them in person but it can be misled when conducted on phone calls or emails when hiring remotely.  What you can do to avoid being misled and ensure a great evaluation is prepare a set of questions that will make the candidates talk about their decision making abilities, their behaviour under specific situations and more. Frame hypothetical situations and prepare questions asking what they’d choose to do. Example, if you found yourself in an evitable family situation when you’ve your client pitch lined up in 30 minutes, what would you do? If you ended up making a big blunder in a presentation, how are you going to confess it to your manager and how will you fix it? Such hypothetical situations will help you gauge the candidates loyalty, decision making ability, their ability to communicate in tough times and much more. So invest good time in devising a question bank. 

3. Behavioural insight test. 

Gauging behaviour of the candidate is crucial as well as tricky when the interview is conducted remotely. The candidate's behaviour and personality trait will talk a lot about their skills and abilities to perform their job role. You can either design a test that is oriented towards evaluating their behaviour or you can observe their behaviour throughout the interview and gauge their behaviour accordingly. If you are looking for an in depth behavioural insight you can opt for Gorewo’s remote hiring process by listing job placements here. Gorewo determines an individual's traits with the help of Ai technologies that evaluate a person's behaviour from the recorded one way video interview. Learning about their EQ, optimism, loyalty, zest, social intelligence help you evaluate a lot about who your future employee should be. 

4. Check out mutual references. 

There’s two things that can potentially happen, either you’ll have endless applications to choose from or have a hard time even finding 5 good applicants. We suggest that check your mutuals, check out options with your job colleagues, ex job colleagues, relatives, friends, family, all the possible connections. You can also offer them a certain percentage after the candidate is chosen from their reference so it’s a win win for both of you. Word of mouth has proven to be fruitful for years and even with so much technology around, this way of work will never be outdated. So go ahead and try your shot at it.

5. Devise a small test that brings a reflective response. 

After certain rounds of interviews, the organisation or the recruiter devises a small test/assignment that will help them evaluate the candidate on the basis of their practical performance. But there are also organisations that design lengthy tests and provide 2-3 days to submit them, but these tests can make candidates lose interest which in return will make you lose potentially good applicants. So prepare a small assignment that will require reflective responses or skill based responses. Plan it in a way that their responses make your task to evaluate them simpler. Secure the flow of your assignment and place questions accordingly, this will help you direct the candidates mind in the way you want them to be and see what they respond to. 

6. Set up interviews in a row.

When the  hiring process is taking place rigorously with a lot of candidates applying at your organisation, choose to take an extra step in hiring. Although it may get exhausting, choose to line up interviews back to back. This will ensure the flow of your meetings with each and every candidate and it will help you compare better. You can evaluate each person on the list as and how interviews take place and in a two days time, you can shortlist the best candidates for your company. This approach will help you remember candidates and their abilities if they prove to make it significant in the meeting and you wouldn’t have a hard time with multiple applications coming in. Since this process might exhaust you mentally, prefer having a 15 minute breathing space between each interview so you can freshen up, grab a cup of coffee and start off again.

7. Allow flexibility.

To ensure discipline and sincerity most organisations have the habit of scheduling interviews as and how they feel convenient. We suggest that you try having an equal middle ground with your candidates. Allow them to have a say in when the interview can be scheduled and make sure they don’t feel they’re imposed with a restricted timeline for job hiring remotely. This will let you understand the candidate more as they’re past the stressful phase of having the interview placed in the times that they may not be comfortable in. This approach will also try and ensure that you don’t miss out on potentially great candidates just because the times didn’t match well. Moreover, remote working will involve quite some flexibility with your employees, so we suggest starting it off from the interview phase itself.

8. Guide them through their job role with a small office tour. 

As there is no physical contact taking place you might want to make the candidate feel comfortable by making small efforts. Virtually show them how your workplace looks like, how the people function, have them introduced to the candidate so the candidate doesn’t feel distant or unaware of things. Explain them about their job role, if they’ve any superior they’re expected to report to, introduce them on the call. Make them understand the hierarchy that the office follows, the approach you have towards meeting goals and ask the candidates to give inputs if they have any. If the company has a working space and if the interview is conducted from the office, give them a small virtual office tour. This will make the candidate feel like he’s almost at the office even though he/she is miles away. 

9. Be considerate.

Some candidates may have the silliest questions before they’re shortlisted. Don’t judge them or be arrogant with them. Try and understand that this way of work may be new to them, they come from a different place. So breathe and answer their questions calmly. Don’t make them fear asking another question as it may be the beginning of a communication gap and that is the last thing we would want while hiring someone for a remote job. So no matter how silly or difficult questions your candidates have, answer them with kindness. 

10. Give them some breathing space. 

Send them a reminder via mail or text before their interview is going to take place or even if it is going to be slightly delayed. Having caught off guard can make the candidate not be the true version of themselves and this will make the decision making part difficult for you. So make sure you give your candidates breathing space and start off on a fresh, comfortable and easy note. You also need to make sure you are giving them enough seconds or a minute to function your questions and answer to them accordingly. Since technology may have its own errors, you might want to eliminate extra miscommunication that may take place due to that. 

To sum it up....

Hiring any candidate is the first step of forming and building a relationship with your potential employee. You may come across annoying, irrelevant candidates but you will be expected to keep your cool as you are representing your organisation to someone who is wanting to be a part of it. On any given day, the organisation’s reputation comes first. So we thought of making this risky and tiring task of yours a little easy by pointing down different approaches you can have while hiring remotely. If your task is getting too tedious, let us take over. All you need to do is post jobs at Gorewo and we shall get back to you. Do share about your experience about remote hiring and have other’s take a piece of advice from your experience in the comments below. We hope you find the best candidates!