4 Reasons Why Your Remote Recruitment Process Should be Revised

The remote recruitment process is all about showing trust in your resources and keeping the process simplified for them. 

Before the pandemic struck recruiters conducted Face to Face interviews, and the concept of remote recruitment or virtual interviews was a distant factor. However, the process wasn’t completely negligible. 

In certain cases, where candidates couldn’t commute for a Face-to-face (F2F) interview round, a virtual interview would seldom take place.

If it wasn’t for the pandemic, hiring processes would still be continued following a personal meeting. But, the adaptability to current scenarios was made easy by the pandemic, and remote hiring became an acceptable norm all across the world.

Hiring managers today are thinking beyond conventional practices to attract and retain top talent within the organization. 

Top 4 Reasons why your hiring process should be revised

Over the past two years, we have witnessed a transition to remote employment around the world. 

This in turn has significantly put the trust in Human Resource (HR) Managers to make a gradual shift to remote hiring and recruitment.

Recruiters have invested in new ways to adopt a remote-friendly culture and simplify hiring processes in order to create a better work experience that remains unique to everyone and is always easy to fall into place.

As most employees across all organizations are today working from home (or remote), without having to even appear for their selection interview, the hiring processes which were in place earlier, have started to become obsolete gradually.

Globalize your talent

If your organization is still hiring the traditional way, you need to learn here how different are your competitors and everyone else is doing it around you.

Earlier candidates used to walk into your office, register themselves at the reception, and sit in the waiting room for their interview turns. Now, Zoom, Skype, and Google Meets have become their substitute lounges. 

Also, what recruiters now look for in candidates while screening, shorting, and eventually hiring them has also evolved drastically. Moreover, organizations are now evaluating, investing in, and promoting innovative hiring methods. 

To explain it a step further, it wouldn’t be wrong to say, the entire process of hiring a candidate is in a reconstruction mode – right from downloading the resume at first instance to making the first call, and subsequently rolling the offer letter.

Application process

Hard copies of resumes have been replaced with PDFs, F2F rounds with telephonic calls, and there is absolutely no need for a physical meeting anymore – your teams need to believe this now.

The process of pre-screening could have easily been digitized even before the Pandemic tapped us all, but it wasn’t believed then. All the tools did exist but no recruiters used them extensively. These were only substitutes and last-resort tools. Make sure these are pinned to your taskbar now.

Skill assessment tools

Skill testing and communications were considered a big hurdle to assess, with the new hiring process in place recruiters have now believed that this too can be done without having to set up any physical 1 on 1 meetings. 

The recruiting process today is not just about assessing and evaluating skills. Employers today recognize the importance that it’s not just technical skills, but the adaptability of a candidate to the work environment, attention to detail, communication priorities — are equally necessary for the candidate to succeed in the work environment.

2. Cut down on the elaborate processes

Recruiters use different recruitment methods to attract and hire talent. 

As a recruiter, you must make sure the potential candidate doesn’t have to go through a lengthy and elaborate process to apply for the job. When making forms for your candidates, try to keep them short and crisp. Do collect all the necessary information, but avoid asking them to fill in a lot of details. 

When they get into filling long forms, your candidates often tend to bounce off and hunt for something that’s easier to source and apply.

Often having to write long descriptive answers can make your candidates lose interest and quit the page. This can cut you short with a certain percentage of resources that could have been a good fit for your role and the company.

While you do this, also keep an eye on how most companies are doing this on various job portals. There will definitely be take-away lessons for you from this. Maybe, you would also want to check these 6 employee recruitment strategies to improve your hiring process.

It is also important that you keep an updated career page and keep a similar form there. 

The key to the question is – first know for yourself what exact information you need from your candidates. This will help you and your candidates save time and be more accurately positioned for the job role. 

3. Conduct a thorough skill assessment

Since you are not going to meet your candidates in person, it can sometimes be hard to assess their candidature and aptitude. 

Wrong hiring will not only disturb your work, but it will also leave a bad impact on the company for breaking ties with resources early on. 

It is in the best interest to take a thorough assessment of their aptitude, in addition to their skillsets.

You can place this after the first round and ask your potential candidate to take this assessment so as to move forward. This can be a short assessment that can be completed in 15-25 minutes maximum. Try to keep this as objective as possible, with questions in between 10-20, at max.

In order to understand your candidate’s comprehension, you can also go with including just one or two descriptive answers. If for some reason this becomes too much to handle for you, you can also consider teaming up with a recruiting agency for swift execution.

But, if you do it yourself, your questions for their aptitude assessment can include tests on:

1. Cognitive ability: This will help you assess your candidate’s ability of logical thinking, reasoning, perception, and memory strength. It will also help you understand their verbal and mathematical ability, and their potential to solve random problems. Questions of cognitive ability will also help you to estimate your applicants' potential to use mental processes in solving work-related problems.
2. Language tests: This test will help you assess your candidate’s abilities in understanding the language your work is associated with. You can judge their proficiency and understanding.
3. Personality and culture tests: These tests will help you access your candidate’s personality, behavioral thinking, and social behavior. These will go a long way in helping you make the right selections.
4. Subject-based tests: These can be anything from tests on programming skills, writings, or managerial understanding. The objective is to understand if they are a good fit for the role.
5. Role-specific skills tests: Similar to what you already asked, but these can have questions a step further in-depth and more specific.
6. Situational reaction tests: Also called SRTs, these will help you assess your candidate’s presence of mind in high-pressure situations and slightly confusing situations. This also provides clarity on how they steer through daily work processes and make their way out of tricky situations.

• Priority tests: You can include questions to ask your candidates to answer based on their understanding of priorities. This will help you understand their ability to prioritize things and access daily affairs and responsibilities.
• Comprehension passages: These help you understand your candidate’s potential of understanding written things and their practice of good reading. Often good readers are the ones who will turn out to be a better fit for your roles. 

4. Build a talent pipeline

Lastly, you need to build a talent pipeline for yourself. Since getting hired has become comparatively easier now, you will need a long list of shortlisted talented candidates in your pipeline – organized on the basis of their skill set, and your company’s functional roles.

It is likely that a certain percentage of your resources will find it easy to switch jobs, and will be appearing for interviews for better career growth, or diversified work roles. 

So there will be a frequent drop in talent, you can assume this to be on a quarterly basis, if not regularly. But, it is always good to be prepared for the worst.

You can always pile up shortlisted resources who did not make it to the last man standing for the job. This will help you save some time in future recruitments.

Conclusion

It can be said that companies are now more technologically reliant than they had ever been before. Also since remote hiring became a normal thing, a growing proportion of employees now wish to get hired from home and keep working from home.

The test trials on this have been successfully carried out across the world, ever since Covid knocked the doors globally. Businesses have also learned that this in turn is a cost-effective solution to modern-day working.

Also, as the talent pool has now grown from a region to a country and even beyond, better remote working avenues have opened up and recruiters can make the most out of it.

All in all, it can be said remote hiring is here to stay for long.