According to a recent survey by Gartner, 82% of company leaders around the world would provide their employees the benefit of working from home for the near future. Now that number is staggering!
As we’ve all settled into our routines of working from home, it is only natural that hiring would resume from home as well. Before the pandemic, remote hiring was a policy less were comfortable with. But as the novel Coronavirus took hold of everything, hiring from home slowly became the norm.
However, recruiters and TA leaders were unsure of how to do this successfully. Some even tried applying their pre-pandemic practices to the new world, but that proved to be unsuccessful.
When it comes to remote hiring, a number of things can go wrong. Your strategy may fail you; your technology may prove to be lacking; or certain things may be out of your control.
So, we’ve jotted down for you a number of things to avoid when hiring remotely:
- Using the regular hiring process for remote hiring: Great performers may not perform well when working remotely and vice versa. For hiring employees who can best work remotely, ask questions about their daily routine, lifestyle, and habits apart from regular interview questions. Ask questions about their work setup. Do they have a home office or can create one from the location they will be working. Factors such as these affect work quite significantly, so it is essential to ask them.
- Inadequate assessment: In a rush to hire a candidate, recruiters find a few topics related questions, design a small test, and send it over an e-mail to the candidate. In such cases, candidates search the data and clear the assessment easily. Apart from this, since the questions are obtained from already available online resources, the test fails to assess the real skills. In such a case, the most hassle-free option is to use online skill assessment tools like imocha where you can select the skills that you want to assess from the skill library and quickly design a test. These pre-employment assessment tools also have image and video proctoring options, which can help in detecting if the candidate has given an honest attempt.
- Less or No face-to-face interaction: It is important to schedule a video interview at least once during the process.
While it can be argued that an in-person interview is the best for assessing a candidate, a number of technologies are now filling that gap. You can schedule a video interview to assess the physical cues, i.e., personality, communication ability, presentation skills, etc. depending on the role you’re recruiting for.
Moreover, for technical roles, you can even leverage live coding interview platforms. These platforms give you the space to code live, while the interviewers can ask questions as the coding progresses.
A number of tools like Zoom, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, etc. are available to use. These are also beneficial for a panel discussion as multiple people can join in.
- Focusing too much on tech skills: Out of desperation, recruiters may hire without adequate assessment of soft skills and focus only on tech skills. In remote working soft skills like communication skills, time management, discipline play a vital role.
- Not getting to know them personally: When an employee is working remotely, their personal life affects their professional life to an extent. To know how the employee can strike a balance between these two, recruiters need to know the personal details of the employee which includes, number of people residing in the same house, their profession, and whether they are dependent on the employee for anything. For example, a nursing mother or any bed-ridden family member that they need to look after can cause distraction. In such a case, you can enquire how they plan on managing work and carry out their personal activities.
As these questions can seem probing to some, ensure that they are put across in a friendly manner.
- Lack of onboarding activities: Onboarding activities like background check is often omitted when it should be done more cautiously and thoroughly since you have never met the person.
Also, basic training is skipped when you need the person to start working immediately. Ensure that your recruitment plan gives you a minimum of weeks' time to do a background check and introduce basic training to the new recruit. This would help in making sure the employee is comfortable with other employees and the work.
- No team-building activities: It is important to introduce new remote workers with your current team through some team-building activities. Conduct a few activities online so that the remote working professionals build a repo with your current workforce. This will help them understand the needs of your organization and align their work with the vision and mission of the company.
- Not providing adequate resources: It is the responsibility of every organization to provide employees with adequate resources, such as technology, necessary devices, ergonomic furniture, to work remotely. This step is often taken casually and candidates tend to leave the company due to such instances. It is also important to provide other amenities like a good internet connection to maintain the productivity of the employee and avoid technical glitches during work.
Recruiting employees to work remotely can be a great solution for businesses that want to increase their talent pool and tap into a diverse workforce. It not only helps you bring global talent on board but also provides you with an opportunity to do business 24/7.