A complete guide to remote hiring

Remote recruiting had started becoming more commonplace even before the pandemic, as organizations realized they could attract superior talent by expanding their search nationwide or even globally.

This meant that recruiters and hiring managers needed to analyze, interview, and hire prospects from a distance. For many businesses and their hiring teams, this may be a difficult task, especially when it comes to determining whether applicants possess the necessary skillsets for a certain role.

However, despite the challenges of recruiting remotely, many firms have grown to understand the advantages of doing so, including a bigger pool of applicants, lower overhead costs, and the opportunity to hire workers from anywhere around the globe.

In this article, you will find crucial recommendations for remote hiring, whether you’re new to it or want to streamline your current remote procedure.

What is remote hiring?

The process of sourcing, assessing, shortlisting, and choosing applicants using online or remote means – without actually meeting them in person – is called remote hiring. 

In reality, the notion of remote recruitment is not new. Many major companies employ remote recruiting technologies in some, if not all, elements of hiring. Recruiters from companies all around the world are increasingly using online job portals, internet marketing, and social media to find applicants.

Benefits of remote hiring

Some of the benefits of hiring remotely are:

1. Abundant talent 

Recruiters have access to larger talent pools with remote recruiting, allowing them to cherry-pick applicants that meet all of their criteria. You can hold a remote interview with anyone, anywhere in the country, at no additional hiring fee.

2. Reduced costs

A significant advantage would be the cost savings connected with traditional employment techniques. Onboarding, for example, involves time and human resources when done traditionally – on-site at the company — resulting in higher costs for the company.

3. Recruiting speed

Remote hiring can significantly speed up the employment process. When there’s a lot of competition for talent and prospects are flying off the shelves, interviewing as soon as possible can help you make better hires. As a result, you may be able to attract desirable passive candidates.

4. Promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)

Remote hiring has the potential to drastically minimize unconscious biases, resulting in increased internal diversity.

Recruiters can begin extending their pool of talent just by being able to explore outside of major metro regions since the broader trend to remote work is already underway. 

Furthermore, as internal processes are optimized for online recruitment, there are chances to handle DEI as a foundational aspect of the process design rather than as an afterthought.

How to get started with hiring remotely

With all of the advantages listed above, it’s time to be ready to begin your remote recruitment experience. Here are some of the most important remote hiring best practices and guidelines to help you get started with hiring people from all over the world.

1. Create a step-by-step game plan

Hiring remotely can get chaotic.

Make sure you have a detailed recruitment plan and targets in place to avoid seeming disorganized.

For a well-functioning recruitment plan, create a thorough set of recruiting goals, including your recruitment strategy, building your hiring team, and the recruitment tools you will utilize.

2. Candidate sourcing

Putting your open positions on numerous job sites is a terrific strategy to reach a larger audience. Describe your ideal applicant in your job description, but don’t make excessive assumptions. You should provide the following details in a job post for remote work:

• Whether or not you’re willing to accept contractor applications
• Time zone availability 
• The essential equipment and if you’ll be supplying it (or whether you’ll be able to set aside money for it)

Candidates can see right away if they’re a good fit, and you won’t waste time analyzing applicants who aren’t the right fit for obvious reasons.

3. Automated screening

You may use a screening tool for finding the relevant abilities and expertise instead of manually combing through hundreds of profiles. You may input your work requirements for a specific role into a screening tool or program.

After you’ve entered your requirements, the tool will only let candidates with the necessary abilities through. When you don’t want unworthy prospects to qualify especially due to the recruiter’s unconscious bias, this step becomes crucial.

A screening tool such as Testlify can also standardize the kind of candidates that advance to the interview stages. This guarantees that the abilities you seek for the job are benchmarked and that only high-quality prospects meet you for the interview phase. This will free up precious time for both hiring managers and the talent acquisition team.

Want to know the different strategies to remove unconscious bias from the hiring process? Read our post on unconscious bias in hiring here.

4. Automated workflows

One of the most useful tools for recruiters has automatic procedures in place. Automated workflows simply automate some of the recruiter’s manual, tedious tasks in the recruiting process.

You can create automated workflows for any task to reduce your workload, whether it’s an email to the candidate after the assessment is completed, an invitation to the next round, interview scheduling, tracking and following up with scheduled reminders, or sharing panel reminders for interviews, and more.

5. Skills and behavioral assessment

Many online assessment tools such as Testlify assist companies to conduct pre-recruitment exams for applicants. These tools often include a number of tests for a variety of positions, including MCQs, essays, coding, typing, aptitude, behavioral, cognitive ability, personality, and more, and are incredibly accurate in identifying the ideal applicant when utilized appropriately.

Such online assessments include proctors or invigilators checking the candidate’s video and audio stream as the applicant takes the exam to confirm the validity of the findings. This can be done in person or via pre-recorded evaluations that are later assessed by expert proctors.

When hiring large groups of people, assessment tools come in handy. Some of these systems even provide you a report on all applicant performance after they’ve taken the online test.

6. Interview

Online interviews are quite important. You may also make them more successful by including others. You could make it a two-step procedure, with the candidate first speaking with HR and then with a manager or team member. You may also hold a group gathering.

The goal of a video interview like this is to provide candidates with additional information about the position, organization, and how things function.

It also aids in gaining a broader view to properly analyze the application.

7. Onboarding

If your recruit exclusively works remotely, your virtual onboarding procedure must be well planned out. Onboarding begins with a new employee’s orientation and introduction to current team members; you may do this by scheduling a brief Zoom conversation with their team, as well as weekly check-ins. Make sure they know who to contact if they have any extra questions and that you’re ready to assist them during onboarding.

Discuss all of the onboarding specifics with the team manager, including what extra training is required and how they plan to handle it. Ascertain that the new employee understands their responsibilities, the particular standards, and what success in the position entails.

Final thoughts

Remote recruiting has been shown to be an effective method of finding qualified workers. Not only is it the most recent, relevant, and obvious next step in improving recruiting procedures, but it also provides a number of advantages that firms sometimes ignore in favor of sticking to more traditional hiring approaches.

You’ll quickly adjust to remote recruiting if you have the correct systems in place. If you’re currently recruiting remote workers, there are lots of ways to improve your strategy. Training your team, following a disciplined strategy, and using strong assessment tools like Testlify may all help your team to hire remotely.