Going the distance: The best strategies to hire virtual employees

Private projects, startups, non-IT companies that needed a specialist, product companies and outsourcers, IT giants with thousands of employees, and small companies with dozens of employees. When you go looking for a job - there are so many offers on the job market! The transition to remote work has affected all processes. Recruiting is no exception. Let's talk about how recruiters can stay productive and put the best strategies into practice.

What changes when hiring remotely

1. Circumstances and priorities. In many industries, the hiring of employees fades into the background or even stops altogether, while in others, on the contrary, the demand for personnel rises sharply.
2. Instruments. All HR processes are completely moving online, and recruiters adapt the tools to suit their tasks: they conduct interviews in video communication services, use tests to analyze candidates, etc.
3. Requirements for employees and companies. Recruiters pay more attention to the self-organizing ability needed at a distance and are more flexible in approaching candidates from other cities and countries. Candidates begin to expect from employers not convenient offices and interesting events, but other bonuses.
4. Additional services. After all, what is PEO? It is an outsourcing company providing services to small and medium businesses. They provide human resources consulting, security and risk management, payment card processing, employer tax filing, employee compensation insurance, medical benefits, and more.

In such conditions, several actions will help to adapt recruiting and HR to the new reality.

Define the tasks you need

You need to understand how to behave during a crisis and whether the company's HR strategy is changing. Primary tasks: organize employees to work remotely, keep them motivated and monitor efficiency. Changing business processes may require reallocating resources: for example, temporarily adding tasks to recruiters for hiring and managing HR processes.

Organize a recruiter's working day

We hear from colleagues that the efficiency in some departments has dropped by 2-3 times because people find it challenging to adapt. One of the reasons is the difficulty in planning a working day and tracking efficiency.

This is easier to deal with in the office: colleagues are ready to discuss matters, share their successes, and help choose the desired task. An employee is left with work one-on-one at a remote location, so he needs to set tasks as clearly as possible and prioritize.

So that in a new situation, the recruiter does not spend a lot of effort on routine work, automation tools will come in handy: for example, programs that can import resumes from career sites and the company's portal and collect them into a single field convenient for the recruiter. It is essential that the recruiter can automatically send interview reminders rather than contacting each candidate individually. This saves a lot of time.

Use convenient software

You can find separate software for each stage of the recruiting process, but we recommend choosing combined solutions into a single ecosystem. It helps to monitor recruiting comprehensively and consider data from different tools to understand the entire process. It is vital that the service is flexible in revision and allows you to change the system for yourself, depending on new needs.

Prepare training materials for candidates and employees

With the transition to remote work, technical difficulties appear that affect the effective search and adaptation of employees. Therefore, it is better to start by preparing instructions for the recruiter's services for the interview. Especially if these are programs that are more complicated than the already familiar Zoom.

The same applies to the services that the company uses when onboarding new employees. Many companies have transferred some of the training online, and some have been postponed to a later date. You should not refuse training: the faster a person learns, the faster he reaches the point of personal break-even for the company. You need to change the format.

Use artificial intelligence to make hiring decisions

In remote work, other requirements appear for employees: their communication skills, compliance with the company's culture, and working as a team are no longer so important. The ability to build your schedule, work in isolation, and set tasks on your own comes to the fore. The psychological profiles that recruiters focus on when recruiting for a particular position are changing. It is more difficult for recruiters to assess these psycho-profiles via video links. 

Therefore, remote tools for analyzing a candidate's personality come to the fore. All these trends are becoming more noticeable in the world every year. And while there are still not many companies ready to digitize HR policies, this situation could change dramatically as the market develops.