- By: Surya Patra (LinkedIn)
Have you been thinking of scaling your existing business, designing new products & services, reaching more customers and increasing your business volumes, but discouraged due to the current market environment? Amidst this turmoil there is still hope. With remote work becoming the norm rather than the exception, preparing your teams for recruiting employees will help you beat the race and succeed tomorrow.
Remote Workforce is no longer a remote phenomenon. Covid-19 has paved the way to show this as the new way of business life. Remote working has been in existence for a while in the technology and consulting sectors, and with many multinational businesses. However, now, remote working is trending as the norm across most other sectors of businesses. Preparing your teams for remote work today will help you succeed tomorrow. This is the time to make best out of you and stay ahead in the game. This is the time for survival of the fastest, rather than the fittest.
To establish a remote workforce, a new remote-based recruiting processes needs to be implemented, for which you need a plan. The below steps will help you to build a strategy to attract suitable talent and manage the hiring process seamlessly leading to building a coherent team for your business success. A well-planned approach based on these steps can help you transition to a remote workforce with little interruption in your business.
Not only are you unlikely to meet the candidate face to face during the recruitment phase, but you’re also going to have to cope with inducting the staff member into the company without meeting them. This raises challenges that need addressed. Here are some steps to build a strategy for Recruiting for a remote workforce:
Preparation and Planning for Recruitment:
- Be specific in your job description, include specific skills and level of experience required, and add screening questions to your job posts. Be mindful of including soft skills required to be able to work remotely, in addition to the hard skills. Many of the employers may not have thought about how important it is now to consider someone’s IT skills in a particular job, possibility of working in varying time-zones or how good their internet connection is, whether they have the command over the software and tools they need to be able to work from home, or lean on a co-work location that is equipped to provide necessary hardware, software and connectivity facilities, or simply, how comfortable they are working remotely.
- In addition to the required skills and experience, you can also plan to provide a section in your job description to help candidates do a self-assessment of their suitability for the role. This can include some form of aptitude tests, and/or work assignment tests.
- Build a strong brand to make your presence felt in a virtual world. Getting the word out is the key, taking the benefit of online presence and diligently using the social media. Showcase your company culture and business style by sharing videos, photos, and employee testimonials on your social media sites, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, et al.
Managing the Recruitment Process:
- Prepare candidates and interviewers beforehand. Let candidates know well in advance which video conferencing tool your company uses for interviews and consider sending resources to help them prepare. Put together a best practices tip sheet for interviewers and interviewees. You can even do test runs with your interviewers to ensure a seamless experience for both parties at the time of interview.
- Conduct virtual meetings, conferencing and online interviews at the time of recruiting employees by using one of the many tools such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Zoom, BlueJeans, Skype, or GoToMeeting to meet the candidate ‘in person’ virtually. Connecting face to face over video, rather than just audio, helps in better understanding, build stronger relationships and identify qualified candidates more efficiently.
- Use one of the many available CRM and project management tools to can keep recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers on track ensuring accountability, visibility and transparency. Some of these tools are Asana and Airtable. Additionally, Some of the CRM tools that can prove useful in recruiting remote employees are RecruitBPM, Bullhorn, Zoho.
- Use one of the online assessment tools to assess both hard and soft skills of the candidates. The simplest way to run assessments online is to add screening questions to your job applications. This allows you to confirm whether a candidate meets your core requirements. In addition, there are a variety of online solutions for recruiting employees that you can use to test both, a candidate’s technical capabilities and soft skills.
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Managing Successful Hires:
- Establish effective communication channels. Instant messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, GoToConnect, Google Chat and a host of other tools are great for bringing team conversations online in real-time. Video conferencing facilities for team meetings are great for building team camaraderie. Organise for suitable network connectivity, appropriate hardware and software to support the working of remote staff.
- Facilitate virtual meetings for meet and greet. Organise online induction and training programs to bring the new hires up to speed. Make sure that the remote staff are comfortable using the tools and resources put in to use for communication, training, project management, reporting, work assignment, team management, accountability, and performance management. There are a host of tools for recruiting employees that are available to aid these functions.
- Plan for building and inculcating the company’s culture within the workforce, organise social networking activities and encourage them to engage in to help keep them motivated.
We’re now faced with very challenging times, but there is an opportunity for those who are thinking strategically to recruit employees. Adaptability to the changing environment is the call of the day. Building an efficient and effective remote workforce is the key to reach your business plans and goals. Almost every business is gearing up to build a remote workforce in some shape and form to get an edge in the race. Preparing your teams for virtual work today will help you succeed tomorrow. A well-built remote workforce will be a great contributor to your future success.
Also Read – Team Collaboration Tools For Remote Employees
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