The global spread of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus, is keeping people at home. Major conferences like Google I/O, SXSW and E3, have been canceled to decrease the spread of infection.
Many companies are encouraging or requiring people to work from home for an indeterminate amount of time.
With recruiting, you’re in the business of people. You might be wondering how to conduct business as usual, and recruit when everyone is forced to work in a virtual setting?
Fortunately, a lot of the recruitment process is already virtual from phone and video calls to online screens to engaging with candidates via email or text.
While adapting to a new work situation, and you might not be too familiar with how to recruit while working outside of an office, here’s a guide to help.
How to Recruit Remotely
Many tools available today are helping recruiters find and source qualified candidates. But there’s not much yet available to help recruiters get through to candidates.
Reaching and fostering relationships is still very much a human thing. For many companies, it’s a challenge to actually get through to, reach and retain candidates in the process—especially passive ones.
Whether someone is actively or passively looking for a new job, there’s a level of candidate care that job seekers expect from recruiters in order to consider making a move.
Here are some tips to keep in mind and their benefits when you’re a remote recruiter:
Tip: Take advantage of technology to screen early applications
Manually screening resumes is one of the most time-consuming tasks for recruiters, especially if more than half are from unqualified candidates.
One way this type of tech can play out in the recruiting space is by having A.I. collect information and do the dirty work to screen candidates or keep in a regular communication cadence. A software tool like Ideal is great for this.
Tip: Switch up your job promotion strategy with the help of digital
Harness the power of technology and look to leveraging your professional network and social media channels as much as possible when promoting open roles.
Collaborate with your colleagues and reach out to them for help, or band together to come up with a digital strategy when recruiting talent for jobs. Tools like Slack, Discord or Google Docs will keep you plugged in with your teams and help keep you organized throughout the process.
Tip: Be flexible when interviewing candidates (and gain a wide range of talent)
Video interviewing is a critical skill to master when recruiting remotely.
Not only do video interviews in recruiting give you access to a wide range of talent, but you’ll also find you won’t spend as much time trying to schedule with the help of video tools like Spark Hire (a popular video interviewing software) or ConveyIQ.
Video interviews help foster faster-recruiting processes; you can stagger them throughout the day, and with most of the population working away from the office, consider that video interviews can happen at any time of day when it’s convenient for all parties.
Lastly, video interviews can also give you access to a wide range of talent, and help diverse talent gain access to more jobs.
Tip: Always provide an exceptional candidate experience
There are many tools available to stay connected with candidates and keep them engaged. Maya is a software tool that helps ask candidates questions immediately after they've applied for an open role and gives you the information directly to assess.
Slack keeps workspaces internally and externally connected. With it, you can coordinate interview logistics and keep candidates in the loop in realtime.
With remote recruiting, you can still very easily match skills, discover a candidate’s aptitude and personality, and connect with candidates at the same rate, or even more.
Most importantly, however, with the tools available to help with several aspects of recruiting, leveraging and developing relationships is still very much a critical thing to get right–even more so when you aren’t working face-to-face with candidates.
When recruiting remote, ensure you can deliver an exceptional candidate experience that includes:
Getting smart on talent. Understand who the other person on the hangout or phone is. LinkedIn makes this seamless.
Setting a schedule — and sticking with it. Outline a firm process at the beginning of a search and stick with it. Let the talent know what part of the process they’re in at each touchpoint. Importantly: follow up when you say you will.
Being transparent in all communication. Communicate with candidates about where they stand in the process.
Positioning yourself as a true resource for candidates. Talent makes career decisions based on information, interest, and excitement. Your top job is to provide them with as much of that information as humanly possible.
At Hunt Club, we’ve significantly invested in advancing our tech network utilization and developing algorithms to assess the relative strength of every single connection. With our improved workflow and processes, our talent strategists are able to work on and offsite, while remaining committed to developing relationships and building trust with all candidates at a much higher rate than the industry.
Ready for a better way to hire?
