How to stay ahead of challenges in virtual recruitment

“Acquiring the right talent is the most important key to growth. Hiring was – and still is – the most important thing we do,” says Marc Bennioff, Founder, Chairman, and co-CEO of Salesforce.

The pivotal role of talent acquisition cannot be put in better words. Acquiring the right talent contributes to the growth and profits of the organisation. With several workforces operating remotely, hiring has had no other choice but to have a makeover in terms of technology and strategy. Organisations have had to accommodate the changes quite rapidly in order to stay competitive and attract the right talent for their job profiles. The global shift in recruiting meant that recruiters may be hiring a potential candidate without meeting face-to-face.

Ask any HR professional about virtual hiring, and they’d vouch that it was always prevalent in organisations but it may not have been given as much importance as it is given now. What the pandemic has done is to push it to the forefront and make it a priority conversation in organisation planning and budgeting. What was a “good to have” has now become a “must have” in the HR boardroom discussion.

How virtual hiring works

Virtual recruitment is a process where potential candidates are hired remotely, without a face-to-face meeting that generally is the case with traditional hiring practices. Different organisations go about virtual recruitment in different ways. While some organisations invest in an in-house virtual recruitment software, some use already available software that is customisable to the organisation’s needs.
Virtual recruitment usually involves the use of various technologies such as:

• Virtual screening and shortlisting – Applications are sifted through and filtered to choose the best ones based on the skill sets required for the open positions.
• Assessments and interviews – In the absence of face-to-face interviews, assessments and virtual interview tools come into the picture to test skill levels of candidates. Online assessment tools have evolved to have varied options such as proctored, non-proctored, multiple choice, coding, etc, for organisations to choose from.
• Onboarding – With workforces becoming remote, onboarding has also undergone drastic change. Today’s automated virtual recruiting platforms have come into the fore with customisable segments for employee onboarding.
• Chatbots and communication apps – The fastest way to communicate with potential job seekers and employees are chatbots and communication apps. Resolving queries, pointing candidates in the right direction with their questions, and even scheduling interviews are all expected features of automated virtual recruitment platforms.

Even with technological advancements in virtual recruitment, recruiters or hiring managers still find remote hiring a challenge. Let’s take a look at a few of the challenges and how to combat them to further strengthen your organisation’s virtual recruitment strategy.

Bring the challenges on and break them down!

Talent teams across organisations are brainstorming ways to adopt virtual recruitment practices into long-term strategies to attract the best talent in the market. Virtual recruitment is getting eyeballs for several other reasons as well:

• Work from home arrangements are most likely to continue, with organisations charting out policies that allow for flexible remote work and a hybrid model of work.
• Applicants applying for positions outside their geographic areas have increased, limiting possibilities of in-person interactions during the process of hiring. This has urged organisations to embrace the use of communication tools to facilitate teams to work and collaborate remotely.
• With applicants being remote, ensuring proper screening and background check becomes a great challenge.
• Conducting remote assessments have also come into the radar, with no guarantee that the interviewee or assessee is the one who applied for the position. This is where proctoring solutions come into the picture.

Do the puzzle pieces fit?

There is nothing like experiencing the culture of an organisation in person. An organisation’s culture and work ethics are best understood when employees meet and interact with others and the management. That said, the current situation has shifted things significantly, forcing teams to collaborate remotely. With teams distributed globally, communicating organisation culture and expecting employees to align to it is a huge challenge. Is the candidate a good cultural fit? Is the candidate in line with the organisation’s ethics? These are some common concerns that…

Let the drums roll!

Familiarising the candidates with the organisation culture should be consciously taken care of across communication. Scream out ethics, the way things are done at the workplace through videos, and virtual one-on-one sessions.

Distance does not make colleagues grow fonder!

With social distancing norms and remote work culture, employee bonding has gone for a toss. The camaraderie between colleagues/team mates, which otherwise contributes to the synergy of the workplace, has gone missing with people logging in remotely.

Leverage team huddles

The onus then is on the organisation and the respective team managers to ensure that video technology is utilised effectively to bring together distributed teams and ensure seamless team bonding. This also ensures the entire team is on the same page in times of crisis.

Compliance across states and countries

Handling remote applicants means handling compliance across different states and countries. This is where recruitment compliance should be considered as a means to ensure that your organisation’s hiring policies are compliant with national and international laws. No two states or countries have the same set of legal requirements when it comes to business. The challenge for HR lies in ensuring a system that takes into consideration laws and legalities of geographies seamlessly.

Know thy law

A central system in place that accesses HR data from across geographies and manages reporting accordingly greatly eases the manual work of the organisation’s HR department.

Lack of digital infrastructure

The biggest challenge perhaps, for organisations to tackle remote hiring is the lack of proper digital infrastructure. Companies have had to rethink budgets and invest heavily in technology that will aid in remote recruitment processes.

Keep up with the (tech) Joneses

With many technology solutions available in the market, companies can face issues selecting the right fit for them. Customisable, end-to-end solutions from industry leaders could help resolve virtual hiring challenges for organisations.

Conclusion

Hybrid work models are becoming a topic of discussion in big corporations. As organisations are opening doors to fully and partially remote workforces, the need for virtual recruitment platforms is only going to rise in the coming years. Hirepro virtual hiring software is an end-to-end customisable solution that proves to be a low bandwidth virtual hiring platform and caters to every organisation’s hiring needs. Transform your recruitment process today. Email () to get the conversation going.