Before hiring a new person it’s important to ensure they’re going to be a good fit, have the right skills and work well with your existing team. But when you don’t have the option to meet candidates face to face before hiring it can seem difficult to be sure you’re making a smart hiring decision.
There are some great ways to improve your sourcing and hiring process now that remote working and has become more prevalent.
Define the ideal candidate
Define a core set of capabilities and must-haves before advertising the role. This way you can ensure that any potential candidates understand what you’re seeking and, ideally, only suitable candidates will apply. Although this isn’t foolproof, it should go some way to reducing the amount of time you will need to spend screening and qualifying candidates later in the process.
So, what are some of the main areas you can define? There are three definitive areas that you should consider when assessing an individual’s suitability and when drafting a job description or an advert.
Firstly, skills. What experience or expertise is vital for this position? Secondly, talents. Are there any abilities or natural characteristics that would help someone succeed in this position? For example, this could be creativity or natural leadership skills. And finally, behavior. Does this role require team-working or is it more likely to suit a self-starter or an individual who works well alone?
Although this can be challenging, it’s worth taking the time to pinpoint exactly what you need as this will drastically improve the efficiency of the hiring process moving forward.
Source for the role thoroughly
The vast majority of sourcing strategies are usually handled without in-person interaction. For example, posting on job boards, having a careers page on your website and advertising jobs on LinkedIn are all great ways of remotely sourcing talent. Outside of this, you can also attend online networking events and webinars, this is a great way to meet candidates who could be passively interested in a new role.
When sourcing for the role you’re recruiting for ensure to have a checklist of necessities — this will be based on the core capabilities you’ve already used to write the job description and the advert.
Another great way to reach potential candidates is to conduct a virtual job fair under your company branding. When you hold a virtual job fair you can use video presentations, interactive scenarios, feedback, and more to connect with potential candidates. From this, you can also find out the perception of your company and use this to improve where needed.
Offer a clear overview of the job
Writing a job description requires input from multiple people. Most importantly the person who is currently in the role and the person who will be managing the new hire. You can ask them questions such as, what is going to be required of the new person on a daily basis? What is their day-to-day schedule like? Are there any areas where they should have training or experience prior to starting? What are the key tasks they will be responsible for?
Outside of daily tasks and the job role itself, there are other considerations. For example, how will their time be tracked, or is the job results dependent only? Are there set hours? Set days? How should the new hire communicate with the line manager?
It’s a good idea to create policies and a working document that you can give to new hires so that they know exactly what is expected of them. This avoids confusion and will help candidates adjust to their new roles faster and with fewer issues.
Perfect your hiring process
A robust hiring strategy is extremely important if you want to create an efficient recruitment process. Utilizing a recruitment pipeline is a great way to ensure you are on top of candidates’ progress at each stage and is key to staying organized.
However, whether you’re hiring direct, working with an agent, or passively seeking candidates, having a strategy is key. It’s worth considering any data protection issues and how you’ll manage candidate details — this could be through a contact management system or specific recruitment software.
Have a great interview process
When interviewing remotely you need to have the correct technology in place to conduct interviews without interruption. This isn’t just video tools such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, or Microsoft Teams but also a decent microphone, fast internet connection, and access to diary management software for hiring managers.
Communication is key for this stage, there could be a number of people who need to be involved at this stage so you will need to be extremely well organized while also maintaining a level of flexibility. Fortunately, remote recruiting actually makes conducting and organizing interviews easier.
Candidates have far less travel time, it’s lower cost and it’s often easier to organize an interview over video at short notice than it is to ask someone to attend in person. Not only does remote interviewing have numerous benefits but remote working also means your pool of candidates can extend exponentially from a commutable radius to worldwide, or at least in the same timezone.
You should be upfront with how many rounds of interviews will be expected and also potentially start dates, this allows for candidates to plan and also improves their experience with your company.
Consider a trial period
Finally, if you’re unsure, you could consider offering a trial period instead of a permanent position straight away. It’s also possible to offer this from the beginning of your recruitment process — you can state that a job is a contract or on a temporary to permanent basis. This can work well for candidates and companies and allows both parties to assess whether they’re a good fit and want to continue to work together.
Upstack — matches startups with vetted software developers! Ready for a match made in Heaven? Get in touch!
Originally published at Upstack.co on Jan 12, 2022, by Joanna Blomfield.
