3 Top Tips for Recruiting Remotely
Working remotely provides a lot benefits to a business. It doesn’t only help you open up your candidate market when you are recruiting but also provides a number of financial benefits like increased profitability, productivity, engagement, and retention.
Given the current surreal circumstances, remote work is a requirement and almost every single business around the globe needs to adapt to working remotely.
Here are a 3 tips on recruiting remotely for those who have not done it before.
Define the characteristics of top employees
In short, CVs and a list of work experiences are not enough. When employing remote workers you need to dig deeper and find out what makes your employees tick. The best starting place is to ask your current top remote workers to find out their core drivers. Then, when interviewing, look for the same key characteristics in new candidates.
For those who are completely new to the remote environment here are a couple of common characteristic of great remote employees (on top the hard skills required like ability to self-organise, prioritise or proficient writing).
- Driven by self-development: People who want to take initiative and responsibility for their action as they see the opportunity for self-development.
- Trustworthy: The whole concept of remote work is based on trust. If you don’t have it, managers will loose sleep over not knowing what’s happening and employees will feel micro-managed. Make sure you can trust your employees!
- Okay with autonomy: When recruiting for remote roles you are most likely looking for people that don’t feel anxious or de-motivated when given freedom to decide how things are done.
However, it is worth noting that those will vary depending on your culture. You really want to recruit someone who will add value and grow your culture.
For the next month, FLOCK provides 25 free culture assessments that can help you define your culture benchmark and recruit based on culture-match using data-driven software. Sign up here!
Pick the right tools
When working remotely, it is very important to be able to utilise technology to create digital profiles in the recruitment process for a number of reasons:
- All-round overview of candidates before the hire
- Identify the best manager/team once hired to help new employees grow
- Find best ways to develop/retain the new employee
Feel free to consider the following tools:
Video interviewing
Tools like Hinterview, SparkHire, or LaunchPad provide a very comprehensive solution to watch all your candidates on video answering your pre-defined questions. They even go to the extend of using Artificial Intelligence to analyse the way candidates speak to predict future performance in a specific role.
Screening tools
In a nutshell, screening tools may be divided into the following groups: Aptitude & Skills, Personality and Values/Culture fit. The main advantage of them is the ability to quickly identify great candidates and use that information to further develop employees once hired.
- Aptitude & Skills – If your role requires specific skills (i.e. coding) those tests are particularly useful to sieve through candidates there are hundreds of assessments available for a variety of skills, IQ or EI. Simple google IQ or EI test to find them.
- Personality – You can screen for various personalities that fit well with a specific role (i.e. developer or a sales manager). You may use traditional psychometric tests for it (i.e. Belbin, 16 Personalities, Insights). However, there are a number of challenges that relate to psychometric tests and its ‘user-friendliness’ & ‘actionability’. You can find a further analysis of the psychometric industry in one of past blog posts here. The one that definitely deserves to be mentioned is Crystal which assesses your personality based on the way you behave online!
- Values & Culture Fit – this space really determines the performance of an individual. You may have the best skills and the best personality for the job but if your values are not aligned and you are not motivated it is just not going to work… Values are the glue to keeps everyone together, especially when working remotely. FLOCK specialises in assessing this alignment and finding out how to leverage people’s values to ensure their fast growth in an organisation.
If you are looking for great agencies who will ensure a values fit with your candidates we recommend our partners: Langham Recruitment, NQB Recruitment, Lorien Recruitment, Spinks
On-boarding
On-boarding is as important as recruitment (if not more). Make sure you on-board & grow your employees from day one. Here are a couple of good practices:
- Build Employee Playbooks: Create a digital library allowing employees to teach one another. Use document-sharing software (i.e. Gdrive) so everyone can edit and share ideas within one shared file to ultimately collaborate and save time. It is great for employee development and on-boarding
- Ready on Day 1: If you want your employees to feel empowered pick a couple of ‘low-hanging fruit’ tasks which can be completed within the first 24-48h of new employment. This shows them right away that they joined your company to create an impact.
- Virtual cappuccinos: Video calls with other members on the team helping new hires to get to know each other a better and feel part of the organisation.
