The current state of the world has not only made virtual recruiting familiar, but made it a fundamental necessity for most businesses. For the foreseeable future, it’s both impractical and unsafe to encourage a lobby full of interviewees. That leaves the inevitable question of how to make your virtual recruiting better and more effective. Follow these four tips that will help make your process more successful:
It’s a sad fact that many businesses post job descriptions that bring in apparently qualified candidates who prove bad fit hires. It’s as true for virtual recruiting as in-person recruiting. This routinely stems from a lack of appropriate focus in the description itself.
The job description winds up being an extended wish list of skills or experience or both. Unfortunately, that’s an excellent way to land an overqualified and soon-to-be, deeply dissatisfied employee. A good job description should offer a precise list of the actual skills, experience, and traits the job requires.
Using social media can feel like a tricky proposition for businesses. Social media sites tend to trend popular for a while before seeming to fall off the map. All is not, however, lost.
You can focus your straight-up recruiting efforts on career-centric social media sites like LinkedIn. You can use more popular sites likes Instagram, Facebook, and even Twitter for the hazier brand-building efforts that make your business attractive to future employees.
While a basic phone screening will do for initial contact, nobody wants to participate in final-round interviews over the phone. After all, it’s very difficult to glean information about interpersonal friendliness and face-to-face confidence while staring at a speakerphone.
In a world where face-to-face interviews won’t fly, a video interview is the next best thing. Nobody has to wear a mask, which will help everyone relax. You also get a much better read on how a person will interact on the day when everyone returns to the office full-time.
Asking the right questions is almost more important in virtual recruiting than in-person recruiting. For example, let’s say you’re hiring for a remote position where the person’s responsibilities involve minimal contact with the office or customers. In a case like that, skills-based and behavioral questions are the relevant questions.
On the other hand, let’s say you’re doing a temporary remote hire for an executive assistant with a plan to bring them in-house down the road. That interview still needs skills-based and behavioral questions, but culture-fit questions become a critical component as well.
The virtual recruiting process can look daunting at first blush. Yet, making it work is mostly a matter of modifying existing hiring practices. Job descriptions get a greater focus on actual needs instead of wants. You de-emphasize factors like culture fit for remote positions where they’re mostly irrelevant. You replace in-person interviews with video interviews. Social media becomes more prominent for outreach and branding.
Have you deployed strategies like these and still struggled to fill roles? Let Timpl help you find candidates for your process.