How To Find And Onboard Great Candidates Remotely

Almost half of managers and small business owners indicated that they underestimated how challenging a hiring process was and experienced issues with bad hires. Not only does it waste a lot of time and effort, it could also allow you to lose customers or other good employees. If you have multiple bad hires, the culture of your company could become rotten and it’ll be a struggle to attract and retain talents. The cost of replacing an employee is surprisingly high. In most companies, the cost of replacing an employee is about 20 per cent of the annual salary. Thus, your people management cost skyrockets if you have high people turnover. The cost also can be high if you are losing them to your competitors.

Many businesses are rethinking how they manage their people after the global shutdown due to COVID-19. Being forced to work remotely has made them question the necessity of an office. Facebook announced that they will support working remotely indefinitely. Even when the pandemic is over, the remote culture is likely going to stay. Having a remote culture means that the workforce could be from anywhere and cost of labour may be reduced if one can find good candidates residing in areas with lower average salary expectations or cost of living.

So what do businesses need to do differently when employing remote resources?

1. Reconsider Role Requirements

If you are willing to hire outside of the country to have a wider pool of more cost-efficient talents, you should consider working rhythm and hours of managing employees from various locations. Relevant work experience may also translate differently and language requirements may also be of concern. Employees must have access to good wifi so their work wouldn’t be interrupted.

Furthermore, candidates who are working remotely may need to possess different types of qualities. They need to communicate regularly and should not require so much supervision. They also should be organised as they’ll need to document their progress diligently. These qualities cannot be detected from a CV. You can determine these qualities from a cover letter and interviews. Thoughtful cover letters can be used to filter out candidates who are more likely to possess desirable soft skills and characteristics. You may also want to use personality tests to gain additional insights into candidates in consideration. Many businesses leverage case studies, mini-tests, and assignments in the interview process to improve the accuracy of their candidate assessments. These steps allow businesses to build the right teams and culture required for their long-term success.

2. Provide the Right Tools

While not having a physical office (or having a much smaller office) can reduce the cost significantly, additional tools and devices may need to be provided to employees to ensure a smooth working rhythm. The employees should be provided with basic devices such as laptops, monitors, phones, etc. In addition, there may be software tools such as Zoom or Asana to help facilitate team discussions and collaboration. If employing casual or hourly employees, there are tools available to monitor employee productivity by tracking laptop and web activities.

Keep in mind that implementing cybersecurity can be a little more challenging in a remote environment. Setting up the devices with proper protections should be carefully considered.

3. Establish New Rhythm

Most people who’ve worked in corporate settings are familiar with remote collaboration. If they need to work with a colleague from another office, they only have phone and emails at their disposal. But adopting a mostly remote culture will require new standards of working rhythm to be implemented. You may want to explore different ways of information sharing and getting confirmation that the information was absorbed by each individual employee. Loss of healthy working rhythm could have immense impact on employee productivity. Each people manager should be coached on driving a good rhythm for their remote teams and managing team morale, progress and communications. Having a simple, consistent schedule of check-ins is highly recommended and making reporting progress/updates easy will keep the team motivated.