It is very challenging to hire remote workers, when the chances of not meeting them in person are very high, due to geographically divided locations and severe pandemic issues for safeguarding the health of everyone connected to you or not. Hence a very firm and skilled step by step guide is needed to hire people by following virtual hiring processes. And those processes are needed to be designed wisely in order to hire a best resource.
Common or Traditional methods
Since hiring is one of the hectic and stressful job, as it requires complete scanning of skills and more importantly of personality. Because if a semi-skilled person is hired then skills can be taught and delivered on need basis. But it becomes a disastrous situation for everyone if the hired person is a depression patient or a psycho. The above scenario is valid for the process when it is executed on site with face to face interaction. And such people, most of the time skip with such scanning process due to several reasons that are mentioned below:
- HR does not execute personality scanning process
- Focus is on skills only
- Sometimes psycho people are so smart to hide themselves by building an alternate personality
- Previous working history is ignored
- Responsibility checks are not tested
Think of a scenario when hiring a person, whom you never met and probably will not even meet after hiring or may be just once. Since most of the remote workers live out of station or may be abroad. Now to scan all the above mentioned things we require special skills. Since things are virtual then chances of above mentioned problems become high or very high.
Since the day, this world is facing Pandemic, the trend of working remotely has increased exponentially and we need to coup up with the challenges of hiring by using diversified methods and skills of hiring.
Simple traditional method of hiring does not work and most of the organizations are still using following traditional methods for hiring remote workers:
- Face to face interviews by using camera
- Recording the interview sessions
- Assigning tasks to complete and submit within specified time line.
- Conducting multiple rounds of interview
So we will go step by step for hiring a best remote worker.
Step 1 – Defining the need properly
By this we mean to say that the easiest way to attract candidate is to confine the job ad to the needs of role. For example if a graphics designer is being hired then define the job role as per need. Do not write everything that a graphics field has in it. There are many tools, Maya, Adobe, etc. so that does not mean the candidate should know all the tools and all types of techniques beings used in it. A best example is to limit the scope of job role to the actual requirement and what actually the company or project requires.
By doing this we will get many talented people who can do what you want them to do for your company. And some of them will be able to do even more with more skill set.
Step 2 – Posting the job on a freelance platform
After the job ad is formalized and made self-explanatory, this should be posted on a freelance platform like Synerge. The post should not be restricted to some platforms only i.e. Job hunting websites but, it can be posted on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs and on your own website also. It can also be emailed to Universities and to friends and ex-colleagues too. When it is advertised on multiple platforms then naturally a handsome amount of resumes and proposals are received perhaps. And sometimes few applications are received, that means the resources are in scarce, then we have to choose from the available ones only.
Step 3 – Sorting out the applications/Resumes
The job applications are sometimes overwhelming in number so we need to find out the most relevant and needs a good filter for. And this is done because we don’t have plenty of time to go through every resume one by one and find out the right candidate. The CV can be filtered by using following techniques:
- Keywords
- Number of experience
- Skills required particularly
Then we can choose the most relevant and experienced people that we find after filtering and call them for interview and they could be 2 or 3 or even 4, depending on the number of vacant positions.
Step 4 – Formalizing the Interview flow and questions
By formalizing means, one should be able to evaluate the things are actually required for doing a particular job. That job could be any type, e.g. Accounts officer, Administrator, filing, computer operator, data entry operator, SQA engineer, Dot Net developer, a designer, an illustrator, or even a project manager, etc. The special skills are required in every sort of hiring but for remote workers they are very essential to use them, so that a best worker can be hired. So, before conducting an interview the interviewer should know what I am going to ask and what my level of satisfaction is. And expectations should not be too high from any candidate, because if they are not set low then it becomes very hard to find anyone.
Step 5 – Conducting the interview
Conducting the online interview, is not same as face to face, therefore there are some pre-requisites to it. And they are as follows:
- Video camera
- Recording the interview session with permission of candidate for future reference
- Start interview by introducing yourself and the company itself
- Ask the candidate to define himself/herself briefly
- Evaluate the skill set in an ascending order means ask the name of the skill and then dive a little into it. This will give a clear idea about the expertise level.
- Ask the candidate about the reporting style, that how they report their daily assignments/tasks.
- Ask them about their communication style.
- Observe the gestures of the candidate while answering the questions
Step 6 – Examine the attitude and personality
After getting the knowledge about the skill set, more focus should be given on following things, the reason that it is very important, as many remote workers, work with multiple projects or may be distribute the work to different freelancers. So we need to find out, that the work we provide should be get done on priority basis without any delays with dedication.
Few examples of questions are as below to ask them:
- What is your response time
- What touch frequency they require
- What is the best time to work and co-ordinate with them?
- What hardware machine they use
- When do you end your day
- When do you start your day
- What do you do when someone disturbs while you are doing work
- How many breaks do you take while working
- Do you like research and development type of tasks
The above set of questions will give a great insight of someone’s personality and let you think about the adjustment in your remote team. Hiring is not a problem but hiring the right candidate is always a problem. This is very normal that candidate also rejects the company. So the skills are required in representing your company as well. The company profile should be well build and presented.
Step 7 – Finalizing the candidate
A final offer can be made after shortlisting and selecting the candidate. But here we need to make sure few things listed below:
- Check the references (mandatory action)
- Check recommendation/s
- Previous pay scale
An offer can be made after looking into above mentioned things. And then if he/she accepts the offer, then onboarding and orientation can be done.
The fact of hiring is that, as company scans the candidate for everything they want, the candidate also scans the company in the same way to explore whether it will add up some value in his experience or not. Therefore it is very important to maintain a decorum of yourself also while hiring is going on.
So the above technique and questions for interviewing the remote worker would help us in hiring a candidate that is not 100% match but near to 100%. As the additional questions and techniques will for sure improve the quality of hiring as compared to traditional style of interviewing.
Conclusion
Hiring anyone for any position remotely is always a challenging job and sometimes risky because company provides access to certain things, that are called company assets and if the person misuse them for his/her own personal benefits then that would lead to a non-pleasant situation. Therefore we should always look for innovative methods for hiring best candidates and diversify our thinking to adopt new styles. The benefits will for sure come out of new things, because changing the style will add-up the value for sure, hence there is no harm in using new and unique styles to reform the hiring processes.
