How To Improve Your Remote Recruiting Process

It’s common for businesses today to be unable to find a good employee, especially if their talent pool is local. So what are their options?

Many turn to outsourcing the role to a freelancer. While this may help complete a single project, it doesn’t address the underlying problem. Yes, it’s cheaper, but you’ll still be stuck in an identical situation a few months down the road.

Enter remote recruiting - a perfect balance between outsourcing and hiring a loyal in-house employee. 

To make this endeavor a success, you’ll need to fine-tune your hiring approach and discover the best strategies to successfully hire the right remote employees.

Here are the top tips for improving your remote recruiting process:

1. Write Effective Job Descriptions

You always need to offer a clear description of the position, regardless if you’re hiring remotely or locally. Remote employees located on other continents will need to know exactly what they’re committing to before even considering working for your company.

Look at it this way:

Companies are a dime a dozen, and highly skilled candidates who can contribute to yours in a meaningful way are quite rare. You should look at a job description as a way to attract these potential employees and present your business in the best light possible.

After all, that perfect employee needs to know you’re a good match for them as much as the other way around.

2. Be Prepared To Answer Hard-hitting Questions

With remote recruiting, you’ve got to be prepared to answer some serious logistical questions, so to speak. Your candidate will ask about overlapping hours and the times your in-house team is available for collaboration since they’ll have an unconventional work schedule. 

Additionally, you’ll need to be prepared to answer questions about the technology you’re using to support remote work, as well as workflows typical for your organization.

3. Explore All Options

Finding someone to help you out with a short-term project is relatively easy. Remote recruiting, on the other hand, will take much more effort. This is because you’re not only looking for technical skills, but also trying to gauge if they’d be a good fit for your organization in the long run. 

The good news is that when hiring remote workers, you have a lot more flexibility and options since you’re not limited by geography and subsequently, time zones. 

This is why you should explore the entire spectrum of hiring options and look beyond the technical know-how. 

4. Offer Valuable Positions

Do you know who is a dream employee? They’re not only the individuals who get the job done -

 they are the ones who will treat your company like it’s their own. In other words, they’ll care about the development of your organization and its potential.

You can attract this type of employee by creating desirable positions, offering benefits, training options, along with flexible working hours. 

5. Connect With Your Candidate

Desite the fact you may never share a coffee with your remote employees, you need to treat them the same way you would any other employee. The same applies to remote recruiting. 

Be clear about your expectations from the get-go and look for enthusiasm about long-term employment. 

If you do end up hiring them, stay connected - if your employees work directly under your management, they’ll be more productive and their output will always stay consistent.

6. Put A Larger Emphasis On Soft Skills

Similar to the previous point, your remote workforce may never share a conference room with your in-house team, but their soft skills still matter. In fact, you could say these matter more for remote employees.

Not only do you want someone who understands the ethics of your organization and commitment to representing it in the best light possible, but you need someone with a plethora of other skills.

For instance, they need to be communicative and self-reliant. Since you won’t be able to supervise them directly, you should also insist on finding someone who has excellent time management skills.

7. Fine-tune your interview process

Most information you learn about a candidate doesn’t come from their resume - you learn it firsthand during the interview. Thus, improving your interview process is a great way to update your remote recruiting efforts.

However, while a well-prepared set of questions goes a long way in weeding out the bad or subpar candidates, you’ll have to take things a step further. 

Your main goal should be to establish a connection with the person you’re interviewing. That way, you can get a taste of their personality and test if they’re a good fit for your company. 

Additionally, we recommend first coming up with a well-defined employee persona. You have to know the exact skills and abilities you’re looking for, which, in turn, allows you to cut to the chase and ask the right questions for each candidate.

Pro tip: Include the core members of your in-house team in the interview process. Their first impression also matters since they’ll be directly working with the candidate in the future. 

8. Outsource A Part Of Your Remote Recruiting Process

The interview is just the tip of the iceberg in the remote recruiting process. There’s also posting job listings, conducting preliminary interviews, checking references, etc. This is all time-consuming and expensive.

If you’re looking for employees with specialized sets of skills such as IT professionals, the easiest way to hire someone is by getting in touch with a tech staffing or recruitment agency.

Staffing agencies like Griffin Global already have a deep pool of tech talent to draw from and can pre-screen candidates to provide you with ready-to-work applicants. You only need to interview them and make the call.

This saves a lot of time and resources, seeing as you won’t waste time going through a bunch of applications or interviewing candidates who are not a good match.

Staying relevant with remote recruiting

The remote approach has been a relevant workplace organization model since the pandemic we shall not name hit the scene. Companies need to be aware of this fact when trying to expand their workforce.

Still, if you want your remote work experience to be successful, you need to find the people who will support you on your journey. It all boils down to implementing a mindful and direct approach to your remote recruiting process. 

Think of the tips we gave you when you start hiring and you’ll thank us later when the hybrid era in your company opens up new levels of productivity at a reasonable cost.

Good luck!