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How to Ace Your Remote Hiring Process:

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Looking at the rising number of remote employees, there is a need to hire right, fit candidates to build your product. Organizational goals are the same, only the way of work and recruitment process has changed. A few months ago, a telephonic conversation followed by a face-to-face interview were the key stages of recruitment process. However, remote hiring slowly became the norm as the world was hit with the pandemic.

To hire remotely, selecting the right and trustworthy candidates is extremally crucial for any organization. So, how you can ace your hiring process all without meeting the candidates in person?

Let’s look at the fundamental elements of remote hiring:

Remote Hiring metrics:

To get a fair idea of how your remote hiring team is performing and to measure the effectiveness of remote hiring process, deciding the key recruitment metrics is very important. Remote hiring metrics will help you get valuable insights at every stage of the recruitment funnel. Ther are various things to measure during the remote hiring cycle. Here are the most important remote hiring metrics that every human resource professional should track:

Sourcing Metrics:

Vacancy rate: It all starts with how many positions need to be filled. This metric gives you an idea about trends in the job market or your organization’s growth. If the vacancy rate is high, it indicates high demand or low supply of talent, high job churn status, and rapid business growth. It can be calculated as:

Number of applicants: It’s a very basic metric that will not tell you how many job fit applicants have applied. However, it will definitely help you measure effectiveness of your recruitment marketing initiatives.

High or low number of applicants indicates how effectively you are sourcing applicants, and it tells you how many candidates you need to attract in order to find a good hire. For instance, if you want to sourcing candidates for in-demand roles and still the number of applicants is low, it shows that the job description is not clear.

Application completion rate: Application completion rate is nothing but a ratio of how many people are actually submitting your job application form. High application completion rate means applicants are serious, and there is not glitch in your application process. But low application completion ratio means applicants are leaving without submitting. The reasons could be long and repetitive questions, demands sensitive, personal, or irrelevant information. It could also happen due to technical issues.

Application completion rate = Number of submitted applications / Total number of applications started

Time and Cost Metrics:

Time-to-hire: Time-to-hire is the most important remote hiring metric. Due to the global crisis, recruiting team of every organization is trying their best to hire remote employees as early as possible and support business continuity plans.

Time-to-hire means the number of days from the moment a candidate enters the pipeline to the moment the candidate accepts the job offer.

This metric is important to identify the loopholes in your remote hiring process and targets areas of improvement.

Time-to-hire = Day candidate accepted the offer - Day candidate entered the pipeline

Measuring time-to-hire is a great step to stay on top of your hiring process. This metric provides you inputs into the great and not-so-great parts of our recruitment process.

Cost-per-hire:

What expenses do you incur while a candidate goes through your recruitment funnel? It takes the total costs spent on recruiting for an open role which includes:

External cost: This consists of advertising cost, agency fees, candidate expenses, training cost, etc.

Internal cost: Time spent by recruiter and manager (avg. wages * hours spent), new hire onboarding time, lost productivity, etc.

(Total internal recruiting costs + external recruiting costs) / (total number of hires in a given time frame)

Cost-per-hire recruiting metric helps you measure how much it cost to hire a new remote employee. It can vary depending on the size of the organization, the level of the position, and the capability of a recruitment team.

Being a remote recruiter, you must be facing constant pressure to reduce cost per hire. The right way to control your recruiting cost is to create your detailed budget while keeping your average cost required to hire a new employee in mind.

Hiring Process Metrics:

Candidate response rate: Candidate response rate is the percentage of candidates who respond to a recruiter’s outreach. This remote hiring metric will help you track and analyze your candidate sourcing strategy in a different way. Candidate response rates help you identify which communication channel is more effective, which messages are understood by candidates properly, and when they respond. To improve your candidate response rate, you can take following actions:

  • Personalized approach
  • Follow up continuously
  • Use a multi-channel outreach strategy

Candidate response rate = (number of responses / number of candidates contacted) x 100

Offer acceptance rate: Offer acceptance rate is the percentage of job offers accepted by applicants. With the help of this metric, you can check the overall effectiveness of recruitment strategy. High acceptance rate shows that the remote hiring team has managed to fill the talent pipeline successfully, created and conducted effective and thorough remote hiring process, worked hard on providing good candidate experience, and offered the best offer to the candidates.

On the other hand, low offer acceptance rate shows that the remote hiring team failed to provide good candidate experience or may be the incentives are not competitive or the recruitment strategy is not effective.

Offer Acceptance Rate = (No. of Acceptances / No. of Offers) x 100

Roles and Responsibilities of Remote Hiring Team

The remote hiring team is responsible for designing and implementing remote hiring programs and policies that will help organizations manage the remote recruitment and work culture. They play a role that is strategic as well as operational, with an aim to hire employees that are capable of helping organization achieve its goals.

Remote hiring teams are responsible for everything: candidate sourcing, screening, interviewing, and hiring the right talent using effective remote hiring tools.

The number of people involved in a remote hiring process may be different in every organization. Most remote hiring teams include the following members:

Management

  • Designing remote hiring strategies
  • Monitoring and taking corrective measures if needed
  • Deciding priorities and goals while hiring remote employees
  • Determining the financial budget for remote hiring
  • Communicating goals and KPI’s to hiring managers and recruiters

Hiring Manager

  • Identifying the hiring needs
  • Notifying the recruiter about vacant job position
  • Providing detailed description about the role to the recruiters
  • Designing roles and responsibilities of hiring team
  • Helping and managing recruiter throughout the remote recruitment process
  • Setting expectations for remote interview process
  • Conducting final interviews to check job skills using video interviewing platform

Recruiter

  • Coordinating with hiring manager to know the recruitment needs
  • Resume screening
  • Identifying a proper method for candidate skills assessments
  • Performing background & reference checks
  • Scheduling telephonic and video interview with candidates
  • Coordinating with the hiring managers for interviews
  • Following up with hiring managers as well as candidates
  • Selecting the right remote hiring technology to communicate employer information and benefits during remote hiring process

How to Manage a Remote Interview Process:

Evaluate your current hiring process:

Switching to remote hiring is crucial for each organization these days. Recruiters and hiring managers are trying their best to hire remote employees with the necessary skills for the role. To hire job fit candidates, you should first utilize the moment to review and modify your current recruitment process into remote hiring get the expected outcome.

Earlier, hiring decisions were based on the multiple in-person meetings with potential applicants. Hiring teams were able to identify whether the candidate has required skills, competencies, values, and whether or not they are culture fit to perform once hired. However, when it comes to remote hiring, you need to think about the following questions to design and implement successful remote hiring process:

  • Does the current recruitment process give the information you require?
  • Does it set clear expectations and instructions for remote work?
  • Is it effective to hire remote employees?
  • What is the alternative for in-person meetings?

Choose the right remote hiring tools:

An accurate remote hiring tool gives you an opportunity to shortlist, interview, screen, hire, and onboard the right talent for your organization. Everyone is aware of the fact that to implement a successful remote hiring plan, choosing a right tool is extremally crucial. However, there are plethora of remote hiring tools available in the market and deciding which one is suitable for your recruitment needs is a complicated task.

How to select the right remote hiring tool?

  • Decide your recruitment goals: To decide which recruitment assessment tool to choose, you need to first define the purpose of the tool, what problems it would solve, and what results you expect in your remote hiring process. Identify your recruitment goals first and, then, search for a suitable remote hiring tool that can help you hire right talent for your organization.
  • Decide what type of remote hiring tools are required: Once you know your goals, the next step is to decide what kind of online hiring tools will enable you to conduct the remote recruitment process seamlessly. Some tools are better suited for conducting online interviews, some are essential for skills assessments and onboarding. You need to decide the tools as per your requirement and recruitment strategies.
  • Evaluate remote hiring tool as per your needs: Final step in selecting your perfect remote hiring tool is finding a tool that provides the right combination of all the features you need. If there are various vendors who fit your hiring needs, you need to compare and evaluate each one of them in order to make the right choice.

Set an Ideal Process for Your Remote Hiring Team:

Like regular recruitment program, you will also have to include multiple stakeholders when it comes to remote hiring. The process includes applying various methods, recruitment assessment tools, and metrics. Setting an ideal process and making your remote hiring team understand how it works is the most vital step towards hiring right fit candidates. So, to set an ideal remote hiring process, educate your team about how to conduct remote interviews by giving them the following information:

  • What are the ideal steps in remote hiring?
  • How to manage remote hiring workflow?
  • How should they customize the process according to specific roles?
  • How many candidates they should have in talent pipeline?

Communicate the Interview Details:

The success of your remote hiring strategy depends on how effectively you communicate with the applicants. Effective communication is required to carry out the hiring process with ease. While hiring remotely, it always better to communicate everything twice or thrice to the applicants. You must be a master in conducting remote interviews but it might be candidate’s first experience. So, provide each minute detail to them and improve your remote recruitment game. Let them know the below details:

  • The date and time of the remote interview
  • About your team members who will be conducting their online interview
  • The recruitment tool you are going to use

Moreover, it is vital that they are given sufficient time to understand the tool.

Ask the right questions:

During remote interview, you need to ask questions that will examine candidate’s remote working habits, behavior under pressure, and identify their motivation for working remotely such as:

  • What is your remote work experience?
  • How to you manage remote work hours?
  • What tools have you used to complete and manager remote projects?
  • Why do you want to work remotely?

Don’t forget tell about your company culture:

While working remotely, candidates will not get a chance to visit your office or meet your employees in-person. So, you have let them know everything about your company. Candidates who prefer a good company culture are most likely to join soon. It helps you attract potential employees and reduces your hiring efforts. To introduce our organization culture:

  • Give them introduction of each team
  • Tell them your company vision and mission
  • Let them know your company history and culture
  • What values you hold and what are your expectations from employees

Give candidates an assessment:

It becomes extremely difficult to gauge candidate skills and knowledge while conducting remote interview. You can give your candidates an online skills assessment or simulator with a firm deadline of a day or two. You will be able to evaluate their skills, competencies as well as see how they will work once hired, how quickly they work, and whether you like their work or not.