Are you planning to implement a remote hiring method and looking for best tools to evaluate remote hiring tips for your business? All of the critical areas are covered in this guide. We are going to cover all aspects related to remote recruiting. As the technology and tools can make communication smooth and easier among employees, many organizations are switching to a remote working environment, especially during this pandemic. Here we will discuss the following points to hire remote employees successfully:
- How can you find and hire remotely?
- List of useful tools to evaluate remote hiring
- Hiring challenges
- Pros and cons of remote hiring
Best Tips to Find & Tools to Evaluate Remote Hiring
One can hire the employees, and the following listed tips can help you for the same:
1. Social Media Platforms
The researchers have proved that nine out of ten companies use social media to hire or source candidates. They use social media as the main tool when they look for work. That means your organization’s presence on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn is also very important. When you post something on social media, sharing is most important.
2. Employee Referral
Your existing employee referral can also be used for remote hiring right candidates. Employee referral is one of the best ways to recruit new employees. It can be a cheaper and fast way to hire employees.
3. Meetup Groups
Remote hiring is focused more on global recruitment rather than recruiting local employees. However, there may also exist some efficient remote local employees. The use of some local meetup groups in your local area can get you a success rate.
4. Remote Job Portals or Sites
There are plenty of remote job boards and sites that specialize in sourcing remote employees. Some of the popular, trusted, and suitable sites include FlexJobs, Upwork, WorkInTech, and many others. These sites have qualified, experienced, and verified remote employees. The list of these employees can help the recruiter in evaluating their reliability.
5. By Advertising on Your Company’s Website
You can advertise for recruiting remote employees on your website or blog. By using remote recruitment tools, you can attract efficient and relevant candidates interested in your brand. In this way, your site can be a great tool to hire an efficient employee.
Some Essential Qualities to Hire Remote Employees
Some technical or specific skills of the remote employees depend on their role, but still, there are some essential and basic skills that remote workers should possess are listed below:
1. Good Communication Skills
Good communication is an important and essential skill to manage the work for a remote working team. Organizations always want to hire an employee who can communicate effectively. Testing of communication skills of your remote employee is an essential step. You can either ask a few sets of questions for this or take a test as well. The questions that you can ask maybe:
- Tell us something about yourself.
- Tell a reason due to which you want to switch your organization?
- Describe a situation when you have influenced your manager and been appreciated by your employer.
Regular communication and collaboration is an important aspect, and you can ask your employee for the same.
2. Organizational Skills
Remote employees may have to work unsupervised or with lease supervision, so they should be highly organized. It may require high prioritizing and managing skills. You may not be able to manage the things if someone drops the email at the 11th hour about non-completed work. To test their organization skills, you can ask the following questions:
- How can you prove your perfection?
- What will happen if your subordinate or teammate asks too many questions and your work gets hampered?
- How do you prioritize the tasks?
3. Reliability
For any remotely working employee, trust is the foremost aspect. Sometimes, this may be difficult to judge, and you may have to believe in your employee’s reliability. You can assess their pre-employment skills through some assessment tests. Here are a few open-ended questions that can help you in testing the employee’s reliability:
- What will you do if you have to speak for yourself in an unfavorable situation?
- How did you admit your mistake ever in front of your coworkers or colleagues?
- How did you handle the time of your failure?
4. Technical Skills
If we are talking about a remote working environment or remote employee for any job role or profile, the employee will have to be tech-savvy. If your organization uses any specific tool or program, you can test the employee to assess his technical skill. For example, you can test the remote employee when hiring whether they can communicate through Slack or not, or he can operate or work on Google Docs, Github, or not. These technical skill tests can prove and judge their ability.
5. Self-Motivated
There is nobody around for the remote employees to look and check their work, so they have to be self-motivated. The remote team you are going to build has to complete their jobs, so they should be able to develop new and creative ideas. The employees should have critical thinking and creative minds to conduct their job.
You can assess your hiring team member’s skills by enquiring them about their most preferred management and working styles. If they are okay with minimal supervision, they can be the perfect fit for your remote team. You can ask the following questions to assess their efficiency:
- Can you work alone or want to be part of the team?
- What are your career goals?
- How do you keep yourself motivated, especially when you have a non-motivational teammate?
6. Self-Discipline
To manage a remote team or staff, self-discipline is of utmost importance. It is all about minimum distraction and completion of the assigned work or task. You can assess the employee’s self-discipline by asking them about their work routine and how they handle their distractions. The candidates should make sure how they handle the work during the strict deadline.
7. Adaptability and Flexibility
You can allow flexibility and autonomy to your remote employees as much as possible. However, some basic and necessary structure is still required. Like you can assess the employee’s performance weekly or monthly or once the assigned task gets completed. In this way, you can organically maintain and manage employee’s interest and their work.
However, to assess the adaptability of the employees, you can ask some questions like given below:
- If you have been working on a project for a few days and suddenly you are being informed that requirements have been changed, how will you manage and handle the new requirement? What will be your reaction in such a case?
- If you and your teammates are working in different time zones and have to conduct the meetings, how will you cope with that?
- If you are asked to complete any task in any predefined way, how will you achieve it?
8. The Way to Respond to Feedback
You may have to ask to modify the work done by your remote employees when you will not find their work up to mark. It may look awkward for a remote working environment if you ask your skilled remote staff to re-do any task. You can test the candidate’s ability to handle criticism by asking them how to handle the task when they fail to do it. For this, you can quickly assign a short and critical task and give them feedback to check their way to handle it.
Pros and Cons of Tools to Evaluate Remote Hiring Tips
So far, we have highlighted some of the popular and successful ways to hire remote employees and assess their skills. There should be several sorts of assessments that you can perform for remote employees, but any thorough evaluation also depends on the job profile requirement.
When you hire a remote employee for your team, there are some pros and cons, and in our next section, we will discuss the same. Let us discuss the same through the following points:
Pros
1. To Widen the Talent Pool
While hiring remote employees, you do not have to recruit the employees only from your nearby place. Instead, you will have to recruit them from the global environment. Suppose your firm is seeking talent with high-level skills with some specific qualities. In that case, it may be challenging to find precisely matched skills as there are several employees with some similar qualities.
2. More Engaged Team Members
Some organizations may feel that they may not control their remote employees efficiently and avoid hiring them. They may suppose that remote employees may decrease their work efficiency. However, practically this may be different. Remote workers may even show higher engagement and productivity.
3. Low Business Cost
The remote team may decrease the operational cost of the business. Several costs like office rent, travel cost, or equipment cost. By hiring a fully remote team, you can eliminate the entire operational cost of your business. However, if you work with the mixed model in which some employees work remotely while others work from the office, you can limit the business operating cost. Reports have been proved that Cisco, like a large organization, has saved even $277 million through this business model.
4. Flexibility for the Employees
In addition to the employers, the remote working or virtual working environment also offers advantages to the employees. The employees can create their working environment and create a better environment for working. Such a relaxed working environment may reduce the employees’ stress level and save their commute time and money.
5. Diverse Workforce
Organizations can use several tools to evaluate remote hiring across the globe, enabling businesses to hire their teammates from large geographical areas. It can expand the team size and add several skilled employees from different geographical regions. This way, you can bring new prospects and add more opportunities to your company.
Cons
1. Less Collaboration and Interaction
By building a remote team, you can lose certain things like brainstorming sessions, team meetings, and work away days. You can also limit social interaction and build the relationship in this way. It may sometimes make it difficult to maintain a unique work culture. However, if you want to create some remote employees’ opportunities, you can organize some events or plan some general interest channels. In this way, you can increase the communication among employees, and they can get the chance to interact with each other.
2. Communication Hurdles
One of the commonly seen issues of the process and tools to evaluate remote hiring processes is less communication among organizational employees. To increase and enhance the communication among employees, you can organize regular team meetings or plan some weekly activities. The team members can discuss their problems and discuss their communication as well.
3. Technical Issues
Remote work completely depends on technology. While working remotely, there may be certain times when there may be some technical issues. You can reduce such cases by planning the activities and providing your employees with basic technical equipment like laptops or Wi-Fi connections.
Final Words
Here we have covered all crucial aspects of hiring remote employees. You can use several tools and technologies to evaluate or assess the remote employee’s skills. You can consider these points if you are going to hire remote workers. During a pandemic, it has become essential to hire a remote workforce and complete the tasks effectively. You can use some of the best tools to support your remote hiring process.
Supersourcing can be an apt platform to find the right talent and evaluate remote hiring candidates. The platform provides you an option to get the right individual developers or an IT agency to hire them remotely.
