In this time of social distancing, you can easily stay in contact with your talent pool by email and text. So much of our hiring process takes place in a digital landscape that connecting applicants to employers is already second nature. To stay competitive when you’re engaging in remote hiring, there are certain types of tech that will help give your process a boost.
Laying The Groundwork
Some sectors are currently on a downturn, while some jobs are in high demand. So whether you are able to take a breath or need to seek out talent quickly, cultivating your talent pool by engaging recruitment marketing tools will always have a positive impact on your future talent searches. Recruitment marketing tech platforms like Ascendify can help you market your organization as a whole rather than with a single particular job ad—candidates can become interested in a job at your organization before a vacancy opens up. Recruitment marketing platforms help by building brand awareness on social media and careers sites, and can also help with managing other talent pool development opportunities like virtual career events.
Sourcing Embedded In Job Ad Tech
When you have a specific vacancy to fill remotely, a programmatic job ad platform can help you with sourcing. The great thing about job ad tech is that it targets both active and passive candidates, finding them where they search on the internet in their daily life. How? Simply put, each of us creates a digital footprint every time we browse the internet—from the sites we visit to even the physical location we happen to be sitting in when we log on. There is a pattern to how talented people find their jobs and where they are likely to search.
Rather than simply posting an ad on a job site, job ad tech is able to scour the internet and source candidates that are likely interested in reading your job ad and qualified for the position—whether they go looking for it or not. A programmatic job ad platform like Pandologic’s pandoIQ can help create a smart remote hiring strategy via a combination of powerful algorithms and big data. In essence, sourcing is based on historical job ad data and real-time ad performance assessment. This is an invaluable tool for sourcing at any time (not just in an era of social distancing) because so much of the job search happens in a digital landscape.
Facilitating The Interview Stage
The biggest hurdle for remote hiring is in the final stages of the hiring process when recruiters actually meet with candidates. The reviews are in: people find video conferencing and Zoom meetings very draining. While the function of remote meetings and interviews may be the same, the experience is very different. From the standpoint of the HR professional conducting remote interviews, the norm to conduct multiple rounds for multiple vacancies may become pretty arduous.
Luckily there are alternatives to enhance the remote interview process. One such tool is a coding assessment, a fully remote and evaluative supplement to the interview. Essentially, candidates receive your invitation to take a test, which will produce a detailed strengths and weaknesses assessment of personality and skills appropriate to the job role. Platforms like TalentSorter or HR Avatar allow for assessments that help recruiters facilitate side-by-side comparison of candidates. The assessments can also be automatically scored to select top-tier candidates based on your set of job criteria and benchmarks. Instead of traveling for a face-to-face interview, candidates who might normally make a first round of interviews can spend time on this alternative assessment test.
Another helpful tool for the remote interview is a video interviewing platform like VidCruiter or MyInterview. As opposed to a simple Zoom call or phone call, this software is designed to aid the interviewer and may include things like automated scheduling software to set interview times or digital interview guides that help facilitate the process. AI tools embedded in the software can help assess candidate qualities like professionalism or reasoning based on their answers. In addition to helping HR conduct a remote interview, AI software can help reduce bias in candidate assessments by providing evaluative data in addition to the interviewer’s subjective evaluation.
One thing to realize about remote hiring is that we already possess a digital framework to stay connected with people. Whether it’s the virtual job fair or the remote interview, tech can help keep employers and candidates connected in a time when remote hiring is a necessity. In fact, as companies consider offering more remote work or work from home opportunities, the remote hiring experience and digital tools that come with it may have lasting worth into the future.