A handy guide to virtual recruitment

What is virtual recruitment?

Virtual recruitment, also known as remote hiring, means the entire hiring process for a candidate is conducted virtually. Right from sourcing and screening candidates to interviewing and hiring them, each recruitment stage is virtual, without any face-to-face meeting, aided by technology and recruitment software.

Technology is the biggest enabler of virtual recruitment

Virtual sourcing via online job postings or virtual events
Virtual interviews through video calls
Remote collaboration through recruitment software
Onboarding tools to roll out offers and e-sign documentation

Sometimes the term remote hiring is used to refer to virtual recruitment. But we can also use remote hiring as a term that refers to hiring remote employees for a company.

Unless the tech used for virtual recruitment provides us with teleportation abilities, virtual recruitment comes with its own set of challenges. But let’s start off by looking at all the benefits it rakes in first.

What are the benefits and challenges of virtual recruitment?

Pros:

Save on all the travel costs!
Typically, the costs of hiring are high when done in person. Companies often end up paying for the candidate’s commute to the place of interview, and if we have many candidates from a different city than the office, then the costs just keep piling up. With virtual recruitment, all interview expenses spent on travel or commute amount to zero.
Schedule an interview at brief notice
Virtual recruitment means that the interviewer and interview can connect remotely, and logistical issues no longer stand in the way as an obstacle to be crossed before setting up an interview. No more scrambling around for meeting rooms or flight availability for scheduling interviews.
Conduct multiple rounds of interviews with ease
Many recruiters struggle with balancing candidate experience and interviewers’ availability when there are multiple rounds of in-person interviews. After all, you don’t want the candidate to be inconvenienced by traveling multiple times to your office. Virtual interviews solve this conveniently. Multiple interviews can be scheduled over a few days since the candidates only need to click a button to attend an interview, every single time.
Access a wider talent pool
Recruiting virtually opens up access to talent in multiple geographic locations since travel expenses or logistical issues (refer points 1 and 2 above) are no longer relevant. This gives opportunities for you to open up your search criteria while hunting for talent and increases your possibility of finding great talent.
Increase productivity or candidate throughput
With virtual screening and virtual interviews, it becomes possible to assess multiple candidates on the same day comfortably. This leads to an increase in the productivity of the overall hiring process and the recruiters.
Organize interview drives or job fairs effortlessly
Virtual sourcing through events and interview drives makes it feasible to run an interview drive with much less planning than an offline event or drive demands. No infrastructure setup or costs. All that’s needed is syncing the schedule of the panel members, which is an easier problem to solve.

Of course, everything isn’t hunky-dory in virtual recruiting. It does come with a few challenges.

Cons:

Difficult to coordinate remotely
Hiring usually involves numerous follow-ups - with the candidates, with the hiring managers, with the interview panel members. An increase in the number of candidates through virtual recruiting means the remotely done follow-ups are amplified multiple times but without the comfort of accessing a colleague at their work desk nearby.
Insufficiency of current infrastructure
Your company might or might not have invested in tech for HR operations. If you fall in the latter category, as a recruiter, you would struggle to seamlessly shift your recruiting process virtually. There’s only so much you can do with spreadsheets and word documents without better tech solutions before you call it quits.
Requires transformation at the org level
It does not suffice for just the talent acquisition team to shift their processes virtually. It is important for the overall organization to embrace virtual recruitment and join forces with the HR team to ensure a smooth transition to the new way of working. The success of virtual hiring depends on how well it is adopted by your entire organization.
Candidate experience might take a hit
A pleasant smile or a warm handshake - don’t underestimate the big contribution that these small gestures make to deliver good candidate experience. Virtual processes mean that this human touch becomes a missing component since the candidate can definitely not see you smile over a voice call or feel your handshake on video.
Tough to gauge culture fit
How a person engages with the environment says a lot about who they are as individuals and gives a peek into their value system beyond the words they use to describe themselves. Assessing a candidate in their natural work environment is almost impossible in an online recruitment process.

How to shift to virtual recruitment or remote hiring processes?

Like it or not, your organization has decided to move ahead with virtual recruitment as the standard. What are the changes that need to be made?

Analyse all parts of your hiring process

Identify which parts need your immediate attention to transition online. Most or all of your sourcing efforts would already be virtual. Interviewing, offer management and onboarding are some of the tough areas to conquer virtually. Don’t miss out on smaller but important parts like collecting interview feedback from the panel.

Bring on gradual change

Don’t blindly change all your processes overnight. Some of your existing processes might still work well virtually too. So don’t go about fixing them all unless they pose a challenge to the rest of the hiring process.

Invest in the right tools

We can’t emphasize this one enough! A workman is only as good as his tools. We have also made a handy list of the tools you would need below to cruise through remote recruitment with ease.

Track the impact and improve

You won’t get everything right on day 1. There will be goof-ups. Productivity might take a hit before it goes up. March on through these teething problems and victory awaits you mighty warrior! What you shouldn’t do is miss out on tracking the impact that moving to virtual recruitment is having on your hiring process and its output. Tools like Freshteam provide you with reports that help you do this. They can help you track metrics like cost-per-hire, time-to-hire, etc. with ease.

What tools do you need for virtual recruitment?

Investing in the right technology is crucial for the success of online or virtual recruiting. We’ve put together a quick list for you.

1. Recruitment software or ATS

You can’t win at the game without this one. A good recruitment software like Freshteam can help you

Source candidates
Coordinate across job boards
Send emails to your candidates
Collaborate with your team
Schedule interviews
Collect interview feedback

2. Video interview software

This one is a no-brainer. Virtual recruiting is pretty much synonymous with video interviews. You can go for free versions of video interview tools like Google Meet or Zoom to check what works best for you before upgrading to their pro versions which have a bunch of additional features that are quite useful. Get video interview software which is able to integrate with multiple video interview tools.

3. Employee Onboarding Tool

This helps you address the most challenging question that arises during virtual recruiting - ‘How do you onboard the new hire remotely?’ A good onboarding software makes a world of difference to your virtual onboarding process with convenient onboarding checklists for your team, employee onboarding kits and e-signature features.