Hire Effectively in an Increasingly Virtual World

Having no alternative in the spring of 2020 but to shift most of their workforce to remote work environments, many employers also found themselves needing to create virtual hiring processes to fill newfound gaps in their teams and account for inevitable attrition. Working remotely does not suit everyone, so many employers have had to develop new protocols to align their hiring practices with their newly virtualized structures.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made many standard hiring practices, systems and routines obsolete or impractical. This, in turn, has required employers to embrace a virtual version of their hiring process. In doing so, many factors have had to be considered as benefits and drawbacks have revealed themselves.

Some of the key benefits of a remote hiring process are reduced costs and access to a larger talent pool, geographically speaking. It can also increase the speed of hiring because screening candidates can be partially or fully automated, contact can be made quickly online and fewer obstacles to scheduling assessments and interviews present themselves.

On the downside, the experience can seem significantly less personal and determining true cultural alignment is challenging. Making effective, long-term hiring decisions can be hard at the best of times. In the current environment, it is even more difficult.

Most human resources professionals rely on a healthy mix of art and science when hiring. The art exists in the realm of intuition, but the virtual hiring format severely limits the ability to apply the more esoteric elements of a HR professional’s toolbox.

As much as this might make hiring tough for most HR professionals, the need to reformat everything is unlikely to abate any time soon. In some cases, hiring may never go back to more analog modalities.

Use Different Procedures to Conduct the Same Process

Most of the companies I consult for are choosing to remain virtual for the foreseeable future. Some have even made the decision to let go of their brick-and-mortar leases. The future will undoubtedly offer opportunities to meet job candidates in person, but the digital future has fully arrived.

If necessity demands the modification of hiring practices to recruit talent effectively, the question for HR professionals becomes how to do that most effectively. Fortunately, many of the same principles that guided in-person hiring apply equally in today’s digitized workspace.

Practices like vetting resumes, administering preemployment tests, conducting personality or behavioral analyses, and checking references all work well online. Many employers are also using more automation such as chatbots and one-way pre-interview systems to answer frequently asked questions and streamline the early steps in filtering candidates.

Most importantly, putting people first remains essential. Even though this is one of the biggest challenges the pandemic has created due to social distancing and physical separations, it must be done.

See Who You Could Be Working With

Despite the availability of a wide range of digital solutions to make remote hiring relatively efficient, employers that historically relied on in-person interactions and interviews with job candidates are struggling to adapt and maintain strong virtual hiring performances.

In-person interactions provide verbal, visual, emotional and auditory information in an abundance that no phone call or videoconference can match. Reading a candidate’s energy and enthusiasm is also easier in a face-to-face meeting.

Now, with in-person contact restricted, refining virtual hiring process requires considering how to outline the format and expectations for virtual interviews. Strive to personalize interviews by sharing information about the people who will be asking questions and by presenting overviews of what the department and organization do. Consider talking the candidate through a virtual tour of the facilities. All this can help bridge the physical gap and humanize what can be quite an impersonal process.

Another step that can pave the road to a positive virtual hiring experience is choosing the appropriate interface. By now, most people know which videoconferencing tools and platforms they prefer. But it is worth thinking about when to use videoconferencing during the interview process and whether there are any points at which it makes sense to have a regular phone conversation.

I do not advise relying too heavily on phone calls. Video interviews provide important verbal, visual and auditory cues to both the interviewer and the candidate, which makes it easier to form personal connections. Video also offers a better sense of a candidate’s demeanor, level of engagement and other crucial attributes.

A phone call still delivers verbal and auditory cues, but the emotional and energetic elements of communication will not come across as clearly. Video chat has now become quite accessible. Whenever possible, it should be viewed as the preferred method for meeting with and interviewing candidates.

Do Not Let Your Texts Do Your Talking

I also recommend limiting the use of emails or texts to work out schedules and engage in extended dialog. A brief call can be much more efficient for setting up an interview. Alternately, a scheduling platform can be used to get this task done.

A big problem with email and text messages is that the meanings of words can blur, making it easy to misinterpret the sender’s intent and motivations. While emailing or texting a job candidate is often necessary, especially when a person is being vetted for a role such as customer support that requires using these forms of communication, interacting over video or during phone calls is the surest way to determine more nuanced elements, like the cultural alignment between a candidate and the organization’s environment.

The key to adapting successfully to virtual hiring will be keeping the humanity in the process as much as possible. Maintaining a human connection will offset deficits that inevitably exist in the digital realm. While streamlining some steps will happen, hiring managers and HR teams cannot defer completely to technology. Fostering and maintaining human connections will benefit everyone involved.

Though virtual hiring might be new to you and your organization, your confidence with the tools and practices will improve. A new normal will settle into place, and we will all look back on this time of transformation as simply another stage in the evolution of the hiring process.