Remote work has been on the rise for a while now. Still, 2020 was when many companies had to switch to working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, companies started actively looking for remote workers. In some countries, like the United Kingdom or Spain, there are over three times more remote job postings than there used to be before March 2020.
Since you’re reading this blog post, it’s likely that your team also needs to conduct recruitment processes remotely. How to do it effectively?
Your remote hiring process should be flexible and scalable-you’ll likely hire remote employees for different roles and deal with different numbers of applicants. A well-curated recruitment toolbox will help you conduct hiring processes smoothly and provide a great candidate experience. In this blog post, we’ll list some tools that will help with different aspects of hiring remote workers.
What type of tools do you need for remote hire?
Granted, each company will have different needs when it comes to hiring remote employees. Still, the basic recruitment process’ stages remain the same. You need to attract applicants, screen them, interview the most promising remote candidates, and test their skills. Below you’ll find 10+ tools that can help you at different stages of this process.
Posting a job offer
You can increase your chances of finding the right remote worker by posting the job ad strategically. Sure, large, general job boards may also work, but there is a selection of websites dedicated to teams that work remotely. Remote candidates are likely browsing these boards, so why not use this to your advantage? Here are a couple of job boards you may want to check out:
Tracking candidates
One of the elements of a recruitment process that could be very time-consuming and inefficient is tracking candidates. Whether you’re hiring remotely or not, it will be very difficult to manage the process using just your email inbox. Fortunately, there are many tools that can help you keep track of the candidates and see where everyone is in the process. Importantly, you want a tool that supports collaboration so that, for instance, multiple people can leave their comments after a job interview.
You may want to look at the following apps:
- Recruitee – this tool allows you to create an engaging career page on your website, build candidate pipelines, or schedule interviews with ease.
- Workable – on top of candidate tracking, Workable enables you to publish your ad to multiple sites at once and search through a large database of potential employees.
- TalentWall – it offers an interactive candidate pipeline, plus dashboards to overview the recruitment processes at your company.
- iSmartRecruit – this AI recruitment software makes the hiring workflow smoother and integrates with numerous job boards, Gmail, Outlook and social platforms. Most importantly, it is affordable, customisable and has every feature your recruiting team needs.
What if you don’t want to invest in a dedicated Applicant Tracking System (ATS)? You can also adapt tools like Asana and Trello for candidate tracking purposes. It could be a quick and easy fix for you if you currently don’t have any system for tracking candidates.
You can find an Asana template prepared for candidate tracking.
Screening candidates
The number of remote job ads grew, but so did people’s interest in remote work. You might be surprised by the sheer number of candidates you’ll hear from after you post the job ad. Obviously, going through all of the applications and selecting promising candidates might take your team a lot of time. It’s one of the main reasons why some remote companies decide to use a skill test to screen candidates right off the bat. You can use Toggl Hire to create your own screening test to narrow down the number of potential employees to people that are truly qualified for the job.
Tools like HackerEarth Assessments help you screen top developers with ease. It allows you to objectively evaluate developers by providing a rich library of 17,000+ questions across 900+ skills to create assessments from! Get a deeper insight into a candidate’s capabilities with the insight-rich reports that are included with every test.
Conducting job interviews
Before you can chat with your potential remote employee, you need to schedule the meeting and align it with all the attendants’ schedules. We suggest that you start by looking at your team’s resource calendar and see who is available to join the meeting. It’s not the best idea to involve someone who already has too much on their plate, for instance, a high priority project. Resource scheduling software like Teamdeck – the resource management software – allows you to easily check your teammates’ workload and pick the right people to participate in job interviews at a given time.
Teamdeck will help you understand who has enough time to join the job interview as a peer interviewer.
Now that you have your preferred time slots for the interview, you can schedule the meeting with the candidate. The most convenient option is to share a scheduling link so that the interviewee can pick a fitting slot from your predefined ones. Tools like Calendly will be very useful here. You can also check if your ATS software has a similar feature, as some tools (e.g., Recruitee) have scheduling capabilities as well. Make sure that a potential time zone difference is accounted for!
For the interview itself, you will likely rely on video conferencing software. Many companies use Google Meet or Zoom for interviewing remote workers, but there are also other options. You can find video interview apps that have been specifically designed for recruitment purposes, for instance:
With Spark Hire you can conduct live video interviews or ask candidates to record their answers
Pre-employment testing
When hiring remote employees, many teams utilize test tasks to make sure that a given candidate has the necessary skills. Some ask for completing a test assignment before an interview, some after. Whichever is your way of recruiting, you shouldn’t forget about this stage of recruitment when building your toolbox. The goal is to make the task convenient to work on for the potential employee and easy to assess for the recruiting team. For instance, when you’re hiring a remote software developer, it makes sense to create a private repository on GitHub and ask the candidate to write code there. You’ll see this person’s work in a natural environment. Since the repository is private, you can also use it to upload your team’s feedback after the task is done.
When hiring remote writers, on the other hand, you’ll probably ask them to create a piece of content. Working in shared documents (e.g., Google Docs) will make it easy to provide specific feedback and archive the test tasks in the cloud.
Reference check
For some remote positions, you will want to run a reference check. It could be a tedious procedure, but there are tools that can simplify it for you. For example, with SkillSurvey, you can prompt your candidate to provide their references and automatically send them emails with surveys. Based on their answers, you will be able to evaluate whether this person is indeed a good fit for your team.
Are you ready to hire someone for your remote team?
Hiring a remote employee may seem like a huge challenge. Not only do you have to assess their skills without meeting face-to-face, but you also have to deal with the logistics of scheduling online screenings, interviews, etc. Luckily, it seems more complex than it truly is, as you have several tools at your disposal that can make your job much easier. At the same time, the process will also feel smooth to the candidate, which can positively affect the first impression your company makes on them.
We hope that our tips will help you hire excellent remote workers for your team. And if you want to read more about remote work, we have some resources that should be of interest to you:
- How to stay productive when working from home?
- Effective communication for remote teams
- Tools to build a well-performing and happy remote team
For some inspiration, make sure to check our roundups of companies that embraced remote work.
