Today, some 18% of the global workforce is fully remote. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed workers home at breakneck speed, resulting in 46% of full-time employees working remotely.
And nine out of 10 of those employees told a Gallup Poll they want to continue at least some percentage of work from home.
This trend is exacerbated by increased outsourcing and the demand for technical talent outstripping housing and local capacity in many regions.
Remote and fully online workplaces aren’t going away. Rather, they’re becoming more common as organizations shift to digital offices, look for offshore talent, and rely on workforces that can’t come into the office.
For those who want to keep up and compete in an environment where talent is no longer limited by geographic location, creating room and maintaining fully remote teams is important. But how do you find and attract talent in these fully virtual spaces? Below are six tips to help you in your remote recruitment for the right candidate.
6 Remote Recruitment Tips to Find Great Virtual Candidates
Write comprehensive job profiles
The key to maintaining digitized workforces lies in having thorough, professional job profiles. They allow you to assess your current workforce, including skills and talents, as well as help you hire new people.
For example, many organizations don’t have standardized roles across the full organization, nor competencies and skills mapped to those roles. You may find you have multiple people working in essentially the same roles under different titles.
Writing job profiles mapped to skill and competency frameworks help you align those inside your organization. You also learn exactly what you need from new people by listing the competencies for that role, rather than the qualifications.
Share the right information
Once you know a role’s requirements, express them clearly. That might mean communicating needs based on competencies and competency frameworks, or sharing hard skills and highlighting what’s most important in the role.
You also need to show the candidate you’re serious about them despite the role being fully remote. Be sure to include salary, benefits, and information about company culture in both the physical and online environments as well.
Use strategic assessments
Most organizations are accustomed to using assessments in some form, but they’re crucial for online candidates.
Assessing not only skills but also personality and soft competencies can give you a better idea of who you’ll potentially work with and how they fit into the digital environment.
While you can’t ask too much of candidates for fear of pushing away the good ones, you can prioritize which information you need to know and use assessments such as DISC to profile candidates.
Leverage personality assessments for team building
Making hires based on good team fit helps everything run smoothly. Knowing how someone will integrate into a team gives you insight into whether or not you want to hire them at all.
Once you commit to a hire, you can ask candidates to take more in-depth personality and skills assessments. These can gauge how they communicate, how they work, or how they mesh with the digital team.
Digital teams are less connected because they never see each other in person, so open communication and complementary work methodologies are crucial for productivity and building camaraderie.
Plus, if you already have someone on a team who struggles in their role, finding someone who does fit it allows you to shift teams and place people where they’ll be more effective.
Take advantage of references
Most of us have heard the adage that any person is just six degrees of separation from another. People know people, and those people know more people. Often, those connections are from past jobs, college, or similar social spheres. That means your employees likely already know great candidates (who they’d have an easy time working with).
Implementing referral programs allows you to reward your employees for introducing those candidates to the company. It can also save you considerably on the cost of advertising for and bringing talent into the organization, especially at an intermediate or even senior level.
Become a company remote employees want to work for
Good candidates want to work for good companies. Often, that translates to transparent, socially responsible, and willing to invest in employees.
Incorporating that into an online-only environment requires creativity surrounding benefits, the perks of working for the company, upward trajectory and promotional opportunities, and other things like salary and compensation.
Taking the time to be honest and upfront in job profiles and during interviews will allow candidates to make the right decisions and help you find your company’s best fit.
This engagement with the company, having opportunities for growth and development, and feeling like part of the team is something many fully remote workers lack. But even though they’ll never step foot in a digital office, they’re still as much a part of the company as someone who works in-office every day.
Be transparent and share benefits of the role and remote work (e.g., cleaning services or lunch delivery rather than a transit budget) to connect with future employees and show they’re part of the company.
Wrapping up: Discover great remote employees to build your A-team
Increasingly, more positions will become fully remote. This reduces transit costs, office sizes, and even your environmental impact. At the same time, it allows organizations to access talent pools that would otherwise be geographically out of reach. That can be extremely beneficial for hitting targets and for business mobility. Many digital candidates could be ideal for a position but may be missed due to outdated methods of hiring. Companies need to adapt their hiring and retention strategies to keep up with the remote trend.