Hiring + recruiting | Blog Post
3 Tactics to Master Remote Recruiting
Linzi Nield
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This article is part two of a two-part series on the unique demands of recruiting in today’s unprecedented ecosystem of remote hiring. See part one here.
In 2018, a study by Global Workplace Analytics estimated that roughly 3.2% of the U.S. workforce (nearly 4.3 million people) work remotely, which at the time was a 150% increase since 2005. The same organization states that 79% of people want to work from home.
Today, a global pandemic, global lockdowns, and other events have caused a significant shift in the employment ecosystem. The change in recruitment has been both immediate and long-standing, indicating a permanent shift.
These massive changes in the workforce have dramatically impacted recruiting teams–hiring managers and candidates alike–who are now finding themselves looking at a vastly different hiring landscape of remote hiring.
From companies postponing hiring, remote recruiters seeing a spike in the number of good candidates available in the market, and top talent expecting work-from-home optimized jobs, these changes aren’t going away anytime soon.
We’ve gathered three critical recruiting tactics to help you and your team adapt and move forward strategically with remote recruiting to land top talent.
1. Get Smart With Market Mapping
Market mapping is an essential part of remote recruiting that many specialists are not used to, and it can feel a bit counterintuitive at first.
In this process, rather than starting by pinpointing the location you want to target for candidate sourcing, begin by reverse engineering your talent search. This means that if you are hiring for strong technical talent, you can begin your search by researching top-rated computer science schools, and then use these less sought-out hiring locations to recruit within.
For example, Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, University of Waterloo in Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada, and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, are all lesser-known hiring hubs, yet ripe with incredible technical talent.
Many of these candidates are both qualified and seeking new opportunities, yet in the past have been confined by location constrictions—with the dramatic shift in markets, it’s an excellent opportunity to recruit these experts.
2. Build Strong Communication Among Internal Recruiting Teams
When it comes to remote recruiting, creating strong internal team communication is more important than ever. It directly translates to professionalism to prospective candidates and helps to create consistent messaging when reaching out to remote recruits.
To establish great team communication, leaders can put in place agreed-upon communication channels and accompany these with best practices, both on how to use the channels, responsiveness expectations, and how to interview feedback should be shared within them. Before recruiting for a specific role, it’s recommended to schedule a pre-brief session with everyone involved in the decision-making process for the role. During this pre-brief, run through and align the key goals, timelines, and internal responsibilities of the recruiting process.
Additionally, internal candidate sharing is an essential part of the remote recruiting process and opens up many opportunities when you recruit remotely. In this way, communication is key in order to quickly share potential candidates internally for other open roles that your recruiting colleagues may be working on.
After the person shares a candidate in the channel, the other sources and recruiters can see all the details in one easy spot and can react if they are interested in learning more.
Having a set process can help keep channels a lot cleaner and easier to read. Overall, it ensures that great candidates don’t get lost internally in this era of greater digital communication.
3. Take Steps Today to Build a Stellar Employer Brand as a Remote Work Leader
Today, job seekers are increasingly interested in learning how your company supports remote work, and how your company values are aligned with their career goals. This means that your company’s ability to effectively thrive in a remote working environment should shine through during every part of the remote recruiting process.
One of the top questions teams get asked from candidates is about how a company keeps employees engaged remotely. This is just one question you can prepare to answer now—and to begin putting solutions in place for. Consider organizing more virtual events and during interviews have a list on hand that demonstrates to candidates ways in which your company supports and hosts virtual events such as social hours, monthly all-hands, or AMAs to keep employees engaged.
Where the main execution points, however, is following through with engagement promises once you’ve hired a new team member. The first few weeks of onboarding a new team member in a remote environment are absolutely critical to help them feel supported and set up for success. One tactic for achieving this is to assign each remote new hire an onboarding buddy who is available to help them with any questions that may come up and in finding the needed resources early on. It also helps to provide critical mentorship opportunities outside of the assigned trainer, helping the candidate adapt to company culture and expectations.
With today’s new remote-recruiting landscape, that’s primed to only get increasingly competitive, this is the moment for leaders to learn and adapt to new remote recruiting best practices to ensure their companies are attracting and retaining best-in-class remote talent, regardless of the circumstances of the hiring market.
