The Covid-19 pandemic utterly reshaped the world of work. It’s been called the Great Resignation, the Great Reshuffle, and the Great Reorganization, but the real “R” word that is here to stay is Remote.
How remote work is changing the future of recruiting speaks volumes about the changing attitude of the hiring marketplace to the phenomenon of the distributed workforce.
Before the pandemic, only 17% of U.S. employees worked from home five days a week or more. Since then, that percentage of work-from-home employees has risen to a staggering 44%. Most want to keep their work-from-home status, and in a tight job market, employees are able to leverage their value to get what they want.
Among workers who are currently working from home all or most of the time, 78% say they’d like to continue to do so post-pandemic. Across all workers with jobs that can be done from home, 60% say that given the choice, they’d like to work from home all or most of the time going forward post-pandemic. Even employees who enjoy working in an office mostly say they would like the option to work from home at least 1-2 days per week.
It’s not just existing employees who are eagerly looking forward to a future where working remotely is the norm. Candidates seeking to change jobs or re-enter the workforce after having been out of it, whether by choice or necessity are also seeking remote work options.
This particularly applies to women who were forced to drop out of the workforce to care for children as schools and daycares closed across the country. SHRM estimates this resulted in nearly 2 million fewer women in the workforce.
[See Is Return to Office a Myth or Reality?]
This strong and apparently permanent shift to remote work is changing not just how corporations are run, but how recruitment is handled. If remote work is fully embraced, the workforce will naturally become more distributed and diversified.
As the Affordable Care Act opened up more opportunities for Americans by severing the tether between employment and insurance, remote work seems poised to do the same by removing the necessity to live in a specific geographic area in order to remain employed.
Recruitment must adapt to fit the new expectations for companies and candidates. While the internet has already gone a long way towards digitizing certain areas of recruiting, there is plenty of space to expand, and the future of recruitment may become nearly fully remote.
For recruiters, this can mean an end to in-person interviews and hiring; recruitment has also gone remote. Thankfully, if the pandemic taught the corporate world anything, it was how to use tools designed for remote handling of work-related tasks. These can now be applied to recruitment.
The same digital tools that make remote work possible make remote recruitment possible. HR departments and recruiters are embracing the latest technology and harnessing it to automate and streamline hiring processes.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and applicant tracking systems (ATS) are making sorting through candidate applications faster and more efficient. While AI is currently imperfect (unconscious bias is easy to introduce if the data used to train AI models is subject to bias), advances are being made and efforts are underway to improve and blind AI functions for application screening.
Analytics is also helping companies look at current and past employee attributes, performance, churn, and spot patterns that speak to Quality of Hire (QOH.) Raw data about candidates can be compared and contrasted to help find key performance indicators that may then be leveraged in future hiring to bring in high-value employees.
The entire dynamic of recruiting from candidate sourcing to new employee onboarding and training has changed. Overall, every aspect of the hiring process has been by necessity restructured to take into account not only the need to complete these processes remotely but what goes into hiring a high-value remote worker.
A major shift is becoming apparent in what recruiters look for when they screen and shortlist candidates. It quickly became obvious that not all employees perform equally when working remotely, and companies had to recognize the need to hire skills unique to highly productive remote workers.
Near the top of the list is the ability to communicate - a must for remote workers - being a self-starter, and having a handle on time management. This last is critical when hiring and managing remote workers; they typically don’t only want flexibility in regard to where they work, but when they work as well. As long as they hit deadlines, why should the employer care if they are night owls?
Recruiting can expect to adapt to the new normal across a range of hiring and onboarding practices. The technology and tools all exist to make these processes easier. Organizations already are likely to be using one or more digitized methods in their hiring funnel.
The goal is to automate and streamline each step as much as possible while reducing bias, increasing Quality of Hire, speeding the hiring process, and improving retention after hire. The following recruitment methods make it easier to complete hiring processes remotely:
For companies that don’t have time for a lengthy job posting and recruitment processes, tapping into a ready-to-work pool of opt-in talent can be ideal. A good example of such an option is Crosschq Recruit, which makes it easy to identify and match eager candidates with must-fill roles to keep business processes moving forward and prevent stagnation.
Interviewing candidates is a fast, easy process now with no travel time required and easy access to candidates who will be working remotely. Video conferencing tools were already available before, but really came into their own in the midst of the pandemic: Zoom alone reported 10 million meeting participants daily in 2019, but this jumped to 300 million in 2020.
Forget spending hours trying to track down previous employers and peers by phone and struggling through a set of questions. Now recruiters can swiftly and easily complete reference checking with apples-to-apples comparisons using Crosschq 360, which digitizes the entire reference checking process for less bias, better accuracy, and faster results.
Technical and analytical assessments can be used in tandem with other tools and methods to help organizations identify the right candidate for the job role on offer. Thanks to online platforms, these skill tests can easily be performed virtually and results are uploaded automatically to the ATS.
Email, messaging platforms, and mobile apps are making it easier than ever for recruiters to stay in touch with candidates and help track who is still committed to the application process. Regular contact can help keep a high-value job applicant involved in the process. It can also allow recruiters to stay in touch with their “silver medalists” for future opportunities.
Once an offer is made, HR departments can continue supporting remote hires with an onboarding process that is completely digital. Using automated workflows to guide a new hire through necessary steps for everything from paycheck deposit to benefits enrollment can lower the cost of employee acquisition.
Onboarding and mentoring isn’t a two-week or two-month process. Most experts recommend staying on top of new hire progress and satisfaction at least for six months, and preferably for their first entire year of employment. Continued contact and quick, easy surveys can help employers spot signs of discontent early and make plans to improve the employee experience and encourage retention. Crosschq Analytics makes it easy to track new hires from the day they start to the day they leave.
Even companies that still need employees to work on-site are seeing the value of remote recruitment. It’s easier on candidates, easier on recruiters, and can yield superlative results by both broadening the pool of accessible talent and refining skills to job matching capabilities. To learn more about how Crosschq supports remote hiring, request a free demo today.