What technologies can help hire remote teams?

Technology has nowadays found its place in many business functions, including in HR and talent management. Especially at a time where the hiring and recruiting process is conducted remotely more and more frequently, leveraging technology to ensure efficiency and navigate the additional challenges that come with remote hiring becomes crucial. 

So, what technologies do hiring managers and talent acquisition specialists have at their disposal? And how can technology be used to successfully hire remote teams?

Although the shift towards remote hiring and recruiting is expected to be permanent—with 70% of talent professionals affirming that virtual recruiting will become the new norm—this doesn’t mean that hiring remote teams is without challenges. In fact, building and scaling teams remotely is even more demanding for HR than hiring employees the traditional way. Challenges unique to remote hiring include: 

Handling a larger applicant pool

Having access to a global talent pool is, without a doubt, a positive aspect of hiring remotely. But having a larger pool of applicants also means more work. Allowing a larger group of candidates to apply for a position will result in more applications that need screening. 

Also, since remote positions are so popular with employees, this is likely to increase the number of applicants even further, which ultimately makes it harder to identify the best candidates because there simply are too many to choose from.

Managing diversity

Hiring talent remotely and opening job applications to candidates from different countries means increasing the diversity of the applicant pool. While businesses should strive to hire for diversity, successful diversity hiring requires additional efforts to eliminate bias from the hiring process. 

What’s more, accepting applications from candidates with diverse backgrounds means that HR and talent acquisition teams need to develop inclusive hiring criteria and find ways to compare qualifications and skills, since different countries have different education systems.

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Assessing the remote readiness of a candidate

When hiring for a remote position, hiring managers not only need to assess how well the candidate’s skills and experience match the job requirements, but also find out if the candidate is remote-ready. 

In order to be successful in a remote position, employees need to be self-disciplined and have strong communication and self-management skills, and these qualities must be assessed during the hiring process.

Also read in the Lano Academy: How to find out if a candidate is remote-ready?

Avoiding team-fit problems

Another additional factor HR and Talent Acquisition specialists need to consider when recruiting new members for a remote team is team fit. Hiring for team fit means checking that there will be no personality clash between the new recruit and the rest of the team, a task which is particularly challenging when hiring remotely, where there is no possibility to meet and get to know candidates in person.

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Many of the challenges that are unique to remote hiring can be solved with the help of technology. Process automation can enable hiring managers to handle large amounts of applications, while other HR tools can be used to streamline recruiting processes such as resume screening, reference checking, personality assessment and onboarding. Let’s look at how these different tech solutions can be used in the remote hiring process in more detail.

Talent sourcing

In remote as well as in traditional hiring, sourcing potential candidates for open positions constitutes a key part of the process. With the help of technology, the talent sourcing process can be largely simplified and made more effective by increasing the reach and variety of the measures taken.

The survey "The Future of Talent Acquisition" conducted by MHS and HR.com found referral systems and platforms to be among the technologies which are currently most widely used in talent acquisition, while recruitment marketing platforms are expected to gain importance in the next three years. 

Also read in the Lano Employment Academy: How to source remote talent?

Automated CV, reference and background screening

Screening applicant CVs, checking their references and carrying out background checks are three vital steps in the hiring process and usually take up a lot of time. Having to screen the resumes, references and backgrounds of hundreds of candidates—which is a real reality in some remote-first organizations—can quickly become overwhelming for the HR team. Very often, this results in long response times and, consequently, in losing candidates to competition.

Using AI to review resumes and check references and candidate backgrounds can prevent this by significantly speeding up the process. What’s more, resume screening tools with AI capabilities are a great way to eliminate bias and ensure diverse candidates get a fair chance.

Applicant tracking system

In a survey carried out by Capterra, 75% of respondents indicated using some form of recruiting or applicant tracking software. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) help businesses manage candidate applications during the recruitment process. The main purpose of an ATS is to store and organize candidate information and job details in a centralized database and, as the name entails, to track applicants throughout the hiring process. 

ATS tools are particularly useful for organizations hiring remotely, since they ensure that no candidates are lost along the way and that information about all applicants is collected in one centralized system which can be accessed from anywhere. Most ATS software also offers a function to filter candidate CVs to lower the number of applications down to the ones that are really relevant. 

Online candidate assessment

Online personality and skills assessments are a useful tool when hiring remote teams. They not only allow businesses to assess whether a candidate is suited for remote work, but psychometric tests are also a great way to make sure a candidate would fit in well with the rest of the team. 

Another significant advantage of online assessments is that they offer the possibility to assess candidate’s without bias, since they are based on objective, predefined personality attributes. This helps create a more diverse and inclusive workforce. 

Recruiting chatbots

Another example of how AI can be leveraged to simplify the remote hiring process is the use of recruiting chatbots. Chatbots can be used to interact with candidates and answer questions about the process, the organization, the position and any other topic that could be of interest for a candidate. By answering standard questions, they save recruiters and HR managers valuable time.

Of course, it’s possible to extend the involvement of AI bots in the hiring process. For instance, the bot could be programmed to send out updates and feedback to candidates at predefined intervals or schedule interview times with candidates. This would reduce the workload for hiring managers even further and lead to more efficiency despite having to handle large numbers of applications. 

Video Q&As and virtual interviews

One of the main struggles when it comes to hiring employees remotely is not having the chance to meet them in person for an interview. Thanks to video technology and tools such as Zoom, Slack or Skype, hiring managers can replicate a face-to-face interview situation and get a better impression of a candidate than they would during a phone interview. 

What’s more, video conferencing tools allow several other team members to join interviews with potential candidates, which is an excellent way for them to get to know each other and see how well they would get on. In the future, virtual interviews could become even more realistic thanks to virtual reality. 

Also, VR could be used to create virtual test environments for candidates. It may still be early stages for using virtual reality in the remote hiring process, but the potential is surely there. 

Video can further be used for asynchronous interviewing of candidates based in different time zones. In this case, the interview takes on the form of a video Q&A, where candidates have to answer predefined questions and record themselves on camera while doing so. 

Global employment platforms

AI and software tools offer many ways for organizations to make their remote hiring process more efficient and to better handle large numbers of applications from talented workers all over the world. However, the use of technology in remote hiring and recruiting goes beyond filtering out unqualified applicants, tracking top candidates or creating a seamless remote interview process, especially since the challenges of hiring a remote team don’t stop with the identification of the right candidate for the position. 

In fact, for many international organizations, the real challenges start only after the initial recruitment process. Hiring top talent in different countries means having to comply with different labor laws and ever-changing regulations and manage the HR needs of a globally distributed team. This is where global employment platforms come into play. 

A global employment platform is a type of global employment solution that combines an advanced cloud-based technology platform with a network of in-country partners that are specialized in employment outsourcing services. Like this, they enable businesses to compliantly hire remote employees all over the world.

Also read in the Lano Employment Academy: How to choose a global employment platform?