As your business shifts towards remote work, you might struggle with recruiting and onboarding new employees. Factors such as the lack of face-to-face interactions might make the process a lot more challenging. You realize that traditional methods might no longer be enough. You need the right tools and strategy to ensure effective remote hire.
According to PwC, 55% of employees expect to work from home at least three times a week even after the COVID-19 pandemic. This just shows that the setup will soon become a permanent thing for your company. It is high time you polish your remote recruiting and onboarding process to accommodate their demands.
With that, here are some tips on successfully recruiting and onboarding remote employees during COVID and after.
1. Choose the Right Software
Committing to remote work entails a full digital transformation for your HR processes. From attracting talents, holding job interviews, and onboarding them, almost everything will be virtual. You need the right software to support your digital endeavors. This will allow you to smoothly transition to a remote and digital workplace. Moreover, it can streamline your recruitment and onboarding process.
With countless options available, you might find yourself overwhelmed. You can narrow down your list by determining what your business currently needs. For example, how many applicants do you receive per hiring season? How big is your company? How much resources are you willing to spend on a software? And what other digital tools do you currently have? By answering such questions, you will have an idea of what types of software you need.
2. Keep Communication Lines Open
The greatest challenge to remote work is communication. Without proper channels, you can potentially alienate your candidates and new hires. As a result, you can lose out on the best talents. Hence, you must make sure that you can effectively communicate with them and guide them throughout their journey.
Take full advantage of the various communication channels available such as messaging apps, emails, and employee dashboards. These tools will allow you to reach out to candidates and provide a transparent recruitment process. Moreover, you can use these tools to disseminate important information to new hires, such as their remote onboarding activities, company directory, and more. By keeping communication lines open, you allow them to bond with the rest of the team and make them feel included.
3. Personalize Virtual Experiences
Work from home experience can be different for each person. The difference in the environment, equipment, and location can impact their productivity and efficiency. Unfortunately, these are factors that might just be out of their control.
To make sure that all candidates and new hires are on equal footing, you should consider personalizing your recruiting and onboarding process. You can do this by allowing a multi-platform virtual experience and asynchronous onboarding or training. For recruiting, you can allow candidates to book their interview schedules and examinations. This will allow them to choose the best and most optimal way for them to get to know your company and its culture. Moreover, this ensures that you can evaluate their capabilities fairly despite the lack of face-to-face interactions.
4. Provide Accessible Onboarding Materials
The biggest perk of going digital with your recruiting and onboarding process is the accessibility of documents and data. This makes it easier and faster to pull out any information from the company using your own devices. You can also use this to improve your onboarding process and new hire experience.
5. Create a Buddy System for New Hires
New employees are at risk of feeling excluded and isolated from the rest, especially in a remote setup. In a traditional office setting, they have more opportunities to bond with their teammates over the water cooler, lunch, or along the hallways. The virtual space isn’t enough to simulate that same environment for building personal relationships with colleagues.
Hence, one of the virtual onboarding best practices is to create a buddy system for new hires. You will assign a specific person who will guide their new teammate throughout their adjustment period. They will do frequent check-ins with the new hire and act as their mentor along the way. Likewise, they will serve as a conduit, connecting new employees to the rest of the team.
For example, you can create a database containing all the essential materials for onboarding and training. You can also provide a remote employee onboarding checklist that your new hire can go through one by one. This promotes individual learning, while also making sure that help is always within their grasp. After all, one-time orientations might not be enough to cover everything they need to know about the company. They need something to go back to in cases they have questions regarding company policies and workflows.
Finding the Perfect fit for Your Remote Teams
You might hesitate at the idea of hiring people remotely. After all, how can you properly evaluate their performance if you can’t interact with them personally? Fortunately, currently technology has made it possible for businesses to recruit and onboard new hires virtually.
Is Your Company Struggling To Develop and Sustain Employee Engagement? VITE will be surely helpful for you.
So get on with times and explore what tools you can use to make your new hire’s journey a successful one.