Few things need to be prioritised in the workplace as recruitment. A company is only as good as its employees, which means you absolutely need the best talent for your company to reach its potential. This is what makes recruitment such a big and important business – you can’t be reaching peak performance if you don’t recruit the best employees.
This used to be relatively easy to do pre-COVID-19. In face-to-face interviews, you had the privilege of reading non-verbal cues like body language to see how distracted or focused/engaged someone is. Recruitment was as simple as seeing someone right in front of you and getting a sense of their confidence and demeanour through those simple gestures.
However, with the pandemic forcing most of us into work-from-home setups, it’s decidedly different when it comes to virtual interviews. Body language is almost non-existent, and it’s easy to call sincerity into question when working over the internet. In-person recruitment has shown itself to be one of the things we probably took for granted more than we should have.
But this doesn’t mean recruitment is entirely dead. If anything, it means that your business needs to up its recruitment game even more and work even harder to recruit the best of the best. And here are three ways you can ace online recruitment:
1) Step Up Your HR Game
To use pandemic terms, the frontliners of your business’ recruitment are your human resources personnel. Even when the world had primarily physical setups, HR was always the most important factor in recruiting the best employees.
Having a good and well-equipped HR team is even more important during online recruitment. Because it’s HR’s job to identify non-verbal and linguistic cues of interviewees, they need to pay more attention and be more in tune than ever with perceiving how people act and think.
Make sure you brief your team about the expectations you have for new hires, and see how well they understand and can identify your needs in online candidates. It’s also your job to make sure your HR team has up-to-date equipment, materials, and knowledge about online tools so that recruitment can be carried out smoothly.
2) Keep Your Infrastructure in Peak Condition
Speaking of having updated materials, you need to make sure that these are available when you do recruitment. At the very least, you’d need proper platforms for video calls and task management.
No, you don’t need the fanciest tools or the most expensive work management systems. All you need are tools that make sure audio and video are clear, and that tasks are organised.
Similarly, you have to assess whether your HR team has access to a reliable internet connection. As anyone who’s ever lost signal or had a power outage at home can attest to, it can be so difficult and frustrating to have wonky internet. This becomes even scarier when you have to deal with something as important as recruitment. Imagine being in the middle of asking a candidate where they see themselves in five years and then getting cut off and saying nothing. I’m pretty sure that candidate wouldn’t like that five-year outlook either.
This is why you need to make sure your team has proper access to the basics, not least good internet. With so many things that could go wrong because of a dropped line or a blurry video, it’s important that your team has a contingency plan in place for when things get tricky. Make sure to iron out the kinks in the recruitment process so that hiring becomes a smooth and pleasant process for everyone involved.
One solution I can suggest is to always take note of your interview candidate’s phone number so that you can at least have a voice call over the phone when the internet is no good.
3) Set Your Screening
Finally, make sure that even before you do the interview, your candidates are screened adequately. This should be common sense for physical interviews, but this becomes more crucial for virtual ones.
Even the best people and companies can get pranked or catfished with fake profiles. You can never be too sure about people’s intentions and credentials on the internet.
Make sure to screen these people beforehand and get a real gauge on their intentions, interest and fit in the company. Make sure you really go through their resumes, and try to get a feel for what they’re like even before the interview. If you have to go through a few pre-interview screenings, so be it.
Recruitment has always been a tricky but vital process in leading and growing a business. You want to have the best people possible on board with your company’s vision, and that’s true even in the new normal. Hopefully, these tips will help you devise better strategies for how to effectively recruit online.
To your success,
Mario
[Visit www.mariosingh.com now to enjoy a FREE e-book of my latest “37 Essential Principles for Massive Success” when you subscribe!]
