How to Expand Your Hiring Strategies to Include Hiring Remote Workers.

Hiring has always been an important responsibility of HR professionals, but with more of the workforce working remotely, the process of search and recruitment changed and needs to expand to strategies of hiring remote workers.

Today, finding the right person is no longer limited to a certain geography. Improved communication and collaboration tools allow people to work from anywhere — no relocation costs required.

While this levels-up the playing field from an equal opportunity perspective. It provides access to a global pool of talent.

This doesn’t mean it is easier to find the right people. It means that we need to start looking at things differently.

Hiring Remote Workers – The Change

As an HR professional, transitioning to remote is not only an internal process. It changes the way we hire people. You are now able to expand strategies to include remote workers.

HR will need to create and improve processes for search and recruitment when local professional networks and face-to-face interviews may not be useful or feasible.

Hiring remote workers beyond your location, connections, or expertise, can be risky. Combined with the unique challenges of managing a remote workforce, experienced hiring professionals are critical to ensuring the success of a team that includes remote employees.

Virtual Onboarding now is on the cards

When you start adopting remote practices, thinking about virtually onboarding new talent becomes important. What does your onboarding process look like today?
It could be a week of orientation, a meet-the-team lunch, job shadowing for few days. While remote employees require you to get creative with your onboarding, the process is no less important than it is for employees that work in a central location.

After all, onboarding doesn’t just mean learning your way around, it should be about getting new hires to be productive, engaged, and ready reduce the land in role time.

Giving your people a world-class onboarding experience is as important virtually as it is physically, it can:

• boost engagement
• Spark human connection
• Increase productivity and pride

HR involvement in onboarding virtually creates the opportunity to build a culture across the business. In the case of remote workers, forming a relationship with HR from the start can help new hires make connections beyond the people with whom they work directly. This in turn can bring them closer to the company as a whole.

Here are few things to take care of when hiring remote workers:

1. Communicate effectively with your remote new hires  Don’t make your remote new hires feel like they have to search to find the right information. Instead guide them with the right message, at the right time, on the right device – in a seamless experience.

2. Modify your content for virtual learning If you already have an onboarding process in place, you’ll want to modify your content to be accessible for virtual workers.

As you deliver any content or presentations to new employees over video conference, do check in every minute or two to make sure they are still engaged and participating. The onboarding process will set the tone for the employee’s experience with the company, so it pays to invest in making it a great one!

3. Coach your managers to nail remote onboarding Your managers may feel overwhelmed with virtual onboarding. Support them through this change with timely virtual nudges. Enable them to take the right action with relevant insights and advice.

4. Facilitate human connections at a distance Remote onboarding doesn’t mean you need to do without the most important ingredient of successful onboarding: Human connection. Virtually create space for bonding between your newbies and their teams: share intro videos, match up buddies, facilitate coffee catch up calls, and much more!

5. Ensure they have everything they need Let IT know what hardware, software, account logins and other equipment your new hires need way before day one. Since this new hire won’t be in the office on their first day, you’ll have to ship their laptops to their home.

Let us help you – reach out and book time to discuss.