Four Steps to Successful Virtual Hiring

Hiring processes changed drastically over the past year as the pandemic forced interviews and candidate assessments to occur remotely. When approached correctly, virtual hiring can be far superior to its in-person counterpart — with speed, ease, and access on its side. Even though remote arrangements nix the opportunity to meet candidates in person, observe how they act in a team setting, and assess how they fit the company culture — core elements of the face-to-face hiring model — our latest research study concludes that the benefits of virtual hiring outweigh the challenges.

In our current climate, organizations have no choice but to embrace remote recruitment, so learning how to ace the virtual hiring process in 2021 is crucial for companies seeking to hire top talent. Seventy-five percent of organizations that have been hiring during this crisis have changed their recruitment processes since the pandemic began.

We sought to discover the secret to successful remote hiring by analyzing 300 recruitment interviews that occurred during March 2020 and December 2020. In our research, we found four ways in which organizations can improve the way they approach remote hiring.

1. Allot sufficient preparation time. Significant preparation, from writing an appealing job description to troubleshooting video platforms, is required before a single candidate can be interviewed, and all of it takes time.

Organizations should carefully craft job postings that are focused, clear, and free of bias to attract the most-qualified and diverse candidates. As Liz Wessel, CEO and cofounder of WayUp, explained in the course of our research, “The way your job post is written predicts who you’ll hire, because the language affects who applies to your job.”

To effectively identify the most-qualified candidates of the applicant pool, recruiters should determine in advance what they want to see in applications — and, critically, should ensure that they’ve blocked out enough time to review applications and to interview candidates properly. In more than 150 virtual interviews, we found that interviewers had underestimated the time needed.

Another significant preparation activity is to become familiar with the platform of choice — whether it be Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, or Skype — so that interviewers can prevent potential tech problems and effectively troubleshoot any that arise.