Americans, with confusion and uncertainty bubbled up inside of us, are wondering when things go back to normal. But what if things won’t ever be the same?

Coronavirus is shaping the future of work. Businesses of all shapes and industries from restaurants to identity verification service providers are muddling about in finding innovative approaches to enable normal operations without as little disruption as possible. The contingency strategies must be made to not just handle the current situation, but also to prepare for future challenges such as possible upcoming recession, increasing business cost, growing global connectivity and more.

The majority of the US workforce are working from home and since this way of work may stretch months into the future, remote working will translate to remote recruiting. The situation is not so different in the UK and the rest of the world. Data collected from 5000 UK working adults in 2021 by the VOX research company shows that up to 52% of respondents are currently working from home.

Recruiting teams should be capable of keeping up with the current state of workforce and plan for future recruiting challenges.

Follow Rakuna’s Guide to engage top talents remotely and achieve your business goals.

01. The Current State of Remote Recruiting

Let’s do a thought experiment:

It’s 4 months into the coronavirus global pandemic. Your spouse is on an online call with clients in the living room. Your kids are in the backyard, learning origami in a virtual summer camp. You don’t know when your office will be reopened, but your new hires are already well-acquainted with the job. You’re glad that you have been well-prepared and confident that your team can handle future business challenges post-pandemic.

Ok, virtual summer camp sounds a bit like a stretch, but the rest is plausible. Chaotic times have a way of reordering reality and, in the process, opening doors to new opportunities and mindsets.

In one week after the national emergency announced by the President, we closely monitor the term Remote Recruiting:

It was mentioned 556 times across all social media platforms, reaching 2.7M people, with positive sentiments. Amidst the confusion during the pandemic, it is a good thing to see people keep up hope.

In the vein of hopeful sentiment, searches for Agile Recruiting, Remote Recruiting and Remote Working all went up. People are looking for new ways to work more flexibly and recruit more flexibly.

Remote recruiting will be a little bit different to recruiting remote employees for years. It deals with greater uncertainty since your remote working team may have to re-adapt to being at office in the future. However, remote recruiting and remote-work culture have been practiced by major corporations such as IBM, Citigroup and Unilever for years, so the principles and best practice can lay a good foundation for your recruiting team to keep up with your business and recruiting goals.

02.Top 04 Remote Recruiting Tips and Best Practices

2.1. Define Your Remote Recruiting Goals and Process

If everyone works remotely, that includes your recruiting team too. Remote recruiting demands your team to adhere more consistently to remote etiquette to avoid productivity drop.

There should also be transparency when establishing recruiting goals and objectives, work hours and working mediums, according to Anita Williams Woolley, associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

“It is going to be important that everyone understands and has the same goals and objectives,” Woolley to HR Drive in an interview “Where goals are unclear or conflicting, productive collaborative work will be difficult whether it’s co-located or remote, but there are fewer opportunities to recognize and rectify unclear goals in remote work.”

A centralized recruiting process should be built with basic elements like:

• Selecting a communication platform for consistent communication tool like Slack, Skype or Google Hangouts
• Daily/weekly sync-ups should be scheduled up front for the team to get together to discuss work and make sure no one lags behind.
• Planning opportunities for the team to get together either virtually or physically at happy hours or monthly meetings
• Selecting a platform that keeps all your data in one place

Resources to help your remote recruiting team build an effective process and collaborate efficiently:

• • 01. 9 Tips To Build A Winning Recruiting Team: Building a strong recruiting team is not an easy task, and it gets harder in the time of crisis. However, with a strong wielding of basic principles, you can bring together a resilient team to face any challenges to come.

• • 02. The Ultimate Guide To Recruitment Process: Remote recruiting process is not chalk and cheese compared to your usual go-to approach. Tweak it here and there then you can carry out a turbo-boosting remote recruiting process and funnel. However, it is important to master the basics first.

• • 03. What Is Agile Recruiting and How It Can Help You Build An Effec...: Difficult time demands employers to be much more flexible when it comes to recruiting new talent. Agile Recruiting lays the basic foundation for enabling your recruiting team to be adaptive to the changing socioeconomic during and post Covid-19.

• • 04. A Guide To Manage Your Newly Remote Workers: The transition from office-hour to remote recruiting will be a bumpy road. Brace yourself with new tools and methods to make sure your team spirit is high and smoothen the transition.

• • 05. Remote Working Tips and Complete Guide To Telecommuting in 2020: Remote working may not work out for everyone. It demands team leaders to get a dozen of things right: Time and resources planning, Connectivity, Working Hours, Goals and Process. Check out what you need to avoid the pitfalls of remote working.

• • 06. 47 Insanely Practical Work From Home Tips from Our 100% Remote ...: Here are a long list of super practical remote working tips from Groove, a 100% Remote Team who have nailed remote recruiting that Rakuna has been following and learning a great deal from for years.

• 07. Working From Home Tips: 31 Great Tips From 31 People: During the current pandemic, many of us have had difficulties adapting work from home. For those struggling to be effective at home, here are some excellent tips that a wide range of experts have given us on how to make the most of working at home.

2.2. Strengthen Your Employer Branding

Employer branding has always been important.

However, now with people spending more time online, and 50% rise in internet usages, your employer branding will have twice the exposure, thus playing a more important role in your success with remote recruiting.

A few tips to get your started:

1) Revisit your company’s core value, culture, company vision and mission. Identify the gaps and overlay in the delivery of your employer branding and lay out tactics to fill those gaps.

2) With those fundamentals of your employer branding in mind, recruiters/ marketers can start branch out and be creative on the choice of voice and content.

In the time of crisis, it is important to show you care and demonstrate your commitment to your employees’ well-being, your partners and your community. Listen, maintain internal and external communication transparency, share your vision for the future. The HOW is up to you since there isn’t a one-size-fit-all approach. However, we’ve rounded up several initiatives companies around the world have taken breath resilience into their brand and withstand tough times:

• Twitter is running #FlockTalk - a virtual employee support program to bring about a discuss space on how COVID-19 is impacting people.
• Walmart is allowing employees in the US to stay home without penalty if they fear the spread of the coronavirus.
• Starbucks decided to offer up to 14 days’ Catastrophe Pay to baristas exposed to the coronavirus.
• Shopify implemented a remote-work policy for their employees around the world and offered employees a $1,000 stipend to furnish their work-from-home setups.

3) Make sure the employer branding stays fully smooth-running throughout your remote recruiting process.

With a genuine commitment, you will paint a a way better picture of your brand in the public eye. There will be someone in the crowd with talent and sheer desire to be a part of that amazing culture you demonstrated, either now or after the storm.

However, to make sure you win the best talent in this dire time, getting them to the door is not enough. Every step in your remote recruiting process must be a representation of your employer brand: From pre-assessment to interview to onboarding. A few tips to help you:

• • Communicate proactively, consistently and considerately. Develop a clear communication plan to share information with your prospective talent. Ensure communication flow both ways especially since face-to-face communication is a privilege, how you communicate and what you communicate is what candidates will think of you.

• • Organize more virtual events using your online conference tools to engage with prospective candidates. Some of Rakuna’s clients have effectively hosted info sessions, Q&As, and employee panels virtually and collected attendees' information using our pre-event registration feature successfully. If you have not, give it a try, or talk to our team to learn how you can leverage this tool for virtual recruiting.

• Bring together the right combination of candidate assessment methods and assessment tools. Once the candidates have been through the online assessment, they’ve grasped the idea of how it will feel like to work at your company and get a taste of the culture. In other words: they know what to expect (and what not to).

Resources to help you ensure an engaging candidate experience throughout your remote recruiting funnel:

• • 01. Everything You Need To Know About Employer Branding: There is an ocean of knowledge when it comes to branding that we can cover within a single post. So we bring to you one of our go-to sources to get employer branding right.

• • 02. The Definitive Guide To Employer Branding: Explore what employer branding means, examples of good employer branding, and how you can implement your own employer branding strategy

• • 03. Top 11 Candidate Assessment Methods For Recruiter: When suit-and-tie face-to-face interview is a privilege, it is high time for your company to consider making an investment in recruitment technology or adopting new evaluation techniques

• • 04. The Ultimate Guide To Video Interviewing: Employers are turning to video interviewing as an alternative for face-to-face interviews. Refresh your knowledge with Vidcruiter’s guide on what it takes to deliver an indelible video interviewing experience for candidates.

• 05. Communicating The Recruitment Process: Dos and Don’ts: In remote recruiting, timely communication becomes much more important. How you communicate and what you communicate is what candidates will think of you. Learn how to plan a winning recruitment communication plan.

2.3. Engage Candidate Anywhere, Anytime

Great recruiters know that the most engaged candidates come when you meet them where they are. This means having access to every mode of communication and understanding where your target candidates are most likely to engage in conversation.

The winning question here is: Where are they?

• • Social media: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are the top three big guys in social media world. Remember that your prospective candidates use each of these platforms differently. For example: They may tend to use Facebook for gossiping about a company, Linkedin for building professional networks, and Twitter to assess one’s employer branding. This means for each platforms, you must have a tailor-made approach with unique and proper voice and content to truly resonate with your ideal audience.

• • Texting: It only takes a candidate an average of 90s to respond to a text, while if the same message is sent via email, you will have to wait for 90 minutes. For speedy conversations with candidates on-the-go, or remote candidates, texting is your go-to approach. Plus, texting can breathe a friendly casual atmosphere into the relationship between you and the talent you’re after, thus, create a more engaging, trusting recruiting experience.

• • Email: Text has been proven to be the fastest mode of communication, emails stay a tried-and-true method. It’s easier to schedule interviews and set up drip campaigns to make sure communication flows both ways and every formal bit of information is handled professionally and properly. Even though text has proven to be the fastest mode of communication, email remains a tried-and-true method. When combined with Recruiting CRM, emails help you to reach candidates at the right time, the right way.

• Phone Call: Phone call can be a bit more difficult to schedule, but the data proves that once once a recruiter connects with a candidate via phone call, they tend to communicate more engagingly. If your recruiters are working remotely, they likely have more flexibility to call candidates outside of 9-5 work hours to reach them.

Resources to help you find the top talent where they are:

• • 01. Social Media Recruiting: Top 10 Best Practices: Social media is a great channel to engage Millennial and Gen Z. This article will give you insights and tips to kickstart your social media recruiting campaigns.

• 02. 10 Tips For Recruiting With Text Messages: When used in combination with recruiting solutions like an applicant tracking system, texting can give you a significant edge over the competition.

2.4. Onboarding, Onboarding, Onboarding.

Training and onboarding play a major part in any healthy, successful workplace culture and it is a principle that won’t be changed with remote recruiting.

The best practices and principles of excellent onboarding stay unchanged and still apply to remote recruiting: Make training and onboarding materials accessible online, provide proper guideline to help you familiar with your process and tools; schedule intro meetings to key members of the team in the first two weeks of employment; organize regular checkpoint to provide them support during the first 3 months.

When you’re welcoming a new employee on the team, consider mailing their laptop and other equipment with employer branded items like t-shirts and mugs, and sending them lunch one day that first week.

To view this original post and other exciting articles, visit us at Rakuna!