Digitising your recruitment process

When you’re looking for new employees, face-to-face meetings tend to be the ultimate decider in whether you will hire someone to join your organisation. However, sometimes face-to-face meetings are not possible, and digitising your recruitment process can provide multiple benefits including speed to market, diversified shortlists and wider reach of employer brand.

Here are our top tips for digitising each step of the process and hiring great talent remotely.

Advertising

This is where you can bring your employer brand to life. Film a short video so that candidates can see what your organisation is all about, what they can expect from the role, and who they will be working with. This video can sit alongside your text advert. Don’t worry too much about how polished the video is, you want to present something authentic, showcasing your team.

During this video, communicate any of the required responsibilities of the role so that candidates can self-qualify, and to ensure that you get more quality applications coming through.

Managing applications and shortlisting

At Robert Walters, and in most recruitment consultancies, we use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to manage all of our job applications. This means that even though we’ve posted your advert to multiple job boards, we can manage them all centrally.

Video interviewing tools such as SparkHire provide the perfect platform to assess the technical capability and cultural fit of a prospective candidate.  A tailored set of questions can be asked and the privacy of our candidates is protected, while still bringing their CV and personality to life. In our experience, organisations have been so assured of candidate capability from a video profile that they have offered the role to the candidate at this stage.

If your organisation doesn’t have a tool like this, we recommend looking at a product that allows candidates to re-record their answers, tailor questions and has robust privacy and security processes. Alternatively, you can partner with a recruitment company to support you through this stage.

Offer

This is an exciting part of the recruitment process and one where you can really add value to those who have applied and interviewed for a role with your company.  

Applying for jobs can be an emotional time as candidates have put themselves out there to try and move forward in their career, and into your organisation. Not everyone gets the job – the most useful thing you can provide people who aren’t successful is constructive feedback. Record a short video to let them know or give them a call, providing feedback on why they weren’t successful.  

When you get in contact with the successful applicant, send them a short video to congratulate them and let them know what the process is from there – when they can expect a contract, their official start date etc.

Onboarding

Using video tools, make sure you set up both informal and formal meetings for your new starter. You can have a formal meeting where you establish clear expectations and goals, and balance this with virtual coffee catch ups so that your new starter feels that they can reach out to you.

Set your new starter up with a mentor within the business, who they don’t report to. When you work in a full office, you can turn to most people and ask them for help when you get stuck, for your new remote employee it’s important they have someone who they can ask those questions.