Smart working and recruiting: how to make remote selection also thanks to an ATS

Smart working and recruiting: how to make remote selection also thanks to an ATS

It’s a fact that smart working, sometimes confused with remote working, is now the predominant condition for workers and companies.

But if we often talk about workers, what changes for those who do research and selection of personnel? How is recruiting done in smart working? What are the aspects to pay attention to, what resources should be put in place, what tools should be used? And how can an ATS help with remote selection? These are all questions that we try to answer in this article dedicated precisely to smart working recruiting.

How the world of work is changing

Before going into detail, it is worth making a premise on what it means to do research and selection away from the office and in a world of work that has changed profoundly.

Let’s start with the latter and the challenges it is facing, which, in turn, affect all companies.

First and foremost, there is the challenge of involving and motivating individual employees remotely. In fact, the work is not enough to engage people, the tasks to be completed and the meetings to be held are not enough, but that whole social component of having lunch together, meeting for a coffee, having a chat during a break, going to see what others are doing is definitely a big miss. This can affect employee engagement and participation.

No longer working synchronously but especially in the same place, not seeing a nod of agreement from your colleague, not being able to confront each other simply by getting up from your chair but having to necessarily schedule a meeting on Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, for example, obviously takes its toll.

remote hiring

Just as among the challenges that count in this new way of working is certainly being able to do team building even at a distance. Think of all the activities that were done in the pre-Covid era, including trips out of town, physical activities, but also the classic dinners or parties: these are all things that served to get to know each other among colleagues, to see each other if perhaps you were in different locations, to create relationships.

That’s why with what’s going on, it’s increasingly necessary to focus on people, both those who are already inside the company and those who are to become part of it. You don’t just have to ask an employee/collaborator to do their job, but it’s increasingly necessary to ask why they do it.

All this is obviously important for those who do research and selection of personnel: recruiting in smart working does not only mean choosing the right technologies, but also thinking about how to guarantee a candidate experience that has a strong impact, what tactics to use to test the true motivation of the candidate, how to get to know them better and how to manage onboarding.

Tips and tools for doing remote selection

The challenges, as you can see, are not only in the world of work time flies, but also for those who deal with personnel selection.

So here are some techniques for dealing with them in the best possible way along with the most suitable tools.

Be clear and transparent right from the job postings

There is nothing worse than thinking that, given that the period is particularly critical, it is enough to publish a job announcement to receive immediate applications from talented candidates.

On the contrary: precisely because we are in a moment of continuous emergency, in which we often question certainties taken for granted until the day before, it is good to be clear and transparent. That is, make it immediately clear to the candidate what and who we’re looking for.

You need to make the customer experience straightforward from the start and make sure that you understand from the outset what the various tasks might be, the type of work, how it will be done and everything else. Don’t take anything for granted.

For example, if there are travel restrictions at the moment, don’t assume that it will automatically be the same for those reading you. Perhaps he or she may think that you work in a hybrid mode, some in the office and some at home.

Of course, these are all details that can be clarified during the interview, but it might be a good idea, already in the job posting, to make it clear how the job will be done.

Therefore be specific to start a relationship right away with the right pitch.

Aim for video job posting

You can also consider using videos for the early stages of remote selection. That is, plan to make announcements through this mode. You need to involve a manager, but also people in the company who already do that job and who don’t just tell you what they do – for that, the classic job posting would suffice – but how what they do makes their professional life better.

Of course, if you all work remotely, the only possibility is to make video clips via smartphone, what matters is that together with a video expert, you give some tips to do it better.

Video creates a more immediate and personal connection. And, according to CareerBuilder, job postings with video get 12% more views and receive 34% more applications than text and photo-only ads.

Create questionnaires to test soft skills

Remote recruiting, as it is called in the Anglo-Saxon world, requires recruiters to put more effort and look beyond purely technical skills.
Yes, it’s true, there’s the video-interview which is the perfect way to test soft skills, but it’s not bad to think, before getting to that point – and obviously after the candidate has passed the first phase of resume screening – of open-ended questionnaires.

By the way, the questionnaire is a double test: by requiring the candidate to take time to write down his or her answers, you can tell how intentional he or she really is about the job. In addition, you’ll already be able to assay whether he or she has what is a basic skill in almost every profession: the ability to write correctly.

Among other questions, you might ask how he is reacting in this stressful situation generated by the pandemic. For example, ask him to describe a typical day for him so you can see if he finds space for himself and understand how he organizes himself.
You can still ask him to list 3 things he has realized in the last 7 months, how his job has changed, how he behaves when the manager is away and he has to make a decision. Or again, how he relates to his colleagues remotely, what tools he uses to communicate with them and so on. Once you have these answers, you’ll be able to assess whether the candidate has all the basic requirements to work remotely in your company.

Use social recruiting to get a feel for the candidate

Social recruiting has always been important in the recruiting world. In remote hiring, it plays an even more crucial role especially because right now, sometimes, social media is not being used to its fullest by people. The numerous posts about the pandemic and its management – which we won’t go into here – are an example of how people react to what they’re experiencing and how they communicate with the world. But that’s not all. What emerges from social media is people’s resilience, the things they’re learning, the constructive criticism, the ability to respond.

In addition to LinkedIn, the advice is to take a look at how the candidate is doing on social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter so you can also get an idea of how they are conducting their work right now.

Check out the candidates’ technical equipment before the interview

remote hiring tools

Never assume that everyone has adequate technological equipment or has a computer with a camera included, for that matter. As well as a stable Internet connection. These are also aspects that you need to consider in your selection process and before arranging the video interview.

Ideally, you should do a test before the actual cognitive meeting so that you don’t generate additional stress in the candidate at the moment he or she confronts you. In this way, you can prepare a plan B in case the conditions are not right, or have the candidate download an app to do everything from their smartphone.

Make the best use of video interviews

The first tip is to not just send the appointment on the calendar, but to add all the necessary details. In this case, an ATS software like In-recruiting can be very useful, as it facilitates remote selection by integrating a live video interview system: Meetin.

When planning, make sure the candidate is available at the time you have proposed. If not, you can take action accordingly. Before you start the video interview, establish all the milestones, communicate them to the candidate and make sure you stick to them.

Use the video mode for in-house people as well

Yes, we know that the various teams organize themselves, but the recruiting team should always go a step further and propose virtual meetings involving all the people in the company. The ideal would be once a week and, if a company is small, it is much easier to organize it from a technological point of view as well.

In any case, proposing a meeting once every two weeks, perhaps on Fridays at 5pm with a virtual aperitif or drinks, can be another way to see each other and have a little more fun. It is very important to do all activities together, including non-work activities, and that your team manager is also present.

How to use ATS to do remote recruiting

ats and smart working

We have mentioned it: an Applicant Tracking System can be the ideal solution to manage remote selection in a more structured and organized way. But not only: also to maintain a constant relationship with the candidates and not “lose” them in the selection process. Let’s see each aspect in detail.

Organization of the selection process

Thanks to an ATS software like In-recruiting you can manage multiposting and the fact that an ad is published on several channels.

As well as analyze which of them are most effective and what kind of candidates come from this or that channel. In this sense, a great contribution comes from the hiring pipeline that allows, in a simple and intuitive way, to have a clear idea of how each step of the process is going.

Thanks to it you can have a view of the candidate’s registration to the ad, the fact that he has been associated to the recruiter’s ad, that there has been a screen of his CV to see if there is an effective correspondence between the skills he has and those required. It also keeps track of candidates invited for interviews with appointments that will be scheduled and visible on the ATS calendar.

You can still check where the candidate is in the process, whether they have received offers for another job, whether they have been hired, or whether they were unsuitable or declined.
All of this is critical when doing remote recruiting because otherwise, the risk is that you’ll miss some key steps. Moreover, thanks to an ATS, you can integrate all the steps of the process with your notes, when you are doing social recruiting or looking for passive candidates.

Communication

Candidates often feel abandoned: they’ve had an interview and don’t know how it went. And this is definitely not a good thing in terms of employer branding. Moreover, it can undermine the selection process should you want to reconsider that professional for another job. An ATS allows you to send personalized messages automatically, give feedback, and verify that it actually came through.

Recently, In-recruiting also introduced a system for making videoCVs into the software. This is a short video resume that can be associated with the candidate’s profile and allows for a more direct and immediate assessment of the person (just as happens with live or delayed video interviews).

Collaboration

Whether it’s a live, deferred video interview or a video resume, it’s always good to be able to engage with the other people on the team, but doing it remotely is really difficult. You can’t watch the video together, you have to provide a “place” to comment on it and keep track of what you say. So an ATS software will give a strong hand to your teamwork, especially for remote selection. Its contribution is also evident in the management of orders, the outsourced part of the selection and so on.

Innovation

With In-recruiting and in particular with Inda, which is a proprietary Artificial Intelligence technology for data analysis and interpretation born for the HR world, you will have a better management of the whole process and you will identify the best talents thanks to Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms.

Artificial Intelligence does not replace the recruiter, let alone remotely, but helps to automate repetitive processes, thanks to its ability to self-learn, and makes the recruiter more dedicated to the relationship, to the involvement, to choose in a few words the right person according to their sensitivity, intuition and experience.