5 Challenges of Remote Hiring and How to Overcome Them
The shift to remote work over the past few years has completely changed the hiring landscape. While remote hiring provides many benefits like accessing global talent pools, it also comes with unique challenges. Here are five common challenges companies face when hiring remotely and tips to overcome them:
1. Difficulty Evaluating Candidates
One of the biggest struggles with remote hiring is not being able to meet candidates in person before bringing them on board. This makes it challenging to fully assess their abilities, personality, work style, and culture fit.
How to overcome this: To address common hiring challenges, incorporate essential interview questions designed to deeply explore candidates’ problem-solving abilities and adaptability. Improve your interview and screening procedures by simulating face-to-face interactions. Use video interviews to assess visual communication skills and assign real-world tasks to evaluate practical abilities. By integrating these critical questions into your assessment strategy and complementing them with personality and cognitive ability tests and feedback from various references, you’ll gain a richer understanding of candidates from multiple perspectives. This holistic approach ensures a comprehensive grasp of a candidate’s skills and work style, leading to more informed and effective hiring decisions.
2. Lack of Candidate Engagement
When you aren’t meeting candidates at your office, it can be harder to get them excited about opportunities and invested in your hiring process. This means more candidates end up dropping off along the way.
How to overcome this: Make sure your employer brand and value proposition come across clearly in all touchpoints of your hiring process – from your job posts to screening calls to interviews. Communicate frequently with candidates to keep them in the loop. Conduct virtual onboarding before day one so new hires are engaged and prepared to dive into work.
3. Coordinating Interviews Across Time Zones
With a globally distributed team, it can be challenging to align interviewers’ and candidates’ availability for real-time video interviews. Time zones often force meetings to take place very early or late for some participants of staffing agencies.
How to overcome this: Use asynchronous video interview platforms that allow candidates to record responses on their own time. Schedule interviews in overlapping but more reasonable windows for everyone. Conduct initial interviews with people in locations closer in time zone, then involve others at friendlier times if they progress. Emphasize flexibility and accommodate needs.
4. Integrating New Remote Employees
Onboarding and integrating newly hired remote employees can be more difficult without in-person interactions and proximity to existing team members. New hires may feel disconnected or disengaged.
How to overcome this: Assign new hires a mentor or buddy for the first few months. Schedule video calls for new hires to meet the team. Recognize onboarding will take more time and effort – invest appropriately. Send welcome packages with company swag to new hires’ homes to make it feel official. Start interactions early before the first day. Make expectations clear about training processes and ramp-up time.
5. Navigating Global Employment Laws
Employing team members around the world means you have to navigate local employment laws in all those jurisdictions. This includes rules around contracts, benefits, taxes, payroll and more. Staying compliant is complex.
How to overcome this: Use an employer of record (EOR) service. An EOR acts as the legal employer abroad while you maintain day-to-day management of international team members. This minimizes your legal risk. The EOR handles compliance, payroll, benefits, and more in each country. Look at this list of RecruitGo’s services to find out more. Working with an EOR greatly simplifies remote hiring across borders.
The shift to more remote work is here to stay. While hiring at a distance comes with challenges, using creative strategies to evaluate candidates, keep them engaged, coordinate interview logistics, onboard thoughtfully, and leverage EORs can help you build productive global teams. With some flexibility and the right tools, companies can access talent anywhere.