Is Remote Hiring Effective for Freshers

“People today really value workplace flexibility and remote working because it allows them to focus their energies on work and life as opposed to commuting or other complications due to geography.” — Ken Matos, Vice President of Research, Life Meets Work

The concept of remote working evolved in the 1980s when most of the global IT giants started outsourcing their labour-intensive works to low-cost countries like India. This gave India’s IT sector a push and in a short span of time several multi-national companies (MNC) emerged from India or foreign firms started their branch in this country.

However, remote hiring was just one of the options along with the walk-ins or face-to-face interview-based hiring process despite disruption in the form of globally distributed teams and new HR technologies. With COVID-19,most companies were forced to shut their operations and roll out work from home options to their employees. It also affected the hiring and recruitment as well. After a short halt, companies began onboarding new employees – freshers hiring and lateral hiring.

Effective remote hiring

In a normal hiring process, the candidates were tested for domain knowledge and skills with different assessment tools, group discussion and face-to-face interviews. All these assess the candidates’ competencies, understanding of various aspects of the role, behavioural and psychometric work quotient, and most importantly overall evaluation of the suitability to the role being offered to the candidate.

Since the companies are functioning remotely, remote hiring becomes an only solution. Freshers are sourced through either placement cells of educational institutions, or job portals, or social media and are interviewed via phone or video conferencing tools or AI-powered remote hiring software to offset onsite hiring process.

Today, these tools allow the organizations to evaluate the employability quotient of the candidates effectively and help in onboarding them. Solutions such as MeritTrac’s Recruitment Assessment Solutions bundled with psychometric, cognitive, domain, communication and behavioural assessments enables seamless end-to-end assessment for recruiting a new employee.

Onboarding freshers

One of the major concerns for the organisations is the productivity of the candidates, cultural fit, and collaborations upon onboarding new staff, especially the freshers. As the adage says ‘the first impression is the best impression’, the initial engagements with the organisation, co-workers and managements drive a new employee to decide his/her career in that particular company.

Intensive online live training with the help of video conferencing tools and holistic induction program with all teammates and other existing staff ease the new employee to take up the responsibilities fast. Allocating a buddy teammate is another fruitful solution to reduce the initial stress.

Other methods for employee engagement are listed below:

• Flexible probation period: Each talent is different from others and hence, it may take different time for each to fully adapt to a new working situation. Therefore, organisations can consider relaxing or extending probation time to suit each candidate.
• Work simulation: In the initials days, employers can provide a work simulation platform to new employees to train themselves to know their roles and working conditions thoroughly before commencing the real duty. This simulation can be adopted for interviews too.
• Webinars or tutorial videos: New employees are mostly unaware of the different facets of the organisations and various roles. Through webinars, the leaders or managers can make them understand these aspects and show them the real expectations. Tutorial videos help the new employee to learn his/her work better and use as a reference.
• Induction or freshers meet: Introducing the new employees to the existing staff and vice versa is key for successful remote onboarding. HR can either organize a freshers’ meet including all newly hired staff and old employees and leaders or plan individual or team induction for boosting the confidence of the freshers.
• Cultural or wellbeing programs: Time-to-time events and programs will help the new staff to quickly adapt to the organization. The employers can also offer the new employees to express their skills in these events and give opportunities for interactions.

Employee engagement is the trickiest activity of the HR department of any organisation, which also focus on employee retention. The above listed are some of the remote strategies the employers can to implement for early employee onboarding and engagements.

Way forward

MeritTrac, India’s leading assessment and testing company, offers solutions for hiring and onboarding skilled employees through its end-to-end assessment platforms, which also enables remote hiring. The corporate organisations can deploy MeritTrac’s solutions for hiring and employee engagement in this pandemic-affected workplace for a hassle-free process.

In conclusion, the remote revolution driven by technological advancement and COVID-19 streamlines freshers hiring through digitally-enabled solutions.