The COVID-19 pandemic has brought in extreme uncertainty on personal, professional, and business fronts. Yet, hiring is still high on the agenda for many recruiters—be it for staffing agencies or corporate HR departments. They are on the lookout for remote hiring tools to get going through this increasingly complex situation. It’s time to make up.

Remote recruitment calls for setting up a complete virtual environment in lieu of face-to-face interactions. In our experience talking to hundreds of recruiters and setting up dozens of unique interview processes since the Recruit’s inception, we’ve observed that recruiters currently wish to shift their hiring process to focus on remote hiring.

Here are some helpful tips for adapting to remote hiring practices to keep your recruiting funnel moving.

Nurture your existing candidate pool to gain their trust

Recruiters are deeply concerned about the financial health of their companies at this point. Enriching your existing applicant database and nurturing those candidates can make the perfect strategy to reduce additional costs. You can keep your hiring process moving without spending more to attract new applicants. This is also one of the best ways to earn your applicants’ trust.

One strategy to keep your applicant pool engaged with your company is to schedule a weekly auto-responder to your candidate database with tips and tricks. E.g. “Improving confidence and congruence to reach your next great workplace.” This will help you stay in touch with them without missing the loop while also emphasizing trust.

While on the other side of this spectrum, recruiters are looking for active applicants through job portals too. In such cases, let candidates know what is expected of working from home for the role you intend to hire remotely. Give a deep and detailed view of the job you are hiring for.

Rely on remote assessment tools to monitor candidates in real time

From video interviews to assessment platforms, the COVID-19 outbreak has pushed more organizations to adopt online proctoring tools. These online tools are adopted to vet top talent and guide them quickly through the hiring process, and this has opened a plethora of possibilities to hire candidates from wherever you are.

Here are some you may want to take note of:

Coderpad: With this live coding environment, candidates can showcase their abilities in a natural environment and see the execution results exactly as you’d see them on your own machine. Coderpad is a great addition to your interview toolkit, if you’re looking out to hire and onboard a developer. This online technical assessment software lets your hiring managers accurately track applicants’ programming. You can set up your custom environment and run code in over 30 of the most popular programming languages.

Hackerrank: Without a doubt, Hackerrank is an excellent programming platform for recruiters to find and hire developers. With a very large community, the tech skill assessment platform is available in 35+ languages, 8 frameworks, and includes a role-based hiring structure.

Zoho Meeting: Zoho Meeting helps you connect with attendees through live chat, audio, video, and screen sharing. More importantly, taking security as a top priority, all transmissions are encrypted with industry-standard SSL/128-bit AES protocols. Also, the platform has the Zoho advantage of seamless and quick integration with other Zoho products.

Bonus Tip: 

• To take hiring through video interviews, ensure you have a minimum internet bandwidth of 10 to 15 Mbps for seamless communication.

• Jot down notes and questions that you might want to ask the applicants during the interview with an online note-taking app.

Simplify your hiring process

This is a tough time for everybody. In the middle of it all, applicants are trying to find their next best place to work. Now is a great time to reduce the number of steps in your application process. It will benefit your business to keep candidates comfortable at this time. As we discussed candidate experience in one of our previous articles, when a candidate is actively looking for a job and finds your process easy and smooth, they’re more likely to accept the offer. Thus, delivering a rich, hassle-free experience to candidates—especially at this point in time—will make a significant difference.  

How Zoho can help you during the crisis

Last week, Zoho announced its Emergency Subscription Assistance Program (ESAP) to help our small business customers who have been affected by the economic disruption. See the full ESAP post for details. You can also avail Zoho Recruit’s free video credits here.

We know you deserve the best. We truly wish circumstances will improve soon. Until then, let’s keep our spirits up, stay home, and stay safe.