As coronavirus spreads, remote work is increasingly being leveraged across the workforce. Even before the virus took over the world, remote work was gaining traction with increased traffic, difficulty to attract talent and gains experienced by companies with job categories compatible with the model, as employers see an average increase in productivity by 4 percent when enabling remote work. That’s why over the past 15 years, work from home has grown 173 percent according to the Global Workplace Analytics’ analysis of 2018 American Community Survey (US Census data) – 11 percent faster than the rest of the workforce which grew 15 percent.
Since recruiting and retaining talent is the most expensive, the future of a CHRO’s budget increasingly relies on finding and keeping remote teammates for optimal ROI. One analysis found employers save an average of $11,000 per half-time remote employee due primarily to increased productivity, lower real estate costs, reduced absenteeism and turnover, and better disaster preparedness.
Remote work is changing recruiting practices. As a result, building a scalable process for hiring talent from anywhere is critical to achieving other priorities keeping CHROs up at night like retention, succession planning, and employee experience.
Here are key tools recruiters need as they delve deeper into global remote talent pools:
- Stay Focused on Structured Success
- Digital Behavioral Interviews
- Leveraging Behavioral Interviews in Video Interviews
1.Stay Focused on Structured Success
An unstructured interview is an unconscious bias trap. There are best practices to avoid unconscious bias, the most important being: building a reliable, structured interview process that does not outsource aptitude perception to the personal judgment of hiring managers, and instead relies on quantitative data from mental ability tests, aptitude tests, or behavioral tests.
The first crucial step of a structured interview is to define success for the role in measurable outcomes. By analyzing success in a role based on objective performance data, artificial intelligence tools provide an unbiased perspective on the qualities and characteristics recruiters should be looking for in behavioral interview scores that lead to success in a given role.
2.Digital Behavioral Interviews
As the growing talent search encompasses remote workers from diverse backgrounds, focusing on a consistent candidate evaluation is key. The challenge creating interview question sets, training recruiters, and collaborating with scorecards, is that the results vary widely and biases creep in with every new person involved. Alignment is more challenging than ever.
Many companies are now turning to platforms that use assisted intelligence for behavioral interviews. A behavioral interview done well provides insight into how a candidate approaches work, what motivates them, and other personality traits that make them successful, at scale. The purpose is not to judge the candidate but to learn about how their behaviors inform their performance. AI platforms assist in behavioral interviews by defining qualities that drive success in a role, remove bias and get a 360-view of a candidate before investing hours in live interviews. They are an essential tool in creating alignment within the various constituencies involved in a hiring process and ensure that biases are reduced.
Ultimately, starting the interview process with clearly defined success and unbiased information on behavioral traits closes the gap to hire faster, because it reduces back-and-forth caused by diverging perceptions of what success “looks like.”
3. Leveraging Behavioral Interviews in Video Interviews
A video interview is typically a later stage of the hiring process, and the strategic time to combine the power of behavioral insights with the value of human touch. By asking questions based on behavioral insights, the ROI on a recruiter’s time is more efficiently spent on: getting to know a candidate, gauging current and potential competence, discussing past experience and skills, finding out how they might approach the role, and learning about that candidate’s career goals. Most importantly, setting up the hiring process to function with assisted intelligence helps recruiters avoid passing over qualified candidates by risking having the interviewing team ask the wrong questions.
With a Fit-to-Role platform, talent acquisition experts can leverage the results of the digital behavioral interview to set up follow-on questions with answer ranges to discuss with the interviewing panel. As a result, a structured video interview becomes an independently weighted data point. Together the combined data points in the hiring process can improve the success of the new employee, reduce bias and use objective tools in the consideration of a candidate’s fit for a certain role.
Modern Recruiting in A Remote World
Hiring diverse team members who fit the success profile for the role no matter where in the world they are can stimulate creativity, support better decision-making, increase team productivity, and improve company performance. Getting the edge in today’s talent market means creating a process that efficiently leverages tools to highlight performance-driven traits, avoid unconscious bias, and employ the valuable human touch when most impactful.
For more information, view the Aptology platform demo or request a full demo.