6 Challenges to Remote Hiring and Ways to Overcome Them
What are the challenges to remote hiring? How can companies overcome the challenges of hiring remotely?
Remote work has risen in popularity over the last few years. However, the challenges of hiring employees remotely prevent hiring managers from capitalizing on the multiple benefits of remote hiring.
Challenges to remote hiring
Within the United States, more than 4.3 million people are currently working as remote employees. Remote jobs have significant advantages over conventional office jobs. Sixteen percent of the organizations worldwide are now fully remote. Yet, the challenges to remote hiring persist.
Eighty-five percent of hiring managers think that remote hiring will be a part of the organizational future. Despite these figures, hiring managers report that the remote hiring process can be tough and overwhelming. Here are the most common hiring challenges that managers face when recruiting remote employees.
- Remote hiring challenge: Sifting through countless applications
Over the past decade, the number of remote workers has increased by over 160 percent. Due to the fierce competition in the job market, hiring managers need to sift through thousands of resumes to shortlist the ideal ones. Naturally, selecting suitable candidates for remote positions becomes tedious. And so, hiring managers must be clear about their expectations to ease the selection process. Well-written and detailed job requirements can help eliminate the profiles that do not qualify for a given remote position. Managers can also optimize the remote hiring process with an AI-based Application Tracking System (ATS).
2. Remote hiring challenge: Time zone differences
A global talent pool allows hiring managers to find prospective candidates from far-off places. However, this geographical freedom results in time zone differences. Time zone differences can cause inconvenience in scheduling interviews and conducting real-time assessments.
And hence, hiring managers should optimize time zone overlaps for live interviews and real-time evaluation. Interviewers can also use automatic scheduling tools to match the interviewer’s time zone. These tools let candidates choose a time that works best for them and the company. Taking these steps can help hiring managers limit the productivity gaps caused by time zone differences.
3. Remote hiring challenge: Vetting and skillset evaluation
Hiring managers always select candidates that possess adequate job-specific skills, no matter the position. Naturally, a thorough evaluation of skillset, experience, and expertise is vital for hiring a remote employee. But accurate skill assessments and evaluations are challenging to conduct in remote settings. 33.1 percent of hiring managers expressed that they struggle to find the best candidates in a remote environment.
Employers and hiring managers can work together to improve unclear evaluation methods. For example, they can design dedicated test projects for employing remote candidates and preparing skillset evaluations. Similarly, conducting customized skill assessments can also help in vetting candidates effectively.
4. Remote hiring challenge: Onboarding difficulties
Onboarding new employees remotely can be tricky. Most new joiners are likely to feel overwhelmed during the first few days at the job. As a result, hiring managers may observe lower productivity with the new employees struggling to understand the workflow. Research states that newly hired employees have approximately 25 percent productivity in their first month after training.
As a hiring manager, you hold the key to augmenting this number. You must make extra efforts to establish a smooth onboarding process to enhance employees’ learning curve. As a prerequisite, hiring managers must plan and conduct introductory sessions with the new joiners. Introductory sessions can help new joiners understand the workflow and processes. These sessions can also help in building a healthy and transparent company culture.
5. Remote hiring challenge: Contractual legalities
Every remote company must draft legal contracts for its remote employees. And thus, hiring managers and employers consider contractual legalities a tedious task.
However, all remote employers must thoroughly examine the labor laws of individual countries to achieve compliance. Employers can also use standard templates for drafting contracts and speeding up the contractual process. What’s more, hiring law and compliance experts can help fine-tune the specifics of the contract.
6. Remote hiring challenge: Salary disbursement
30.6 percent of remote workers expressed economic anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. It goes without saying that proper salary disbursement is essential for employee retention and job satisfaction. Unfortunately, transferring salaries to remote employees can be a complicated offshore challenge. Tax laws of countries, international money transfers, accurate salary calculations, and invoicing can cause serious hiring and compliance issues. These issues can complicate the salary disbursement process for any remote business.
Remote payroll and compliance providers can solve these problems. Such payroll solutions can significantly ease the HR team’s responsibility of managing contracts and salary profiles.
Conclusion: So, how can you overcome remote hiring challenges?
Remote hiring poses many challenges. However, every remote company can tackle these challenges with the right remote hiring strategy in place. AI-powered application tracking systems can speed up the screening process of remote employees. Automatic meeting schedulers can reduce time zone differences for conducting interviews. Test projects and customized skill assessments can enable better skillset evaluation and an efficient vetting process.
Strategically planned introductory sessions ensure a smooth onboarding process. Following standardized templates can reduce contractual misinterpretations, whereas remote payroll service providers can ensure punctuality and accuracy in salary disbursement. Following these standard practices can help hiring managers overcome remote hiring challenges with ease.
