HR Strategy for Future Hiring

Namaste.Who would have imagined that this eons old form of greeting would become a world savior?

Clearly, the world has changed. Social distancing, minimal travel, and remote everything, are the new normal. In this milieu, remote work has become the rule and will be here to stay.

HR leaders are finding themselves in the midst of a strategically challenging whirlpool to keep their company workforce-relevant and integrate the distributed workforce into a cohesive value delivery engine.

The Four Imperatives for HR

There are four actions HR leaders will need to take to prepare their company to thrive and be resilient in this new environment. Technology and its security would be the core enablers in the remote work environment.

Employee awareness and training:

HR will have to work closely with the CIO and CISO in ensuring employees working from home and remote workers are aware of how to use collaboration tools, how to do first-line trouble-shooting of common issues, and how to connect and work securely.

Remote work policies:

They will have to formulate remote work policies. However, just publishing policies will not suffice - very importantly, HR will need to implement ways to enforce the policies through motivation as well as disciplinary deterrence. Enforcement will require monitoring remote employee actions with technology leverage, for which there would need to be close coordination between the CIO and CISO.

Organizational structuring:

HR would need to revisit existing staffing models – for example, is it necessary to have all employees on site, or would it suffice keeping only the essential employees onsite with the rest working from home or remote; increase ratio of gig workers etc.

Talent acquisition

HR will also have to formulate new approaches for talent acquisition in the changed environment - how to recruit new talent, how to onboard full-time talent, and how to integrate temporary and contract workers. The traditional forms of physical-contact face-to-face interviews and exams, will need to give way to remote recruiting paradigms. The days of asking candidates to travel from all over to appear for tests and interviews are over.

Traditionally, HR talent managers have focused more on ‘sourcing’ candidate CVs – getting more and more CVs. And as a means to this end, many HR teams maintained empaneled external hiring agencies just to feed CVs. However, ‘selecting’ the right candidates from the bank of CVs sourced, invariably received an almost cursory treatment.

In the emerging remote-work environment, where the selected candidates will work remotely as employees, trust, attitude and their adaptability to the company’s culture becomes very important. Before selecting the candidate, it would be necessary to determine if the candidate can be trusted to work on their own without supervision, and do they have required cognitive skills, job knowledge, and ability to learn. The kind of supervision and hand-holding an employee gets on-site in workplace will inevitably be less, in a distributed remote work space. Therefore, the onus is more on the employee to be self-driven, to know the job, and have the ability to learn on their own – all these aspects need to be established before the candidate is ‘selected’ for the job.

You cannot get these insights into the candidate by a mere phone call. The legacy form of recruiting – that of HR speaking to the candidate on a phone call for a few minutes, and a phone interview by the hiring manager, will need to undergo a radical change. The selection has to be deeper and the interviews more structured.

It will no longer be enough for HR talent managers just to ‘source’ candidate CVs. Talent managers will have to source and they will have to ‘select’ the right candidates.

Follow the four-step process to select right candidates:

You will have to evaluate candidates through a four-step process –

Step-1 In the first step, filter out candidates who clearly do not make the grade – you can do this by asking them specific‘knockout questions’ using application forms (incidentally, using a CV to filter candidates is no longer an effective method and not recommended, because most candidates are savvy enough to create CVs that are inline with expected JD keywords, to beat traditional ATS engines).

Step-2 In the next step, administer cognitive skills, knowledge and psychometric tests to candidates. Obviously, creating the tests can seem to be a daunting task – but if you have the right tools and platform that automates this for you – the pain is removed.

In this, look for tools that provide you a bank of questions and tests you can select from, and also allow you to create your own customized tests based on your company’s specific requirements. The tool should permit you to set the minimum marks required to clear each test – and candidates who do not make it to that threshold should be filtered out automatically.

If you are going to base your selection of candidate on a test that he or she takes remotely, you must ensure that someone else doesn’t appear for the test on behalf of the candidate, or that the candidate doesn’t cheat during the test. For this, choose a remote assessment tool that prevents impersonation and cheating by using remote invigilation technologies.

Step-3 In the third step, administer a one-way video interview on the shortlisted candidates who have cleared the tests in step-2. The one-way video allows you to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ the candidate – which are indispensable for knowing the candidate’s communication skills, expressions and personality.

For the one-way video interview, select a tool that allows you to create a set of questions that you would ask in an actual face-to-face interview (the questions can be general – like, why do you wish to join this company?, or it could be job-related – like, how will you create a sales plan? You can get the specific job-related questions from the hiring manager). After creating the set of questions, set the time for the candidate to answer each question. The tool should automatically mail your questions to the candidates, and provide them an interface for recording their answers to the questions, one-by-one. The tool should allow you or the hiring manager as assessor, to view and rate the recordings.

Once the one-way video interviews have been rated, your tool should automatically prepare a ranked list of your candidates based on their one-way video ratings as well as a consolidated rank based on what the candidates obtained in their cognitive, knowledge, and psychometric tests plus the one-way video interview ratings.

Step-4 In the fourth step, you can shortlist the required number of candidates from the top of the ranked list obtained in step-3, for a two-way video interview. The tools should allow you to create a set of questions that candidates will be asked during the live interview (this makes the interviews structured by eliminating personal bias and sets a level playing field, since all candidates would be asked the same questions in the interview). Very importantly, the tool should automatically eliminate the major pain point faced by most talent managers, which is scheduling the interviews between candidates and the hiring managers - the tool should let you automate the interview scheduling. EasyTalent will help you automate all the above four steps. Contact us. Our solutions managers will advise you on how you can migrate your talent acquisition into an cost-efficient, fully automated, and ‘remote-centered’ talent selection process.