Preparing Your HR Department for Permanent Remote Hiring and Onboarding

By Adrian Johansen

Image Source: Pexels

With this in mind, your Human Resources department must maintain a strategy for permanent remote hiring and onboarding practices. Finding the right talent in a digital world can be difficult. Getting these professionals trained up to function effectively with your team and systems can be even harder.

Looking ahead, it’s necessary to prepare your HR department now with the skills, systems, and technology they need for successful virtual talent acquisition. Here are some tips and strategies to help you prepare effectively.

1. Understand the Challenges

Before making the transition to permanent remote hiring and onboarding practices, your HR department must assess the challenges that can occur when maintaining virtual work. Every organization has different needs. Understanding yours and how virtual hiring efforts interact with those needs can make for a complex situation.

These are some of the prominent challenges modern workplaces face when attempting to adjust to permit remote strategies:

● Managing an excessive number of applicants

● Scaling data storage and protection

● Communicating information over virtual platforms

● Cultivating a technical skillset

● Integrating new team members

Because of all these obstacles, thoroughly assessing your remote hiring strategy is vital in your preparations for a digital HR transformation. Included in this assessment should be your methods of humanizing and communicating data, scaling your information systems, and building an effective IT department.

2. Find the Right Assistive Technologies

New technologies will be vital in your ability to create effective hiring and onboarding practices that can accommodate all worker needs. Your online platforms and HR Information Systems should be customizable and cater to every task necessary for effective onboarding.

Fortunately, the modern world offers a plethora of options when it comes to software-as-a-service and other cloud-based platforms for managing remote workers. These are some of the tools you will need:

● An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to parse your influx of resumes.

● A Human Resource Information System (HRIS) that can consolidate candidate information, payroll, and employee data.

● A Workflow Management System (WMS) that makes it easy to check in on new hires and track tasks.

These are just three pieces of modern technology that can help HR departments make virtual hiring and onboarding as seamless as possible. For example, the power of an ATS allows you to narrow down candidates based on semantic algorithms so you can more easily handle a greater candidate pool. Meanwhile, the right information and workflow management systems will guide you through all necessary tasks.

3. Clarify your Job Descriptions and Candidate Needs

With a careful assessment and the right tools for the job, your HR department will be better prepared to meet virtual candidate needs. However, finding and managing the right talent won’t be possible without clarity and care.

Dictating an effective approach to permanent remote hiring and onboarding requires clear definitions of all job descriptions and roles both for current employees and prospective hires. For example, HR professionals have a lot on their hands. Most juggle everything from hiring candidates to working with senior employees on securing the benefits and resources they need. With the evolving demands of a digital world, it may be necessary to diversify your HR department into distinct Personnel and Human Resource Management teams.

From there, you can have HR managers dedicated specifically to virtual hiring and onboarding, while the Personnel team manages current employee needs. Such clear and specific roles are also necessary within the job descriptions you put out onto the market to help you better manage incoming resumes with company goals.

4. Prioritize Accessible Communication

One of the chief priorities every team should have when working remotely is maintaining accessible communication. When we all worked in an office, it was easy to approach a co-worker with a simple question and get a quick response. These days, it takes coordination of timezones, tech platforms, and sometimes chaotic work-life balances to have a dialogue.

That said, your HR department must make accessible communication essential for remote hiring and onboarding. Especially when it comes to engaging new hires, you need to be accessible to answer any questions and address any concerns that may come up.

Thoroughly go over the communication platforms you use with new hires and ensure that you remain open to them should they need you. An effective remote hiring strategy relies on the ease of communication from the beginning.

5. Never Stop Engaging

But accessibility and engagement should not stop after the initial hiring process. With surveys finding that enthusiasm for work peaks around the start of a new job and then wanes by 22% shortly afterward, HR should make it a priority to consistently engage new hires.

Engaging with a virtual team can take a variety of forms. Tech can be vital to supporting such an approach. For instance, Zoom breakout rooms can help build social interaction in small groups. Similarly, team-building exercises like playing trivia games or holding brainstorming sessions over a digital platform can help build a culture of engagement.

Be prepared to support permanent remote hiring and onboarding processes with a plan for consistent engagement. Without this, you’ll likely see negative impacts on employee retention and morale.

Conclusion

Since remote work is here to stay, you should maintain a permanent and consistent plan for promoting the success of all new hires. This begins with a thorough assessment of your needs and comes down to consistent engagement across the digital platforms that make the most sense for your organization.

With the right remote hiring and onboarding strategy in place, your HR team can promote a successful company culture that lets remote workers thrive.