Talent is present abound across the world. You just have to widen your horizons beyond geographical limitations to get access to tech experts from anywhere. Remote workers are also the need of the hour given the traveling and social distancing restrictions in place due to the recent pandemic outbreak.
So, let’s get started with the best ways and techniques to hire and successfully integrate a remote talent pool into your company during this COVID-19 era.
Hiring Tech Talent During The Pandemic
The usual hiring process is mostly restricted within geographical limitations. After a few initial rounds of resume and profile screening, candidates are often interviewed on-site and inducted into physical workplaces.
But with the pandemic still going strong, such practices are not the best way to hire tech talents, given the safety and convenience concerns. Besides, remote hire of tech specialists is observed to be a lot more efficient, productive, and quicker. Here is how you can go about it.
Finding The Tech Talent
As most job recruitment and related processes are conducted via online services, you can also search for the right candidates through online resources. Referrals, tech conventions, online coding platforms, job portals, freelance sites, social media platforms like LinkedIn, online platforms like TopTal, Glassdoor, Upwork, Github, and YouTeam, are all popular choices you can choose from.
As you may not attend a physical meetup, try to focus on alternatives like online coding completions, hackathons to find suitable candidates.
Interviewing Your Candidates
Besides their technical skills and expertise, few qualities are necessary to qualify as a remote worker. Assess and check your candidates while conducting a software developer interview. Essentially, look for these qualities:
- Remote readiness
- Their ability to organize their working environment
- Personal management capabilities
You need to formulate questions that help you identify workers who can be flexible to adjust to remote working needs and be productive. You can start with general personality-related questions that focus on communication, time management, flexibility, creativity, critical thinking, organizational fitness, readiness to work in a team, and overall emotional intelligence. Do make sure they are adept at using remote tools and communication modes.
Checking The Culture Fit
When hiring remote workers, there are very particular challenges like overcoming the language and cultural differences between the different geographical regions. Traditionally, when workers come to work in person, they get many chances to adapt to the organization’s work culture due to continuous interactions. The absence of such constant interactions can make it difficult for remote workers to work together as a team and resolve conflicts.
So, always remember to hire a culture fit in a remote team who can gel with your team to avoid any future misgivings.
Ensure that job seekers share the same vision as your team does and agree to the working terms and conditions.
Some questions that can help you gather insights about the top tech talent are listed below:
- Why did you leave your previous company?
- Why did you choose us?
- What do you consider to be ideal work conditions?
- Describe the last time you helped someone non-professionally.
- What do you want to be in the next 5 years?
- Talk about your role model, if any.
- Do you have any previous experience of working remotely?
Integrating Your New Tech Employee To The Team
Your job is only half done when you have hired recruits for tech positions. You need to establish a proper onboarding process to ensure employee retainment and a smooth working tech team. Just as with the recruitment process, onboarding, too, needs to be completely moved to online modes to accommodate the true remote working model.
Online On-boarding
Digitize the entire onboarding process for your technology companies so that it becomes easy for any new recruit to onboard with just using online onboarding methods. Some companies have a rigid protocol where the employee has to present themselves for onboarding physically. While this was the norm in regular times, you should be willing to adjust your protocols to fit the remote working model. Here are some tips to help you:
- Make use of online authentication and verification to vet the employee credentials.
- Record all the interactions for future reference.
- Set up a library of all resources and store them easily to use format with relevant comments, resources, and more. Documenting all the company information, practices and standards will help the new employee find any information with ease.
- Automate the onboarding processes with the help of scheduling apps and tools.
- Developer onboarding can be made more efficient by establishing employee learning systems.
- Divide the onboarding process into three parts. Pre onboarding, in boarding, and post onboarding and carry the employee through each part of the process.
- Pre onboarding – Introduce the terms of employment, objectives to the employee, and create all employee accounts required to access company resources.
- Onboarding – Send the welcome email and necessary tutorials, account details, and any other relevant information to the selected techies. Make sure to hold official employee introduction via video conferences to the rest of the team members. You can also set up a coding partner or team buddy to help them integrate into the team.
- Post onboarding – Get feedback from the employee and evaluate the recruitment process. Keep monitoring their progress.
Make Your Team Easily Accessible
Try to foster a streamlined work culture within your teams so that the new software engineers do not feel lost. Make sure all information is readily available and easy to access. Create an internal system to facilitate easy access to information like the team’s roles, responsibilities, contacts, knowledge base, and more. Your employees can make use of software and social engineering tools to better know co-workers.
Take Care About Cyber Security
Remote software developers most often use their devices and sometimes unauthorized software applications to store and share company data. This can bring in many unknown vulnerabilities to your data systems, and hence you should employ proper security practices to prevent data breaches and leaks.
Do train your employees on cybersecurity best practices, scan Mac for viruses, and run regular resource feedback and surveys to control unauthorized software and hardware usage.
Wrap Up
Hiring remote programmers or an entirely remote team sure is challenging for recruiters. But it offers the best possible solution for hiring the much-needed tech talents in a pandemic situation. From candidate screening to onboarding and work monitoring – everything needs to be digitized and moved online for better access and convenience. Do use the right tools and platforms to hire the best talents you need and keep progressing towards your goals.
Interesting Related Article: ” Surviving the Pandemic: 10 Financial Tips for Businesses During COVID-19“