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When the regular audience was stranded at home due the pandemic, the UceLI Quartet improvised, playing Puccini’s ‘I Crisantemi (Chrysanthemums) to 2,292 plants in Barcelona, Spain.

When baseball fans around the world were stranded at home, their baseball teams improvised, filling their stadiums with cardboard cutouts of their fans.

World-class organizations around the globe have also improvised as it relates to the whole new world of remote hiring.  

Yes, virtual hiring is becoming increasingly popular largely due to safety concerns and the need to social distance.  Many, many, organizations have discovered that hiring, onboarding, and training can be done virtually, efficiently and effectively, especially due to today’s technology.  In fact, 51% of organizations have interviewed a candidate remotely, and 42% have extended job offers remotely.1  Furthermore, 21% of hiring managers feel that remote interviewing will be the norm in the future.1

That does not mean that there are not both benefits and pitfalls to virtual hiring.  Virtual recruitment can make the hiring process more efficient, but it can also add a lot of stress for the job applicants.

Some of the additional benefits of remote hiring include:

  • Expanding the pool of candidates for consideration.
  • Obviously, virtual interviewing affords a solution to COVID-19 safety concerns for both the candidate and interviewer.  
  • Affording flexibility to candidates, especially if they can’t travel from home or have childcare issues.
  • Quickens the hiring process. 
  • Cost savings.
  • Gives the opportunity to the interviewer to assess how effectively the candidate works and communicates remotely. 
  • As long as the interviewer uses the same standard set of questions for each job candidate, there will be less chance of pre-judgement and bias.  Oftentimes, when people are interviewing face to face, people are more prone to base their conclusions on “gut instinct” or first impressions, which is not always fair to the candidate.

With that said, there can be pitfalls with remote hiring.  Just some of these downsides include:

  • Candidates who are more comfortable with in-person interviews, may not adjust to, and get stressed out, by this new normal of virtual hiring.
  • Both the candidate and the job interviewer do not have the benefit of that first feel, impression, and intuition that comes with an in-person introduction and interview.
  • The candidate may not have reliable internet access or connectivity, which interferes with the on-line interview and communication.  Technological issues can also occur with Skype or Zoom, and as such, these should be pre-tested prior to the remote interview.

Have you and your organization improvised by moving to a remote hiring model?  If so, we’d love to hear how it went. Email your feedback to info@kevinsheridanllc.com.

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Kevin Sheridan

Kevin Sheridan is an internationally-recognized Keynote Speaker, a New York Times Best Selling Author, and one of the most sought-after voices in the world on the topic of Employee Engagement. For five years running, he has been honored on Inc. Magazine’s top 101 Leadership Speakers in the world, as well as Inc.’s top 101 experts on Employee Engagement. He was also honored to be named to The Employee Engagement Award’s Top 100 Global Influencers on Employee Engagement for three consecutive years, as well as being designated as a Senior Fellow at The Conference Board. Having spent thirty years as a high-level Human Capital Management consultant, Kevin has helped some of the world’s largest corporations rebuild a culture that fosters productive engagement, earning him several distinctive awards and honors. Kevin’s premier creation, PEER®, has been consistently recognized as a long-overdue, industry-changing innovation in the field of Employee Engagement. His first book, Building a Magnetic Culture, made six of the best seller lists including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. He is also the author of The Virtual Manager, which explores how to most effectively manage remote workers. Kevin received a Master of Business Administration from the Harvard Business School in 1988, concentrating his degree in Strategy, Human Resources Management, and Organizational Behavior. He is also a serial entrepreneur, having founded and sold three different companies.

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