9 Top Virtual Recruiting Tips to Optimize Your Hiring Process

If you aren’t already bringing virtual tools into your recruiting process, you’re one of the only ones: around 89% of organizations are doing much of their recruiting work virtually to reach top talent, cut costs, and save time.

But simply “going virtual” doesn’t guarantee any positive outcome—you have to approach it the right way.

With this in mind, here’s a crash course from Willo on how to optimize your virtual recruiting process.

What Is Virtual Recruiting?

Virtual recruiting is when a company uses technology, rather than doing things manually or in-person, to find, communicate with, and hire potential candidates. 

This means everything is done online—from posting job openings on various platforms to inviting candidates to participate in online assessments and even conducting video interviews. 

For instance, Willo provides a convenient way to conduct asynchronous video interviews and verify a candidate’s identity automatically, allowing you and your candidates to save time and offer more flexibility in the hiring process.

Source: Content Stadium

Virtual recruiting can also involve identifying and contacting candidates through their profiles on sites like LinkedIn. As of 2022, for example, 96% of recruitment teams were using social media as a tool for their work.

How Can Virtual Recruiting Benefit Your Business?

Improve hiring process quality

Virtual recruiting improves the quality of your hiring process. 

It does this by streamlining the coordination and organization side of things, taking care of invitations and data collection, so more time can be spent engaging and assessing prospects. Additionally, the possibility of bias affecting recruitment results is limited, as businesses can set structured interviews with the same length of time and questions for every candidate, ensuring everyone gets an equal opportunity to shine.

Just ask airBaltic—they used Willo’s virtual candidate screening platform to screen 100+ high-potential candidates per week during a large recruitment drive.

Save time & money

Virtual recruitment is more economical and cost-effective than traditional recruitment models. 

InHealth, for example, saved over 1,000 recruiting team member hours thanks to the virtual candidate screening process.

Reach more candidates

Another key benefit to virtual recruitment is that you get access to a much greater number of candidates.

According to a survey by Jobvite, 63% of recruiters said that virtual recruitment had increased their access to candidates outside their local area. This is increasingly important as more jobs become partly or entirely remote. 

Additionally, casting a wider net helps with company ambitions regarding increasing diversity among the workforce. For instance, research has shown that companies with a diversified structure had larger revenue streams than less diverse companies. That means valuing diversity in your company isn’t just moral, but profitable as well. 

Things to Consider When Conducting Virtual Recruitment

Technology

To run a truly optimized virtual recruitment department, you need to have a wide range of solutions, including some (or all) of the following:

• Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)
• Video Interviewing Platforms
• Collaboration and communication tools
• Candidate Management Systems 
• Data Analytics and Reporting Software
• Mobile Recruiting

Recruitment CRM tools typically come with a variety of features like ATS, candidate management, collaboration, and communication. So, when you're picking a solution, it's essential to make sure it offers the specific functionality you're looking for.

Expérience du candidat

Candidates want to work for companies that value their employees, and companies with a streamlined hiring experience with a focus on open communication and fairness, helps to set good expectations from the get-go. 

As such, you should always treat candidates with respect and professional courtesy, especially as 78% of candidates say the overall candidate experience they receive indicates how a company values its people.

Keep in mind, a good recruitment experience isn’t just beneficial for candidates. If you’re open and honest with candidates, you can expect similar results from them, allowing recruiters to better assess the talent and skills of each candidate. 

Assessment tools

Online assessment tools are a valuable asset for hiring managers to leverage. You should take time to explore virtual assessment tools, such as platforms like Arctic Shores, that can help evaluate candidates' skills, abilities, and cultural fit.

There are several good assessment tools to choose from that will improve your candidate pre-screening and quickly eliminate unsuitable applicants from further consideration, which will save you a lot of time.

Top 9 Virtual Recruiting Tips

1. Use software platforms to boost effectiveness

As noted in the “things to consider” section above, there is now a huge range of software that can drive efficiency and productivity in your hiring processes. Many of these tools can work for multiple tasks.

For instance, Willo is an asynchronous interviewing tool that also offers comprehensive identity verification features.

2. Streamline the invitation process

It is not unusual for candidates to withdraw their applications if they feel a recruitment process is too long or the hiring team is unresponsive. And 80% of candidates who have a negative unsatisfactory recruitment process are inclined to share their experiences with others.

All the more reason to ensure you’re providing the best experience possible.

With Willo, you can easily invite candidates at scale. Upload a CSV, invite individually, or share the link on a job board. Willo will also take care of the email/SMS and automated reminders to keep candidates in the loop at every step of the application process.

3. Collaborate with your team

Another imperative for successful virtual recruitment is having the right tools for effective collaboration. 

You must select tools that have strong collaborative features that allow multiple stakeholders to access and contribute at every stage of the process, from selecting candidates to advancing to interview to being able to access reports and recommendations. 

Willo, for example, allows you to securely share interviews using the Showcase™ feature to collect feedback from any internal stakeholder.

4. Cater to different time zones

Today, businesses have the remarkable ability to discover and harness talent from all corners of the globe, transcending geographical boundaries that once restricted them to local talent pools.

This is a distinct advantage, but it does mean having to be mindful of time differences when scheduling and conducting video interviews. Nobody is performing optimally hours before their morning alarm or past their bedtime.

5. Prioritize security & data privacy

All of your tools and software need to be compliant with both international and local data laws.

Ensure that any solutions you are considering introducing to the business are GDPR-compliant and meet the security standards of the county/state where your business is located.

6. Plan your questions ahead of time

This is a crucial aspect of interviews and should form part of clearly established procedures and processes within the hiring team. 

Having a well-thought-out list of questions to ask each candidate in advance will help you save time and have more meaningful conversations as it will help ensure that all candidates are asked the same set of questions. This is also important for staying compliant with interview best practices.

Want to learn more about this crucial aspect of virtual recruitment? Check out: Top Video Interview Questions for Recruiters and Hiring Managers.

7. Gain a deeper understanding of candidates' qualifications

You need to gather additional information from candidates that helps flesh out your understanding of their performance in their previous roles. The things you collect will depend on the role you’re hiring for, but might include:

• Portfolios
• Work samples
• Project deliverables

With Willo’s simple file uploads, candidates can easily upload documents before their interview for you to review. This helps you get a better picture of their qualifications before the interview starts.

8. Showcase your company culture

Virtual recruiting makes it challenging for candidates to experience your company culture first-hand. Use video presentations, virtual tours, or testimonials from current employees to provide insights into your organization's values, mission, and working environment.

9. Evaluate the need for candidate references

While references can be valuable, they can artificially lengthen the hiring process, especially for roles that didn’t need references in the first place (like entry-level roles, for instance). There can also be issues with bias, especially if you’re poaching employees from other companies, and the possibility that references can be forged. So, if you’re checking references, you’ll need to be thorough and ensure that they’re relevant for the role you’re hiring for. 

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That being said, there are plenty of methods you can use during the interviewing process to evaluate a candidate’s suitability, without the need for references. For instance, more in-depth questions about their previous experiences, and even the inclusion of a technical test to evaluate their abilities, can give you even more insights than you would get actually talking to an employer.

Virtual Recruiting Can Improve Your Hiring Process

Moving to virtual recruiting can bring huge improvements to a company’s hiring process. Leverage the power of the right tools to unlock candidate sourcing potential. Expand your reach, discover a wider pool of potential employees, and streamline the interview process.

Of course, you can’t have truly optimized virtual recruitment without having the right candidate screening and video recruiting tools. At Willo, we provide this and more, taking the hassle out of recruiting for you.

There's a good reason we've been ranked #1 by G2 two years running. Schedule a demo and see why!