Creating a remote recruitment model for distant locations

Creating a remote recruitment model for distant locations

If you are a part of the Talent Acquisition team looking for an appropriate solution to increasing your talent pool and minimising your overhead costs, you can consider conducting a remote recruitment drive and avoid visiting every college campus physically. As much as this may sound a challenging and not-so-effective strategy, by using technology smartly, you can achieve the desired results. Remote recruiting requires proper planning and proper communication with potential candidates. In this blog post, we help you create a concrete strategy to remotely recruit the best talent from different colleges across the length and breadth of the country. But before that let us understand the remote recruitment process and how to go about it.

Remote recruitment model and strategy

Remote recruitment is a process by which a company conducts the entire campus drive online from a geographically different location, without physically visiting the college site. In the remote set-up, the hiring team can conduct a few online assessment tests and shortlist the candidates with the required score for the final interview round. The interview is a video call where both interviewers and interviewees get to interact online. This allows the interviewing panel to evaluate the candidates’ skills and select or reject them based on their performance in the interview.

Why do companies need a remote recruitment model?

In today’s fast-paced world, hiring the right candidates requires a proper strategy and smart use of all the technological amenities available at your disposal. Remote recruitment has numerous advantages since it not only reduces the expenses of a company, but also allows it to save a lot of time and still hire the best candidates for a particular job profile.

Many a time, a company is unable to tap into talent from a large number of colleges owing to their remote geographical location, and are forced to conduct campus drives only in a few select colleges. This way, the company loses the opportunity to hire good candidates from distant colleges and has to settle down for the few candidates it recruited from the campuses it visited. Listed below are some of the major reasons why you should consider adopting a remote recruitment model for campus drives.

1. Cover more colleges in short time span: With a remote recruitment strategy, you can reach out to campuses in any part of the country and hire the best talent for the job profile. This way, more number of candidates get an opportunity to participate in a campus drive and the company is able to build a larger talent pool to hire.
2. Hire higher number of candidates: Remote recruiting strategy allows the company to hire a higher number of candidates since it evaluates and interacts with a large number of students, unlike the traditional method of visiting a campus where it could interact with only a limited number of candidates.
3. Improves company brand value: Remote recruitment model provides a company with the opportunity to expand its reach and create a concrete brand value among a large number of campuses and candidates. The company creates brand awareness through social media platforms and website blogs, informing students and colleges about its principles, policies, and opportunities. Social media platform is also used for providing information about the recruitment drive, interact with students and clarify their queries.    
4. Hiring team size not a constraint anymore: The size of the hiring team does not matter when a company conducts a campus recruitment drive remotely. This is because the HR team has the option of conducting online assessment tests (without having to visit the campuses physically) in the preliminary rounds and filter the candidates based on their scores for the interview round. The hiring team only needs to have proficient people in the interviewing panel to interview the shortlisted candidates effectively and hire the best among them.
5. Recruit smart, reduce overhead costs: Through remote recruitment, the HR team is able to reduce overhead costs involved in travel and other miscellaneous activities, and also save a lot of time. In this way, the hiring team can commence and complete the recruitment drive on time by conducting preliminary rounds online and interviews over a video call.  

How to conduct remote recruitment?

Remote recruitment involves strategic planning since it requires a lot of attention to detail since the hiring team is not physically present at the campus to conduct the drive. The strategies explained below can help a company to plan well for their remote recruitment drive to hire a large number of talented candidates.

1. Hold webinars for colleges/students: Webinars are a way to interact with the prospective colleges and the students to make them aware of the company’s principles and processes, products and services, and the opportunities offered for young and growing talent. It is also a medium to discuss the current market trends, evaluate the communication skills of the students and understand their interest based on questions and queries in the session.
2. Hold job-related contests: To make the campus recruitment process more interesting, and to get a good picture about candidate skills, holding contests related to the job opening can be a great way. The company can conduct many online contests and record the scores and refer to them during during the actual recruitment drive to get a basic idea about a candidate’s knowledge and skills.
3. Use technology effectively: Technology helps you to collect candidate information and store them at a single platform to be accessed and updated as and when required. It allows you to prequalify candidates based on their scores in the online tests and focus on them for further interview rounds. The interview rounds can be conducted through a video call or video conferencing in a remote recruitment model, where the shortlisted candidates are interviewed by a panel online, without having to physically visit the campus for the drive.
4. Automate and scale: Use a smart, intelligent recruitment tool to enhance your recruitment process by automating some processes such as candidate sourcing and screening to identify the potential colleges and candidates to target and hire the top performers. Automation tool also keeps you updated with information candidate performances and their individual scores of all the rounds that helps you to make the right decision about them while hiring for the job opening.

In a nutshell

Remote recruitment strategy has a lot of advantages. It helps the company to expand its reach and recruit students from far-off cities and build a large talent pool. It improves the company’s brand value since more and more campuses and students become aware of it. Remote recruitment is also a time-saving and cost-effective process compared to the traditional method of visiting campuses. Lastly, the company is able to use technology effectively to hire candidates for the job. To know more, visit https://pod.ai/employers