Remote hiring trends: What’s in and out in 2021
Let’s take a look at the hiring and recuiting patterns that are trending and those headed to the history books.
It’s tough to consider hiring trends for 2021 without acknowledging how profoundly the prevalence of remote work and virtual teams has increased over the last year. While some workers may be returning to the office in 2021, Newsweek recently reported that the share of those working from home and who wish to continue doing so is large and growing. In addition, businesses that have not previously searched for remote team members are warming up to the idea of home-based employees.
Related: Adapting employee wellness for the work-from-home era
This shifting dynamic is having a profound effect on the recruiting and hiring process. Long-standing practices are slipping away, and new approaches are rapidly emerging. Let’s take a look at the patterns that are trending and those headed to the history books.
What’s out
Some of the standard operating procedures of the past are quickly fading away.
Using boilerplate job titles and descriptions
It’s time to bid farewell to generic job titles and boiler plan job descriptions designed to function as one-size-fits-all options applicable to almost any role. In addition, job postings that include long lists of required skills and technical know-how are quickly disappearing. In their place, functional titles and tightly written job descriptions are trending.
The right job title helps online searchers find relevant posts more quickly on crowded job boards. It functions as a headline for the position and gives searchers a good sense of the job. Once the headline has grabbed attention, a job description that focuses on the role’s goals helps clarify the specifics. In addition, a quality job description includes an overview of responsibilities, desired (but not necessarily required) hard skills, relevant soft skills, and information about how the remote work situation will function, such as availability expectations.
Asking questions about salary history
While it used to be commonplace to ask applicants about their salary history, this practice is quickly being retired for several reasons. For starters, many job seekers bristle at sharing that information and find the question off-putting especially because the answer to this question is mostly irrelevant. The company starts the hiring process with a pay range in mind, and applicants know what pay range they are seeking for a position. The key is finding a match.
Besides, salary history isn’t a great gauge of a candidate’s experience or value. Life and career goals shift, and pay expectations vary with those changes. For example, a candidate who earned six figures in a corporate job who now wants to focus on family may be an affordable addition to your team. Likewise, someone shifting focus back to career may have a lower salary history but still possess the skills that demand a higher wage.
Finally, according to the Society of Human Resources Management, it’s now illegal to ask an applicant about salary history in many places around the country. It’s easier to have a “no-ask” policy in place than to worry about following the right procedure in different cities and states.
A Peek at the future
Employers and job seekers are connecting in new ways during the recruitment and the interview process.
New recruiting methods
Many business owners are changing how they recruit new talent by turning to smaller, niche job sites that specialize in candidates with specific backgrounds or profiles. ( Two good examples include WeHireHeroes.com, which focuses on veterans, and HireMyMom.com, which connects mothers to flexible work arrangements.) Using a niche platform dedicated to connecting driven professionals looking for remote work can make the recruitment process faster and easier in critical ways.
First, high-quality candidates and top-notch professionals who are dedicated to working from home often forgo the big job boards searching for like-minded employers in terms of virtual work arrangements. As a result, the talent pool on niche sites tends to be deep and filled with applicants dedicated to virtual structures that are successful over the long-term.
Also, niche sites generate a more manageable pool of candidates specifically looking for remote work so that businesses can focus on well-suited candidates quickly. Traditional options like LinkedIn or job boards such as Indeed or Monster have a broad reach and can generate thousands of resumes. This creates a logistical hurdle for businesses that aren’t using applicant tracking software. It’s easy to overlook suitable potential matches when you are overwhelmed by resumes.
Evolving interview techniques
The emergence of COVID-related regulations has accelerated the trend of moving interviews from in-person affairs to calls and video conferences. As interviews move out of the conference room and on to Zoom calls, it’s shifting the interview process and re-writing the script.
An interview via Zoom offers a glimpse of what it will be like to work with this candidate. It’s a good proxy to assess how well the applicant might perform in a virtual work situation. What’s more, a larger group of people can participate in the interview process, leading to a more robust review of the candidate.
Questions that focus on soft skills are taking center stage, as teams know that communication skills, teamwork, and self-motivation are essential components for successful virtual teams. Direct questions about experience effectively contributing virtually and managing projects and people from a home office is now a critical line of interview questioning.
What’s next?
As more people work from home and seek virtual jobs, the process of finding new employees is sure to continue to evolve. As broad job descriptions and generic titles fade away, the recruitment process is likely to get faster and more efficient. As questions about salary leave the interview process, many job seekers will feel freer to seek a wider variety of roles without the anxiety around how to best answer that question.
The growing number of professionals dedicated to working remotely will increasingly seek out like-minded employers in spaces devoted to finding and maintaining virtual teams. Technology advancements will undoubtedly lead to new best practices for interviews. People will soon seek and accept new jobs, do great work, and build business relationships without actually meeting in person.
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