A Recruiter's Guide to Technology-Driven Remote Hiring Here's how technical assessment tools and remote coding software can help organizations iron out their recruitment process and catapult their hiring efficiency to newfound heights

Hiring is one of the most important functions in any company and has the power to either make or break an organization. While recruiting, there are many criteria or boxes that you will have to check against before welcoming aboard a new team member. Naturally, the quality of the candidates ranks the highest on this list. The degree of skill and baseline knowledge that a candidate brings to your company is of utmost relevance to its continual growth. As recruiters, you just can't afford to take these lightly. To paraphrase one of David Mitchell's characters from the book Cloud Atlas, "What is an organization but a multitude of employees?"

Other important factors include the time and energy that it takes to close each candidate. On average, recruiters take anywhere between one and four months to process a new hire, with only 30 per cent of companies being able to fill a vacant position within the 30-day mark. As you can tell, these numbers aren't exactly favourable and can really cost your organization in the long run.

Traditional methods of hiring don't allow us to be efficient in both of these pursuits. In terms of quality analysis, even though recruiters do their best to filter the best talent through rigorous interviews and multiple assignments, the truth is that human labor can never match up to the amount of sophistication or the sheer level of insight that an optimized software can offer.

Here's how technical assessment tools and remote coding software can help organizations iron out their recruitment process and catapult their hiring efficiency to newfound heights.

Receive comprehensive and detailed report analyses on candidate's skills: Gauge candidate performance through comprehensive reports that tell you the whole story. With technical assessment tools, you'll never be in the dark. They provide you with an in-depth understanding of a candidate's strong suits as well as their weaknesses. Also, you can easily stack candidates' results against each other to create a leaderboard and evaluate using nuanced performance-related metrics.

Increase your bandwidth by assessing multiple candidates at the same time: Amplify your reach by sending out email invites that will allow candidates to take up coding assessments remotely, at their own convenience. Potentially, hundreds could take these tests simultaneously; after which the system will automatically evaluate and shortlist desired candidates based on your preset benchmarks.

Conducting interviews of this magnitude manually would prove to be a herculean task, demanding a good chunk of your valuable time and resources. For subsequent rounds, you can also choose to virtually connect with the selected candidates over video interviewing platforms that are specially designed to facilitate technical assessments.

Standardize your hiring process and remove all forms of unconscious bias: Research has shown time and again that traditional hiring processes are biased. Unconscious ageism, racism, and sexism play a big role in determining who gets chosen. Automating your hiring process ensures lesser human intervention in screening and selection, thus reducing any conscious or unconscious bias that may have crept into your evaluation. AI-based assessment tools are your best bet at objectively screening candidates based on skill alone.

Adapting to new technologies is no longer just a choice, but a matter of survival: Replacing in-person interviews with automated assessment platforms should not be seen as a sign of regression, but rather a clear indication of business evolution. Even though remote hiring might seem like a forced necessity due to the current pandemic, it is definitely here to stay. I, for one, daresay that it would be a fool's errand to revert back to conventional methods.

Since recruitment software are made to do most of the heavy lifting, it might seem that the role of the traditional recruiter is reduced to that of an ancillary. This is nothing to brood about, however. If anything, this should give you ample cause to celebrate.

Instead of putting in long strenuous man-hours into screening, assessing, and tests, you could start focussing on the more crucial - if not most pivotal - aspects of the hiring process: building concrete human relationships. Automation has finally enabled us to do this. I strongly believe that it's imperative for companies to start forging strong bonds and feelings of brethren - right from the very beginning of a candidate's journey - even before they are formally inducted into the team. In an ever-mechanizing and technologically-evolving world—even the smallest of human connections will go a long way.