Whether you're recruiting remotely or in person, the fundamentals of good recruitment remain the same. It's all about asking the right questions of candidates to assess whether their technical and behavioral skills match the company's needs, but also about making the right candidates want to join you.

Remote recruitment nevertheless poses a number of challenges in terms of the stages in the recruitment process, posture and communication with candidates and between the various people involved in recruitment. In this article, we share with you 4 key stages in a successful recruitment process, with some nuances if you're recruiting remotely.

1. Writing your job description: an essential step in finding the right candidate

The job description is the first interface a candidate will have with your company and the position to be filled within it. It's vital that it's clear, realistic and makes the right candidates want to join your company. Even before a first interview, it's designed to share what you expect from the future recruit who will occupy the position on offer. To ensure the right level of clarity, the first step is not to write your job description - which is what most managers do - but to draw up your scorecard.

What is a scorecard in recruitment?

The scorecard is your basis for all recruitment work. It specifies several key elements:

• What skills are you looking for in your future recruit?
• What level of importance and priority will you give to each skill?
• What is your vision of success in 12 months for each of the skills listed in the score card?
• How - during the recruitment process - will you assess the candidate on each of the skills listed in your scorecard?

Let's take the example of recruiting a Sales Director for Company X. Here's what his scorecard might look like:

How to use your scorecard to draw up a job description?

Once you've defined your scorecard, you can move on to writing your job description.

The scorecard enables you to formulate in a very clear and transparent way the major missions that will be entrusted to the future recruit, the expected results and some of the levers of action available to him to achieve them. The scorecard exercise is particularly useful because it encourages you to think in terms of missions & objectives, rather than actions. Rather than exhaustively listing all the actions and tasks that a future recruit will have to carry out on a daily basis, it's much more interesting, from a candidate's point of view, to set out the major missions and objectives: it's then up to the future recruit to imagine, in addition to the standard actions, other actions that will contribute to achieving these objectives.

The main categories of your job description are :

• The job title: it must be clear and reflect the reality of your future recruit's job.
• A description of your company: you can talk here about the company's mission, the product or service you sell, the types of customers you address, but also your work culture. If you offer a full or partial telecommuting policy, it's worth mentioning it prominently, as it's a good argument for attracting a proportion of applicants. A survey conducted by YouGov for Nicholson Search & Selection in 2021 showed that the majority of young workers (school leavers) are in favor of 100% teleworking. So if you're targeting school leavers, this is a key argument in your work culture that you need to promote.

• Major missions & objectives: it may be useful to specify the percentage of time the future recruit will have to devote to each major family of objectives.
• For each mission family: list a few actions to achieve it
• Expected skills: here you can talk about both soft skills and technical skills. In soft skills and interpersonal skills, remember to mention those that are important for integrating into your work culture. At NUMA, for example, having adopted a "Work from anywhere" policy, the ability to communicate effectively in writing and to be self-reliant are important soft skills and soft skills for us.
• The recruitment process: particularly in a remote recruitment context, we advise you to be very clear about the different stages of recruitment a candidate will go through, the time interval between each stage, and the people the candidate will meet (and how: by video or in person).

A well-written job description is the key to attracting the right candidates: firstly, in the search engines of the various job boards you can use, but also to filter out, right from the job description, applicants who might not be a good match for the position or your company's culture.

2. Recruiting from a distance: what's different for candidates and recruiters?

Hiring remotely is undeniably different from traditional / physical recruitment.

• Perception of corporate culture: Since candidates don't actually visit the company, it's harder to get a feel for the corporate culture, atmosphere or team dynamics. You'll need to make these points as clear as possible to bridge this gap, and even organize quick meetings between a candidate you've fallen in love with and several members of your organization. This is known as a "cultural fit" interview.
• Skills testing: it's key to identify at the score card stage how you're going to test each of your key skills, bearing in mind that you won't see the candidate "in real life". Some organization and execution skills can be tested with shorter practical cases and scenarios than the long ones some companies may offer. Other soft skills and interpersonal skills can be tested throughout the recruitment process, without being the subject of a specific stage. For example, at NUMA, to test candidates' written communication skills, we systematically ask candidates after a job interview to share with us by e-mail what he/she understood about the position and its challenges. This enables us to test spelling, clarity and conciseness in writing, which are key in a company where 90% of work is done remotely.
• The recruiter's position. In terms of energy, it's important to bear in mind that you get tired more quickly at a distance. In fact, at the end of the successive confinements, we spoke of "Zoom fatigue" to describe the phenomenon of exhaustion in people who do one videoconference after another all day long. Then, at a distance, there's also the risk of over-interpreting certain signals more easily: a person not looking at the camera would be distracted, a person making too many "uh's" would be unsure of himself. Without the non-verbal side, our attention is naturally more focused on every detail we would see in the frame of our screen. 
• The transmission of information between the various parties involved in a recruitment process. At a distance, it can be more complicated to obtain quality information about a candidate. Whereas in a face-to-face meeting, a recruiter or manager could go and see the various participants physically to have a full debriefing, at a distance, the written word prevails and there may be a risk that this written word will be of poor quality (not precise enough, not illustrated enough with concrete examples...).

3. Recruitment interview guide: questions to ask in an interview to assess a candidate and recruit effectively

The interview guide is a good tool for conducting your interviews, but also for passing on information about the candidate from one stage to the next. To build this guide, the first step is to define the right questions to ask. To do this, refer to your scorecard.

If one of the skills you're looking for is coachability, then you can give some hard, dry feedback to see how the candidate reacts. If you're looking for conciseness in your candidate, then you can ask them to pitch in 2 minutes what you should retain from their application: "You've got two minutes, tell me what you want, what I should retain from you, in 2 minutes". Finally, if you're looking for precision from the candidate, then you can ask them how they prepared for this job interview.

As you can see, there are as many possible questions as there are skills to be assessed, but as you can see, your starting point is always the scorecard, to enable you to obtain answers that will really help you assess the candidate on what you expect of him or her.

Asking candidates the right questions during a recruitment interview is not enough to make a good hire. It's important to really listen to the answers and dig as deeply as you can into the skills that are important to you, including the ideal candidate or the rare pearl in your opinion. "Happy ears" is a bias that every manager/recruiter can have when they're in a hurry to hire (because there are projects to staff, big business needs or holes in the team), or when they particularly like a candidate. Nevertheless, every answer counts, and it's important for you to dig deeper into these skills and motivations to form a firm opinion on the ability of the candidate you have in front of you to take the job.

To do this, you can do the exercise of defining, for each skill to be assessed and each question asked, the answers that are good answers for you and those that are bad answers and will therefore be "deal breakers" at the end of the job interview. 

Here, for example, are some good and bad answers for us as recruiters at NUMA:

But be careful: your job interview guide should not lead you to turn your interview into an interrogation. Remember that an interview is an evaluation process for both the recruiter and the candidate. Candidates' expectations during a recruitment process are also to understand how the company works, what the employees are like, and how they will work with their future N+1 or N+2.

These are all elements that are easier for candidates to perceive in person. When recruiting remotely, never forget to put on your "sales" hat to make candidates want to join you. Whether the outcome of the interview is recruitment or not, this phase remains important for your employer brand (now visible on instagram accounts or on sites like Glassdoor).

There are 3 best practices you can put in place right now to win over your candidates: 

• Long-term vision: "Our aim is to achieve 20% growth over the next 3 years, which means we'll be investing heavily in logistics to be able to guarantee maximum customer satisfaction. This will leave you plenty of room to evolve and innovate."
• Involve your N+1 or N+2: "I'd like you to talk to Alain, Director of EMEA Operations. It's important that you talk so that you understand what our long-term ambitions are, and he's also a major sponsor of logistics, with the
• Organize a meeting with other team members: "I suggest you meet the other members of the team, so you can get to know the people you'll be working with and get a better idea of where you're going."

That's it, you've made the decision to recruit that candidate you've fallen in love with! 

4. Candidate onboarding is the final stage of recruitment

Remember, your recruitment process doesn't end when your candidate is officially hired. According to an APEC study, 17% leave after 3 months.

And this is all the more true when you're recruiting from a distance: asymmetries of understanding and perception between what was experienced in the interview and what will be experienced in the first few months can be multiplied.

To limit this risk, it's essential to prepare your new employee's onboarding properly. If you've opted for a hybrid work culture, then the onboarding of your new employee is bound to be different from what you're used to in a 100% face-to-face organization. To successfully adapt this essential step, certain documents can be sent out in advance, provided they are sufficiently complete to enable the new recruit : 

• to feel more at ease when we see each other
• have specific questions to ask
• be able to put what they see and hear live into perspective in relation to more macro elements about the company or the team

What you can do remotely when onboarding your new employee:

• introduce your new employee to everything he or she has achieved in the previous months in the department, for example, by passing on OKRs or visions of success, project presentations or end-of-project reports.
• Demonstrate the tools used at both company and team level. This presentation can first be made synchronously, using tools such as Loom.
• Talk to the new recruit about hot or highly operational topics during a synchronous remote moment, so that he can digest the information and have a stock of questions to ask you when you see each other face-to-face.

What you can do face-to-face when onboarding your new employee: 

• Pass on the company's and your department's vision to your new recruit
• Putting her at ease with the way we work
• Enable her to forge links with the people she will come into contact with the most

As you can see, the onboarding of a new recruit requires preparation, even more so when this onboarding is hybrid. Your challenge is to know which subjects to address during the face-to-face sessions, and for which purposes, in order to derive maximum value from them.

Successful recruitment doesn't just mean that a position is filled quickly, it also means that a new recruit stays because what he or she has seen of the company and what we have seen of him or her during the various stages of the interview are true to life.

Conclusion

The decision to recruit a new employee is an important one for the company, as it impacts on team organization, corporate culture and your budget. Especially when you know that 17% of employees leave their company after 3 months, it's vital to recruit successfully. Recruiting is all the more challenging when it's carried out mainly remotely, so you can rely on the 4 key steps shared in this article to maximize your chances of a successful future hire!