3 Strategies to Hiring Confidently without In-person Interviews

Learn best practices from talent leaders at Confluent and InVision

More so than most corporate functions, recruiters and hiring managers rely on in-person interactions to assess the emotional intelligence and soft skills of their candidates. However, as more and more business is being done remotely, recruiters need to shift their strategies to deliver the insights managers need to be confident in their hiring decisions.

Searchlight sat down with Lynn Carter of Confluent and Jackie Velasquez-Ross of InVision to talk about how their businesses have adjusted to our new reality and the investments they’re making to future proof their hiring processes. Here is what we learned.

Main Takeaways:

• Define your hiring criteria upfront and invest in a structured hiring process that improves organizational decision-making, drives higher conversion rates, lowers implicit bias, and increases equity.
• Your hiring process is your best opportunity to show your candidates what working for your organization will be like and that they’ll be set up for success. Strive to add casual touchpoints between employees and candidates. Build inclusive hiring panels.
• Building deeper working relationships with hiring managers and becoming a true business partner will develop the trust and confidence necessary to make key hiring decisions sight unseen.

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Structured Recruiting

The best recruiting teams have long relied on building well defined hiring processes that allowed organizations to scale while maintaining a high bar for excellence. With hiring becoming a 100% remote practice structured recruiting has gone from a best practice to table stakes.

What this looks like starts with the first phone screens and into meetings. While it’s always been important to build a human connection with candidates to understand their motivations and decision-making criteria, it is now also important to allow them to bring their whole selves into the interview process. Try to insert some casualness into the process - interviewing is stressful! This might mean being more flexible about scheduling or letting a candidate hold a baby as they talk to their presentation. Showing candidates that they will be seen and treated as whole human beings, not just as employees, is a huge part of the interview process.

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Business Partners

Taking on a new role in an uncertain time is hard, but so is making a critical hiring decision without ever having a chance to meet a candidate in person. To enable managers to make these decisions confidently requires becoming a true business partner.

For talent and people leaders this means aligning recruiters with specific teams gives them the time necessary to become subject matter experts in the types of recruiting and hiring they lead. Whether an organization is receiving a deluge of new applications or only a trickle, having strong phone screens that only bring in candidates that align with the criteria defined in intake conversations helps build the culture of trust and will help make final decisions easier to execute.

Finally, building structured recruiting criteria and decision-making rubric upfront will ensure that managers can objectively review their candidate pool at the end of an interview cycle and feel confident about their decision. While you rarely find someone who satisfies every attribute, seeing that a candidate fulfills 70%-80% of the predetermined skills and experiences can help the hiring manager make a tough call where otherwise they would lack the data they needed the move forward.

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Conclusion

While change remains the only constant in our work today, it is heartening to see that the best practices that were true in January of 2020 are still true today. If you didn't have a chance to join our webinar live, please watch it on demand and look out for future posts and thought leadership roundtables from Searchlight in the future!