3 Crucial Things to Consider When Making a Hire Virtually
Last week, I wrote about adopting new virtual hiring and onboarding processes in order to move your business forward. For that piece, I asked some of the country’s top business leaders a simple — yet provocative — question:
“Would you feel comfortable making an offer to a candidate you hadn’t met in person?”
Our conversations yielded a lot of interesting answers. Chloe Kataev, recruiter at Riviera Partners, cautioned against the commonly-accepted wisdom that hiring managers should approach this process like it’s online dating. “If you are vetting for a personal connection,” she says, “you are likely indexing too strongly on the similarity of thought or experience, and that is not how you build diverse teams (which have been proven time and time again to improve business outcomes).“
In other cases, the “conventional wisdom” is conventional for a reason — it genuinely seems valid and useful. Synthesizing these different perspectives left me with a big pile of practical tips and things to consider when hiring someone you’ve never met. By putting them into practice, you can make the whole remote hiring process a lot more comfortable for everyone involved.
As Julia Rudlin, Director of Growth at Terminal, reminds us, “It’s extremely important to see and evaluate how the person works and communicates with you and your team via remote tools (e.g. online paired coding programs, Zoom, Slack, etc.),” especially since teams will increasingly be more distributed.
These tips will be relevant even after the COVID-19 lockdown has passed. “Most companies today have remote engineering teams and even companies that typically co-locate are considering embracing a remote or distributed team structure post-quarantine,” says Rudlin. For example, “Facebook is notorious for being inflexible on remote work but recently announced their [work from home policies] will extend throughout [the end of the year], so the competition for talent has increased”.
With that in mind, here are three specific things to look for when interviewing a candidate remotely:
- Body language — Body language can make you feel more or less confident in, or comfortable with a candidate.
Ask yourself:
- What does body language actually convey to you?
- What matters most about someone’s body language?
- Has your interviewing committee come to an agreement on what’s important about body language?
- If body language produces feelings of confidence and comfort, then what parts of the body should your team focus on during virtual interviews?
- How will you translate the signals you pick up on?
Tips:
- Especially in the early stages, opt for video calls over audio-only ones if possible.
- Position the camera so your arms and upper torso are visible. Encourage the candidate to do so as well by complimenting an item of clothing or another object in view. This may inspire them to lean back, allowing you to see and experience more of their body language.
- Pay attention to their eyes. As Chloe Kateav says, “Do they mostly look at the screen, but when you ask them difficult questions — where do their eyes go? Are they staring thoughtfully into the abyss, or are their eyes darting in anxiety?”
2. Chemistry — As the old saying goes, you know it when you see it — when you “click” with a candidate during an interview, it’s a good sign they’ll be able to integrate with your team in the future.
Ask yourself:
- How do you define “chemistry”?
- How can you create an emotional connection or common feeling between two people without being in the same room (ex. asking about hobbies, commenting on decor, etc.)?
- What kind of energy level do they bring to the call, and how do they make you feel?
Tips:
Determining a candidate’s energy level may correlate to the chemistry and connection you feel:
- High energy — bright-eyed, projecting enthusiasm, radically engaged
- Positive energy — smiling, personable, optimistic, grateful, passionate
- Low energy — not engaged, sleepy, no spark to make you feel alive
- Negative energy — blames others, pessimistic, not well mannered
3. Rapport — Positive rapport is defined as a close and harmonious relationship in which people understand each other’s feelings or ideas and communicate well. Building rapport is essential to building a strong connection.
Ask yourself:
- How do you define positive rapport?
- How can you establish good rapport virtually?
- How can you build trust and empathy?
Tips:
- Some folks struggle to socialize virtually, so you’ll need to find common ground to build rapport. Spend more time with the candidate in a deliberate yet organic way.
- In addition to your interview loops, increase the frequency of casual interactions such as calls, text messages, and invitations to virtual company happy hours. As Kataev says, “It is very common to take a candidate to lunch or out to drinks, and by making it a small group activity, you can relieve some of the awkwardness of it all being a virtual process, and it will give you the room to feel comfortable with the candidate socially.
On the flip side, as Andy Hunn, co-founder & COO of Resonate and Yvette Pasqua, VP of Engineering at Haven points out, there are subtle elements of in-person interviews that may be hard to replicate virtually. Some of these include:
- How a candidate treats the HR team as they guide him/her through a hectic flurry of onsite interviews
- Do they seem annoyed by a last minute change? Are they thoughtful and kind to the executive assistants and coordinators running the process?
- How a candidate treats people outside the organization
- During a meal with a candidate, how do they treat the wait staff?
- How a candidate performs “on stage”
- When giving a presentation to stakeholders, how do they command the room? How do they manage the conversation, and how does their passion and emotion come across?
We’re in the midst of a transitional moment for everyone involved in the hiring process. As with all evolutions, some elements of the new normal will be familiar, while others will put us in positions we’ve never been in before. Are you ready to get comfortable with the uncomfortable in order to thrive in changing environments?
Many thanks to my expert contributors and those who indulged in banter with me on this topic including Chloe Kataev, Julia Rudlin, Andy Hunn, Lisa Van Gelder, Juan Pablo Buritca, Yvette Pasqua, Daniel Doubrovkine, Job van der Voort, James Turnbull and Jim Chou.
