By jose Remote Hiring - 3 Keys to Hiring Remote Employees Safely
Hiring security for remote employees is one of the most complex challenges for companies, especially after the pandemic. For at least a year, most companies had to migrate all their processes to remote work, even those that did not have a work-from-home culture.
In this forced digital transformation, several companies migrated their recruitment and hiring process to the virtual modality without much knowledge about how to secure their processes from potential risks.
In this article, we will briefly explain what some of the security risks are in remote hiring, and what the key phases are to recruit and hire remote talent securely.
Remote Hiring in 2022
1. CVs: The First Security Filter
The first thing that is usually received in a recruitment process is the candidate’s CV or Resume. Most candidates’ CVs have the same sections: basic identification data, previous work experience, and education.
In addition to checking if the candidates meet the requirements of the vacancy, we recruiters must verify the information contained in the CVs through the following filters:
Basic Identification Data
Implementing an identity verification process will allow you to mitigate the most common risks when hiring, by knowing:
- If the candidate is who they say they are (identity validation, explained later)
- If the candidate has a criminal record (background check)
- If the candidate has permission to work where they reside (work permits and visas for migrants)
- If the candidate has the required documentation to work (e.g., driver’s license, professional card, etc.)
Previous Work Experience
We can verify if this experience is correctly listed through their LinkedIn profile. If we want to know if the candidate had a good experience in their previous job, we can contact the listed references.
Education
To validate university or postgraduate degrees, we can ask the candidate to send us authenticated copies of their diplomas, or contact the universities directly to validate their authenticity.
2. Virtual Interviews and Assessment Center
Once we have filtered the candidates’ CVs, the next step is to conduct structured interviews to gather relevant information about the candidate that is not in the CV. Virtual interviews are highly effective internally and can even improve the candidate experience compared to in-person interviews.
For secure hiring, we recommend including multiple roles in the selection process, facilitating decision-making and gathering evidence from different perspectives. The 3 most common roles are: the recruiter, the manager who requested the hire, and a future team member.
Having at least two interviews also allows evaluating the consistency of the candidate with different people, identifying if it is a good match for both the candidate and the company, and humanizing the selection process.
Finally, we recommend complementing the qualitative interviews with a Job Assessment to verify that the candidate has the necessary knowledge and skills in case they are chosen to fill the vacancy.
It is important to keep in mind that each country has regulations regarding recruitment processes, so it is the responsibility of each HR department to ensure compliance with local laws when structuring the recruitment and selection process in a secure manner.
3. Identity Verification and Background Checks
Depending on each country, this is perhaps one of the aspects that most secures remote hiring of candidates. Verifying identity and criminal background is a controversial issue, as it could represent potential discrimination situations in case the candidates do not pass the review.
To verify identity, the candidate will simply need to provide an ID document. For criminal background checks, companies secure their recruitment process through providers like Emptor, who review the relevant government sources and validate whether the candidate has had any relevant background or not. However, each company will have to define how to handle the background when hiring.
Summary
In summary, hiring remote employees securely consists of implementing simple but powerful practices at each step of the recruitment and selection process, so that at each step we build trust with the candidates and when offering a position, we have enough data and context to start a secure employment relationship.
If you liked this article on hiring, you may be interested in this other one: 10 Essential Recruitment Tools or this one where we explain what Background Screening of candidates is.
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