Category: COVID 19
Social Distancing Meets New Hire with these Tools and Technologies
With all the uncertainty around work right now with the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s hard to imagine that there are companies out there who are hiring right now. Truth is, many companies that provide essential services are continuing to hire during this challenging time. How are they making hires happen? One way is by adopting digital collaboration and document technology to enable critical decision makers and hiring teams to participate fully in the hiring process, remotely. Digital document management tools have become must-haves for extending offers and securing approval signatures in this day of no-contact. Looking for ways to make hires during this strange time? Here are a few tools and technologies to consider. Most are available to everyone and offer free trials or cost-conscious plans; we hope you find them helpful.
Video Communication
When it comes to mastering the digital hiring process, seeing is believing. Here are some excellent options you can use to create collaborative and team-centered video interviews with candidates. We think you’ll find these tools helpful at any stage of the hiring process. From the initial interview to extending an offer. Some allow screen sharing and recording options, too. Be sure to give candidates clear instructions for any video interview or meeting. Provide agenda details, a list of participants, along with their titles and core responsibilities, and topics for discussion at every stage to help ensure success.
Document Management and Digital Signature
Speed up document approvals with the help of these tools. Most are designed for document management and for securing digital signatures. Great for finalizing offer extensions, offer acceptance, and ensuring onboarding documents are received and reviewed. One note of caution, be sure to check with your HR and Legal departments to ensure requirements are being met.
In addition to these, the most important thing to use to keep your teams growing during this strange time is an open mind. Be open to new ways of working and collaborating. Don’t be afraid to adopt new tools and technologies that support the hiring process. Focus on solutions designed to remove hurdles standing in the way of your next hire. Remote conferencing and document management technologies allow candidates, teams, and managers to continue to work together every step of the way. Positioning yourself and your teams to thrive both in the short and long term.
Let’s hope that COVID-19 is under control soon and that as many people as possible remain healthy as we find our way through today’s challenges. Stay safe and healthy!
Team Quardev
Hiring Remote Employees And Setting Them Up For Success – Top Three Tips
When hiring in-person employees or remote employees, the requirements are necessarily the same; however, the bar may be higher with remote employees. Not only will the employee need to demonstrate the correct mix of skills, but this person also needs to show self-motivation, clear communication, technical ability, and resourcefulness.
So how do you tease out whether your candidate has these qualities using only online communications and video interviews? It’s challenging enough in person, right?
It can be done – and done well. We’ve been lucky enough to work with clients Nationwide and have been using online tools combined with our interview process successfully for a while; here are three essential tips:
Be clear on what you need
You’ll never find the right candidate if you don’t know what you want. Make sure you know which skills are must-haves and which are nice to haves. If every skill is equally important, then none of them are important; rank them, create a timeline for when you need the person on the team, and then hire the best candidate you can at that time.
It’s not only about hard skills, particularly now when tech is moving so fast. It’s challenging to find years’ experience in technology or tools that have just come into use. This is where soft skills are vital; people who are self-motivated, resourceful, can communicate well, and are tech-savvy are worth pursuing even if they are missing experience with a specific technology. Smart people can learn technology or tool, but it’s more difficult to train on grit and soft skills.
Create your interview and process and repeat
What’s best to begin with? A phone screen? A video call? A skills assessment? Or jump right into a full interview with the team?
It depends. How soon do you want to hire this person? What is most important to you and organization – culture and team fit, or are technical skills more important? How fast is the talent market moving right now? When you’ve answered these questions, you can discern whether you should start with screenings and assessments or start with a video call.
Once you decide on your assessment process, create a system, and be rigorous in your evaluation while including the right people. Make sure to map out the process for the candidates. Let them know how many steps and who they will meet.
Structure the interview around building trust
To be successful in remote work, you cannot micromanage employees. Employees need the correct tools and support to be successful, and you need to trust they will get the job done. You can build this trust and rapport in the interview process by asking questions such as: have you worked remotely before, and why was it successful? Have you worked with highly distributed teams or interacted with customers virtually?
Additionally, you can find out whether the person will be a personality fit by asking the behavioral questions that tie to the company attributes you value. If you need to have employees geared toward action, ask for examples. What can the candidate share about how they have handled past failure, success, and roadblocks. Since culture fit is a two-way street, enable the candidate to propose scenarios to see how your organization handles things as well; have a few examples of how your company expects employees to manage their workload and working as a team member. Once you move past these questions, you can begin to dig into technical expertise.
Look at the whole picture: The interview is essential, but it’s also important to rate the complete interaction, from sending the resume to following up after an interview or email interaction. Along the way, you will get a sense of the candidates’ communication style – this is important. The person who seems to understand what you are trying to do and what you need is who you want.
So, it looks like hiring a remote employee isn’t all that different. It requires that you know what you want, you have the right people interviewing and assessing the candidates, and that you pay careful attention to all of the communication during each interaction to get a real sense of communication style and culture fit for your team.
The next step is hiring and onboarding – stay tuned for more tips!
A Gift Of Time During This Challenging Time
In our last installment, we discussed the need to identify and document our goals to help keep our activities moving forward and to maximize our productivity.
For this round, we’ll be talking about the One Thing. We all have daily habits that we adhere to without even thinking twice about them: making our beds in the morning, making coffee, dressing for work, commuting to work, etc.
We don’t think twice about these things, they are simply necessities of life, which don’t elicit much in the way of feelings one way or the other. And yet they need to be done, so we do them out of habit. These habits are all things that keep us going, whether we acknowledge them or not, but they aren’t the “things” that I’m talking about.
Outside of the standard daily activities that we perform, it can be beneficial to think about that one thing every day that we are most looking forward to. It doesn’t have to be too elaborate. It’s simply that one thing that we absolutely know that we are going to accomplish, regardless of the other activities in our lives. There’s no limit to the possibilities, and it’s going to be different for everybody, like:
- Planning and executing a good workout
- Washing your car
- Mowing the lawn
- Setting up that new meeting with a new client
- Planning a new adventure
- Whatever!
Identify one item outside of your daily routine, and make that thing happen by the end of the day. If you can continue to add just one thing to your task list (and complete it) daily, you’ll be amazed at just how much you can get done.
There’s a warning here: don’t overdo it; pick one thing only each day, so it’s a manageable goal and make that thing happen. One thing is plenty, and at the end of a single month, you’ve suddenly bumped up your personal or professional productivity by 30 items, which isn’t too shabby.
Now you are thinking, this sounds great for normal times, but what we are experiencing is far from normal. Consider that in abnormal times it can be an even more valuable tool and can provide results that we hadn’t even considered.
Now is the time to broaden our daily goals to include things we thought we didn’t have time to accomplish. Think more in terms of things that can increase your personal and professional development, or perhaps passing some of your life skills on to your family and friends. Stuff like:
- Teach your kids how to drive a stick shift
- Split wood and run the chain saw with your kids
- Cook with your kids
- Read that technical paper that you’ve been putting off
- Take an online class (it’s surprising just how many free courses offered online)
- Re-connect with old school mates
- Write handwritten letters and send them to family and friends
The list can go on and on, and I just happened to use these examples, as they happen to be the things that I’ve added to my daily list over the last week or so.
The results may really surprise you as they have surprised me, and I’d strongly encourage you to give it a try, it’s gratifying. Who knew that my son would be proficient driving a stick shift on the first outing? Isn’t it awesome to have the kids cook and clean for you for a change?!
We’re all in this together, let’s come out of it on the other side stronger than we were going in by adding that One Thing in our lives every day.
How To Keep Moving When Your World’s On Hold
Taking care of yourself and those you love during this uncertain time due to COVID-19 is a challenge no one could have prepared you for. Understandable, given the idea of time itself and how you are able to spend it, is suddenly unrecognizable. But to keep moving forward, recognize it you must. The more clearly the better.
How do you see your time? Glass half empty or glass half full?
Since the lockdown began here in Seattle, a few of my team members have expressed feeling bored. Others aren’t sure how they’ll keep young family members entertained. Some are feeling that there is more time, but available activities to choose from are unrealistically restricted. Others, suddenly unemployed, are struggling to decide how to spend newfound, unstructured time. Those fortunate enough to be employed and able to work from home are trying to decide how to spend time previously spent taking care of necessities working outside the home entails, not to mention the hours spent commuting.
Time is the most precious thing that we possess, and rightfully so. The thought of having extra time on our hands is something that we generally aspire to have, but never really feel we do have. Not at the levels, we think we need to do the things that we want to do anyway. Yet, here we are in this unique situation, and what we find ourselves with is just that thing that we’ve wished for, for so long – TIME. Time to hit pause and reflect on all the times we’ve told ourselves that if only we had a little more time, we’d love to do this, or that, or that other thing. I’ve made that very same statement so many times; I’ve lost count.
NOW is the time.
With the mandated stay-at-home rules, now you have the time. The question is, how are you going to use it?
To find the answer, I’m approaching it the same way I would any new project:
- Define what it is that you want to achieve
- Get started in making it happen
What do you want to achieve?
Start by writing down all the things that you'd like to get done between now and whenever this thing clears up or the stay-at-home mandate is lifted. Don’t get hung up on things like household projects and chores. Think a little more broadly. Like reading that classic novel you’ve always been meaning to read or learning how to cook that special dish you’ve always wanted to make. Maybe you'd like to teach your kids some of the valuable skills you’ve learned along the way. Start playing an instrument. Learn nuclear physics. Anything at all is fair game. Seems simple? Yes, I’m with you on that, and it is. The key here is to define your goals. What you’re likely going to find, is that your list is MUCH more extensive than you might have imagined. No worries, though. Try prioritizing your list as you would your daily work activities.
Get started.
From there, get started. That’s the key – START! You’ll find that your master task list will morph a bit along the way, but that’s okay, adjust your priorities as they do and keep pushing forward. You won’t get all of the things done that you wanted to, but you will have made a dent in that list … and you’ll be delighted that you did because you’ll not likely have another opportunity like this any time soon (hopefully), so use it.
Now, GO!!!
I hope this post is helpful. Let me know how you're using your time during the stay-at-home mandate. All of us here at Quardev would love to hear from you. In the meantime, please stay safe - AT HOME!
TEAM QUARDEV
