5 Challenges IT Managers Face While Hiring Remote Talent

The pandemic had brought a new stream of workplace culture - the borderless teams. The IT industry, particularly, is the most prominent beneficiary of remote working culture. We’ve seen IT survive the pandemic impact by adopting novel ways of working.

While as lucrative and fancy as it sounds, forming and managing remote/borderless teams isn’t a piece of cake.

Many IT managers are still not prepared to effectively source remote talent. While consulting the IT teams for resource procurement, we’ve found that most IT managers struggle with several common challenges of remote hiring that can be easily mitigated with technology and certain management approaches.

Let’s discuss them in detail.

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Most Common Challenges in Remote Hiring of Technology Resources

The following are the most common challenges IT managers face while hiring remote talent:

1. Receiving Too Many Job Applications

The geographical area is a great function in limiting the number of applicants. Not everyone wants to relocate to your office location, and that reduces the number of applicants for a particular job.

But when you’re hiring technology resources to work remotely, the number of applicants drastically improves.

Although it provides companies with an opportunity to choose from a pool of qualified candidates, managing a plethora of job applications can be a pain for IT managers.

Receiving unnecessarily big chunks of job applications can be overwhelming. The IT managers have to wade through countless cover letters and resumes before they can find the ideal candidates.

Considering that time is money and the role needs to be filled as early as possible, too many job applications are a challenge for IT managers.

So how can they overcome it?

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Be Specific with the Job Requirement

The first filtering criteria is to be as specific as you can with the job description.

Many recruiters and managers make the mistake of using job description templates as is. Instead, they should mention key job requirements that only get them eligible applicants.

However, solely being specific with the job description will not solve the issue. You need more. Consider the following solution too.

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Use Job Boards

Manually recruiting remote employees is never an efficient option. Considering the huge number of applications you’ll receive even after posting a very specific job description, you need technology for your rescue.

Using recruitment platforms like Notchup, IT managers can ease out the process of job application sorting, interviewing candidates, application tracking, etc.

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2. Conducting Online Interviews

It is true that a majority of the population has access to the internet, but high-speed internet users aren’t too many. Seamless online interviews require high-speed internet bandwidth, and there are high chances that many of your interviewees won’t have access to such.

Not only the internet bandwidth but things like time zone differences and a high tendency to misquote the applicants are also common challenges IT managers face while hiring remote talent.

To overcome such challenges, IT managers should opt for simple yet effective recruitment software that doesn’t require high-speed internet connectivity for seamless video calls.

Also, to schedule interviews at a suitable time for both parties, IT managers should let the recruitment software do that math.

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3. Evaluating the Technical Skill Set

IT managers need to evaluate the technical skills of the applicants in order to make sure that they possess adequate skills for the specific job. But how can they do this while recruiting remote talent?

There are two approaches to curb this recruitment challenge.

The first is to have the specific technology experts interview the candidate and request them to attempt technical tests using assessment software. Although you’ll have more control over this process, there are chances that you don’t get the right resource.

You’ll also have to put effort into writing test papers and evaluating the candidates manually. Again, this process is time-consuming and adds to the recruitment cost.

The second option is to use recruitment platforms like Notchup. For instance, Notchup has access to a global pool of IT talent that is carefully vetted for their technical expertise

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4. Finding Suitable Candidates for Remote Environment

Not everyone can perform the best while working remotely. Considering a plethora of distractions that might occur while working from home or just anywhere, the candidate companies hire should have the right attitude towards remote working.

To overcome this challenge of hiring remote IT talent, IT managers should make sure that their hire has the following traits:

• Strong Communication Skills: Since remote workers aren’t present at the office, they need to have exceptional communication skills in order to maintain transparency among stakeholders and perform their duties remotely.
• Discipline: It is a trait that everyone should have, and remote employees aren’t the exception. You can manage undisciplined employees in an office, but in a remote setup, things are out of your control.
• Adaptability and Flexibility: Having borderless/remote employees means you’ll have to deal with time zones. Generally, employees with a 9-5 mindset don’t perform better in terms of adaptability and flexibility. So make sure your new hires have this trait.

Prior Remote Working Experience: If you don’t want to bother yourself or your team by training the new hires in a remote working environment, it’s better that you hire the ones that have already worked with remote teams.

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5. Onboarding the Remote Hires

In a remote working environment, employee onboarding isn’t like in-office. As the employees won’t be physically present at the office, you’ll face difficulties in helping them understand your organization's culture, work procedures, tools and technologies you use, etc.

Here are some things you can do to eliminate this challenge of remote hiring:

• Start Early: As soon as the employee joins the organization, you should invite and request them to join the company communication group (Slack, Microsoft Teams, or any other tool you prefer using). This will give them buffer time to learn about the organization by themselves.
• Send them an Employee Handbook: Digitize all your company documentation that you believe the new hire should go through. Large organizations use intranet and internal wiki to maintain such digital records.
• Create a Sense of Belonging: Without the physical element, remote employees tend to have a sense of impostor syndrome. To curb this, IT managers should host fun onboarding activities related to hobbies and interests.
• Encourage Video Conferences: Video interactions are an awesome medium to establish a personal touch in remote work-related conferences. The employees feel more involved during video calls.
• Facilitate Collaborative Learning: Learning while working is a great approach to enable team collaboration. When the new hires are given small assignments, they collaborate with other employees, and this forges bonds.

Now when we’ve discussed the top challenges, IT managers face while hiring talent, it’s time to start recruiting.

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Our recommendations:

• IT managers should make sure that they use cloud-based software tools to monitor employee productivity and efforts. For example, tracking employee login hours, apps and website accessed, and time spent on various tasks gives them an overall understanding of employees’ seriousness towards the work.
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• The IT managers should also put effort into facilitating effective collaboration among the teams. For example, adopting best-in-class communication tools, training employees for corporate communication, and ensuring a LIVE environment within the organization will boost communication.
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• Lastly, there should be a provision for task allocation. Although every IT team setup has tools for task allocation, many team members don’t prefer to log their work into them. Hence, IT managers should encourage employees to facilitate work via task management tools.

Alright, this is all you have to know about hiring technology talent remotely. If you have any doubts or recommendations, you can simply share your views and opinions on discord. You can join our discord here.

Also, if you’re in the need of best-in-class technology resources, feel free to sign up to Notchup for hiring managers.