Virtual Hiring: How We Hired Remotely During COVID-19

VIRTUALLY INTERVIEWING & HIRING EMPLOYEES 

Virtual Hiring: Amidst the current crisis brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses must adapt to changes and meet customer demands in new ways. At ARK Solvers, we not only hired a new employee but did it all virtually. Read on and learn how we did it!

How to Conduct Virtual Interviews

One of the biggest hurdles we encountered was conducting interviews. Typically, we like to interview candidates in person to see their social skills such as their handshake, eye contact, attitude, and promptness. To counter, we use Zoom. An interview that typically would take 30 minutes in person took 1 hour over the Internet. During the extra time, we had more small talk with the candidate. We also use the time to do more scenario-based questions which showed how strong their critical thinking skills were. We also had the ability to record the Zoom meeting, which allowed us to then review the interviews with our colleagues for input.

Virtual hiring Onboarding and Training

After we decided on a candidate it was time for training! In normal times, our Virtual hiring procedure usually would take four weeks to complete; this is done to prepare the new employee on all our procedures, software, tools and to be set up for success.

But now that our majority of our staff at ARK Solvers Cyber Security and IT Services is working from home, we needed to create a new HR system that doesn’t depend much on forms and physical contact in the office. Rafael Treto, one of our recent hires in the Technical Department, had to be trained for his new position while implementing social distancing. What we did was to use Microsoft Teams as our primary medium of communication to call for training that’s relevant in Network Security, Email and Spam Protection, and other aspects of Cyber Security. Teams is just one of the applications that we heavily relied on to virtually continue our Virtual hiring processes; another tool we utilized is Monday. With this project management tool, we’re able to organize Rafael’s onboarding with ease. Instead of our COO, Yodalsy Santoyo, shadowing him during the four weeks, she was able to record training videos for him to follow as well as share screens with our other technicians rather than having an employee being side by side to teach new hires, face to face. As an additional step of support for Rafael we provided him with a take home laptop instead of a desktop computer in case he needed to be deployed to work from home.

Lessons Learned in a Remote Workplace

The transition between traditionally working in the office and remotely working from home is a huge and risky milestone that we continue to achieve. With each day, we get better at managing and taking over our Cyber Security and IT Services for our South Florida clients on a virtual level. We do miss the usual team lunches, gatherings, and occasional celebrations at ARK Solvers, and we’ll do them just as soon as such activities are possible. Still, it’s important to point out that we appreciate the most social interaction we can get with our colleagues these days, which we previously overlooked. We learn to be more sensitive and understanding towards our co-workers as we settle on a different working system. ARK Solvers Cyber Security and IT Services will carry on with improving our virtual onboarding program until everything goes back to normal. And who knows this may just be the new way of onboarding new employees as we saved a lot of time and were much more efficient with our process.

By: CEO, Reginald Andre