Background

At the start of the session, Gareth conducted a poll. He asked attendees about their recent experiences using remote elements in their recruitment processes, as well as their expectations for the future. Overall, the results confirmed the growing importance of this topic

• Before the pandemic began – Less than 5% said that they had used remote elements ‘a lot’ before March 2020 when the COVID crisis started. 50% of attendees said that they had ‘not used remote at all’.
• Since the pandemic began – just over 50% have used remote elements ‘a lot’ since March 2020. This is a huge increase on the 5% from pre-pandemic in this category. 35% said they had used them ‘a little’ and only 12% said they had not used remote elements at all.
• The rest of 2020 – Not a single person said that they wouldn’t be using remote elements in some part of their recruitment process.
• Into 2021 – every attendee said they would be using remote elements to some degree in 2021. With a whopping 65% saying they would use it ‘a lot’.

In terms of the way that the audience expected to use remote techniques there were some interesting results:

• The majority of attendees were going to use it for promoting vacancies, receiving applications and the initial assessment of those applicants.
• 100% expected to use it for initial interviews.
• A significant proportion would use it all the way to the final interview, therefore meaning that they expect to hire people that they have never physically met.
• Another common area for using remote techniques is going to be aptitude testing and skills testing.

Instant Impact on practical considerations for remote recruitment

Our first expert speaker was Felix Mitchell from Instant Impact. Felix covered the practical, operational, and technological elements of remote recruitment, including tips on the successfully running of remote assessment centres. Felix certainly raised some fascinating points:

• How much impressive talent there is on the market and what an amazing opportunity there is to hire great talent. In view of the fact that this  includes those in different industries with transferable skills.
• The way that remote can improve the effectiveness of five channels for attracting talent, including online job boards, partnerships and virtual headhunting.
• The importance of training and briefing remote interviewers to optimise the online candidate experience.

Instant Impact are in-house recruitment & diversity experts. They work as an extension of their clients’ HR function and provide the strategy, team, marketing & technology that they need to make high quality, diverse hires directly. Consequently, Instant Impact are committed to eliminating bias in all of their talent partnerships. In addition, they commit to setting a new industry standard when it comes to diversity.

Recrion on interpersonal and interviews in relation to remote recruitment

We then heard from Katherine Wiid of Recrion who took us on a deep dive into interpersonal and interview-related aspects. As a result of this, she gave some great top tips such as:

• Setting up a welcoming background to interview from
• Always interviewing online as a panel of 2 or 3
• Working hard to over-communicate deliberately and frequently during an interview
• Separating ‘confidence from competence’ in a candidate

Insight from FI and the accountancy awarding bodies

We then heard from First Intuition’s Hazel Rogers who launched the Insight Report that FI have commissioned on this topic that is likely to stay with us beyond the pandemic:

Insight report – Remote recruitment Oct 2020

At the end of the session, we invited thoughts and tips from the accountancy awarding bodies who were present at the forum.

• Olivia Hill, Chief HR officer at the AAT, stressed the importance of using job adverts to give a flavour of what working in the organisation is like. She also talked about the benefit of pre-recorded videos from the Chief Exec and other members of the executive team, talking about organisation culture.
• Dave Payne, a senior manager with the ICAEW, gave his 5 top tips for ‘virtual attraction’. This included facilitation of peer-to-peer interaction during the recruitment process.
• Sharon Machado, from ACCA’s insight team, rounded things up with some fresh ideas and new points (not surprisingly , always a tough task for the final contributor!). Overall, Sharon’s points included the use of psychometric testing to guide interview questioning and link to organisational values.

This has been a short summary of some key takeaways. However, you can watch the recording by clicking on the button below: