Best IT Hiring Practices in a Remote World

By: Derick Jackson ¦ IT Expert Consultant ¦ https://www.smallbusinessconcierge.biz

Since the beginning of the pandemic, information technology hiring managers have had to optimize the use of IT to enhance interviewing remote workers. Here are some best practices to help you optimize your IT hiring practices in a brave new remote world.

1. If you facilitate an online interview between a new hire candidate and other team members in your company, send the interview invitation to all parties two working days before the interview. At least one day before the interview, confirm in the IT tools you are using that all parties have accepted. If all have not accepted the interview invite, use your organization’s collaboration tool (Webex Teams, MS Teams) to confirm that the missing individual will participate in the interview.

2. Contact the candidate at least one day before reconfirming the participation in the interview.

3. If your candidate is unfamiliar with your collaboration IT tools (MS Teams, Webex, Zoom, etc.), it may be beneficial before the interview to set up a 15-minute call using those tools and assist the candidate in connecting to those tools. This pre-interview meeting with your candidate serves a secondary yet essential purpose. It also allows you to observe your candidate’s internet service reliability as the interview facilitator or hiring manager. It is vitally important if you (or your client) evaluate the candidate to work in a remote job where the home internet reliability is a factor in operations.

4. During your initial conversations with a candidate and on the interview meeting invitation, add additional details that you want the candidate to sign into the interview five minutes before starting the meeting from a quiet location. These five minutes will allow you and the candidate to resolve most connectivity issues before other participants join the call. Your client may view your organization more favorably if interview candidates are always ready to go at the start time of the meeting. It could make the difference between your company winning or losing the business.

5. An essential aspect of interviewing remote candidates is evaluating skills using the tool used for the job. It is especially critical in IT-related fields. One appropriate to better evaluate candidate skills is to develop practical evaluation scenarios using the tool the selected candidate would use every day. Using an online “sandbox” version of the tool could complement the usual technical questions in an interview. For example, suppose your candidate is interviewing for tier 1 software support for an organization. In that case, you could bring up a “sandbox” view of the software’s admin console and evaluate your candidates’ familiarity with using the interview. Many of your favorite software products may have “sandbox” environments that can be accessed and used as a resource in the interview.

Overall, the pandemic and the increase in remote workers have changed how we evaluate talent and knowledge. Employing some of these techniques can help you enhance your interview and lead to the selection of better new IT hires.