5 Effective Practices for Secure Remote Hiring

What began as a temporary shift in 2020 quickly evolved into a broad experiment in remote working. Despite the initial chaos of setting up makeshift kitchen table workstations, businesses soon recognized the benefits of working from home. More than a year later, remote hiring and remote work has become a core component of workplace culture.

The challenge now extends beyond ensuring productivity among remote workers. Equally critical is providing a secure work environment for hiring and onboarding new employees remotely. Whether your new hires are working from home or a local coffee shop, specific measures are essential to minimize security risks and prevent data breaches that could impact your entire organization.

Below are some fundamental security best practices to ensure your remote hiring process is safe and secure.

Top Secure Practices For Remote Hiring

Ensuring the security of your remote hiring process is crucial in today’s digital age. Here are 45 solutions to help you streamline and safeguard your remote hiring practices effectively:

Work on the Authentication System

When it comes to ensuring a secure remote hiring process, it’s easy to overcomplicate things, especially if your security measures have been built on previous iterations. However, the more cumbersome the process, the more likely it is that your employees will look for—and find—workarounds that defeat the purpose of these security measures.

Here are some practices to streamline your authentication process and enhance security during remote hiring:

• Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Security breaches often result from weak passwords. Combining MFA with Single Sign-On (SSO) systems can mitigate these risks. Adaptive MFA tools analyze every login request by evaluating factors like network, location, and user behavior. This makes them particularly effective in low-risk situations.
• Biometrics: A key component of MFA is inheritance, which includes factors such as fingerprints and facial recognition. These are some of the most challenging factors to falsify, making them strong components of a secure remote work environment.
• Passwordless Authentication: Passwords are increasingly proving to be less secure. With the rise of passwordless authentication options, your IT team can maintain greater control over your network while resisting external threats. Implementing these technologies can enhance security and streamline the user experience.

Use VPN

In the online process of hiring remote employees, there is one opportunity that will allow you to access a larger market of specialists – the use of VPN apps. This is not the only reason to download VPN apps for PC, as the role of technology is also concentrated in the field of security. If you Download a premium VPN, like VeePN, an employee gets the opportunity to bypass regional restrictions and protect his web surfing from cyber threats (and many).

Conduct Security Awareness Training

An aware workforce is a more secure workforce. Providing formal cybersecurity education to your employees can help to safeguard against cyber threats like phishing, ransomware, malware, and more. Since the pandemic began and with more people working from home, cyber threats have increasingly become more sophisticated. For example, the following security issues should be top of mind for your remote workers:

• Third-Party Software Vulnerabilities: The top 30 online retailers in the US are connected to over 1,000 third-party resources each, and nearly a quarter of those assets have at least one critical vulnerability. It’s important that users are aware that attacks can come from the software they use every day and you can always safeguard your sensitive data. So, it is important to take this into consideration.
• Social Engineering: Social engineering utilizes deception to manipulate individuals into divulging confidential or personal information that can then be used for fraudulent purposes. Social engineering attacks include, but are not limited to, phishing emails, scareware, and quid pro quo schemes. Nearly a third of the security breaches that occurred in 2020 used social engineering techniques, of which 90% were phishing.
• Ransomware: Attackers use data-encrypting programs to disrupt and destroy business processes, and/or also threaten to publish personal data. They then demand payment to stop their attack. The overall sum of ransom demands surpassed $1.4 billion in 2020.

Integrate Zero Trust Architecture

Zero Trust operates on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” This means that every request from every user is authenticated, authorized, and encrypted in real-time to safeguard your sensitive data. By doing so, you eliminate the assumption that any user, whether inside or outside your network, is trustworthy by default.

With remote hiring, you are often onboarding new employees who may never set foot in your office. This makes it crucial to ensure that your security measures are robust and foolproof during the hiring process.

Steps to Implement Zero Trust for Remote Hiring

1. Authenticate Every User: Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to verify the identity of job applicants and new hires.
2. Authorize Access: Set up role-based access controls (RBAC) to ensure that employees can only access the information they need for their roles.
3. Encrypt Data: Ensure that all communications and data exchanges during the hiring process are encrypted to protect sensitive information.
4. Monitor and Audit: Continuously monitor user activity and audit access logs to detect and respond to any suspicious behavior promptly.

Adopting a Zero Trust architecture for remote hiring ensures that your organization’s security remains uncompromised during these challenging times. With tools like Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Cloud App Security, implementing these practices is both straightforward and effective. Prioritize secure remote hiring to protect your organization’s valuable resources and maintain trust.

Establish Clear Remote Incident Management Policies

Start with the assumption that security issues will arise. To prepare, establish clear protocols for responding to incidents like cybercrime, fraud, and human error.

Unlike office environments where IT teams can easily monitor and support employees, remote work poses unique challenges. Your IT team is likely working remotely too, so real-time intervention is tougher.

Implement endpoint detection and response tools to manage security issues across all locations. This approach ensures you can scrutinize and address threats as they happen, maintaining a secure remote hiring and working process.

Conclusion

Working with people is traditionally associated with increased risks. Those who search for and hire personnel must be tech-savvy to prevent network hacking and effectively repel hacker attacks. A company can integrate the 5 listed practices to minimize cybersecurity risks and this will significantly improve the level of protection.

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