7 Best Practices for Building Successful Remote Teams with Video Interviewing Software

It’s no secret that since the rise of Covid19 remote work exploded in popularity. It’s why we’re seeing a large number of organizations rushing to leverage video interviewing software to find and hire remote teams successfully.
This phenomenal technology has made it unbelievably easier for employers to hire candidates across different cities and countries to build successful remote teams.

Video interviewing software supports you in creating a streamlined, consistent and convenient hiring process. A process that inevitably makes life easier for both candidates and recruiters alike. Not only that, but it also makes it easier to test key skills and abilities, pinpoint top talent effortlessly, and hire great remote team at the speed of light.

So if you’re starting to feel like you’re unable to build your dream team. Don’t worry.

Video interviewing software is the tool you need to make your life easier – and it’s worth its weight in gold.

So if you’re striving to build productive and efficient remote teams, here’s how video interviewing software can help!

Define your ideal remote employee

If you’re looking to hire a talented remote team, you’ll need access to candidates from all over the world. And chances are, the number of potential candidates is astronomical, and frankly, quite overwhelming. So to spare frontline recruiters and managers from this hectic process, it’s best to clearly define the qualifications of your ideal candidate.

Ever heard of a candidate profile? A candidate profile is a blueprint of your top candidate. It helps your talent acquisition team map out all the skillsets and traits that are required for the job. This way, you specify the skills, motivation, goals, personality, influencers, and the demographics that you expect to see in a candidate.

Perhaps you’re looking for a self-motivated and tech-savvy candidate who can work under pressure in a remote-work environment. Once you nail down what you want to see in a candidate, you can simply narrow down your search and find the right fit through video interviewing software.

Do you believe that a candidate with a certain personality type will work best for certain remote roles? For example, video interviewing software like EVA-SSESS allows you to add a personality assessment after each video assessment interview. This way, the video interviewing software will help you learn more about their traits and how they’ll thrive in a remote-work environment.

Foster a value-add application process

If you’re hiring a remote team it will boost their experience when you ask them to apply in a unique way – without just asking for their resumes.

At Elevatus, we don’t only ask for resumes. We reversed the process. Instead, we ask candidates to submit a one-way video assessment to get to know them better. Afterwards, we reach out to them to learn more about their technical skills and abilities. At the end of the way, we know that resumes don’t tell the entire story. Nor do they shed enough light.

For instance, we’re hiring for various positions in Marketing, HR, Business Development and Software Engineering. We ask candidates to answer 5 simple questions in a one-way video assessment:

• Tell us a little bit about yourself
• What inspired you to choose your career path?
• What was a notable challenge that made you grow professionally?
• In a professional context, what topic interests you the most and why?
• Why did you apply to this assessment?

So rather than asking for a resume upfront, we asked candidates to jump straight to the interview and answer a few questions instead.

The point is, once you show candidates that you’re simplifying rather than complicating the application process, they’ll be more willing to submit their applications fast. This way, video interviewing software makes the application process more exciting than daunting.

Shortlist remote talent by merit instead of background

Every recruiter would love to spend less time reading CVs. We can all agree on that. You could filter through hundreds of CVs to build a talented shortlist, but this may spark a few concerns. For starters, the best CV writers aren’t essentially the best candidates. Simply because they might omit information or not splurge the entire truth on paper. Another major issue, is that CVs are somewhat based on background and experience rather than quantifiable skills.

Also, we can’t neglect a major issue: CVs have the tendency to elicit unconscious biases in the recruitment or assessment process. On the bright side, video interviewing software helps you shortlist remote talent fast through AI-powered video assessment interviews. Meaning, you can hire the best person for the job by unravelling their skillsets and personality traits through video-based assessments.

Through these video assessment interviews, you can pinpoint job-specific technical skills and test for soft skills that are crucially necessary for remote employees. Such as self-motivation, communication and collaboration. Skills you can’t technically extract from CVs alone!

Conduct online skills assessment if necessary

Now, after reviewing the video assessment interviews with the video interviewing software, you must have noticed that some candidates in particular peaked your interest. And at this point, you want to put their skills to test.

So…what do you do?

You send them a skills assessment!

Skills assessments can ultimately help you screen out unfit candidates, hire skilled remote teams, and improve retention. Depending on the role you’re hiring for, we suggest you devise a task that is of moderate difficulty. One that is indicative of the types of activities that candidates will be performing on a daily basis.

These skills assessments don’t particularly focus on knowledge or abstract personality traits. In fact, they measure actual skills. Such as soft skills (attention to detail) or hard skills (computer literacy).

So if you’re looking to hire a Software Developer, you can opt to send them a coding assignment. If you’re hiring a content writer, you might ask them to write a blog post. And if you’re hiring a secretary, you can ask candidates to take a typing test so you can see how fast they can type. More often than not, these sort of tasks will have candidates interact several times with your team. Which will undeniably help you get a sense of how they communicate and collaborate in real life.

Ask the right interview questions

Oftentimes, there’s a lot of debate when it comes to interview questions. Should you ask general or detailed questions? Should your questions be friendly or extremely professional? Should you take on an assertive tone? Either way, it’s crucially important to standardize questions for each candidate. And by using video interviewing software, you can do just that.

When it comes to asking the right interview questions, there are a few things you may want to keep in mind. Most remote teams tend to interact mainly through apps, email and video conferencing tools. So you might want to ensure the candidates you’re interviewing can successfully communicate through these methods.

But that’s not just it. You’ll also want to add a few questions that unravel core competencies. Including time management, self-discipline, reliability, proactivity, and more. Here are a few of our favorite open-ended video assessment interview questions:

• Have you ever worked remotely? What were some of the challenges you faced?
• What would you do if your manager is absent and you have to make an important decision?
• What are three things have you done in the past year to improve yourself?
• In your opinion, what’s the optimal way to stay in touch with coworkers, supervisors?
• Describe your remote office and ideal work environment.

All in all, you’re going to have to ask questions that probe further into the candidate’s character. Of course, it would be even more optimal to choose both: cut-to-the-chase and deep-dive interview questions when interviewing candidates through video interviewing software. This way, you’ll get all the valuable insights you need to either move candidates forward in the pipeline or not.

Get your team on board to create a cohesive hiring experience

Focusing solely on hiring an A-star remote team is not enough. You need to turn these individuals into a team that truly works cohesively together. Starting with your recruiting team.

One very common misconception about remote teams is that that they tend to work better on their own.
Now, this might be true to a certain extent, but team collaboration irrevocably makes their work productivity better. That’s why we can’t stress enough the importance of recruiting teams collaborating with potential candidates all through the hiring process. It’s important to involve the future hire’s immediate coworkers in the interview process after the recruiter conducts the first-round interview.

Here’s how video interviewing software can help with that.

Video interviewing software like EVA-SSESS enables recruiting teams to assess, evaluate, and hire top talent in one single place. Where they can share feedback, comments and ratings on any potential hire’s video assessment interview. They can also engage in discussions that flow in real time and share tasks with each other.

When using our video interviewing software, recruiters can hire collaboratively, maintain transparency throughout the hiring process, and ensure that candidates are kept in the loop with timely check-ins.
This way, it makes it easier for recruiters to instantly spot how long it has been since they last connected with each candidate, identify bottlenecks, and easily tweak the overall hiring process.

Leverage personality insights that shed great light

As we mentioned earlier, there’s a considerable link between personality traits, work performance and requirements for the job.

When using scientifically validated personality tests, employers and recruiters can objectively and accurately assess candidates, to make more informed and secure talent decisions.

For instance, our video interviewing software, provides a Five-Factor Model personality report for each candidate, after they conduct a video assessment interview. This report will reveal more about the candidate’s personality, including his or her learning and communication style, performance in sales, and programming aptitude. Based on their personality traits, employers can determine if they are a cultural fit, depending on the company’s values and how it operates.
So by gaining in-depth personality insights, you can better place prospective candidates based on their personality traits.

For example, a candidate who scores high in agreeableness, might not be a great fit for a Sales Representative.
And if the candidate scores high on conscientiousness, it means that they tend to prefer fact retention as a learning style. Which means, these candidates tend to be more inclined to memorize facts and meaningful information, rather than understand them; which implies concentrated, goal-oriented learning.
As a result, by unraveling their personality insights you’ll develop more concentrated training methods for them in the future, and a tailored learning and development approach.

Bottom line

There’s no doubt that when hiring remote candidates, you may come across various challenges. But all these challenges may be tackled with video interviewing software.

Video interviewing software helps you redesign your hiring process to recruit and hire remote employees efficiently. It also enables you to effortlessly manage and retain them.

At the end of the day, remote teams are no different than office-based teams. They still want to have the resources to be productive and successful. And with video interviewing software like EVA-SSESS, you can build a culture that gives that to every remote team, even when they’re miles or oceans apart.

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