There’s no denying that so-called ‘virtual’ recruitment, the concept of hiring via online platforms such as Teams calls and AI agents, is becoming more commonplace.
Businesses are increasingly looking to be more effective during the recruitment process, reducing the amount of manpower and resources they’re committing to a search, ideally saving both time and money.
According to research from Alexander Daniels, around 26% of employers have made one permanent finance hire in the last two years, using a process solely consisting of virtual interviews.
This has raised some issues around quality and a large majority of these companies have admitted to not having the most success when hiring this way.
While many companies use video calls for an initial screening interview, this suggests a rising trend of communicating solely via video, which could massively impact recruitment as an industry over the next five years.
What is Virtual Recruitment?
Firstly, what do we mean by virtual recruitment?
Virtual recruitment became increasingly popular during the pandemic, when social interaction was restricted and most of the working world took to the internet in an effort to reduce disruption.
In the beginning, virtual recruitment simply described the move from face-to-face meetings to video calls, although this has rapidly evolved over the last five years.
Today, virtual recruitment may describe; AI chatbots that screen potential candidates, assessment resources such as psychometric testing, applicant tracking systems or virtual onboarding.
The problem is, while virtual recruitment offers plenty of advantages in terms of available resources, it does remove a personalised element that the recruitment process largely hinges on, especially when it comes to evaluating culture fit.
With that in mind, we’re exploring the advantages and disadvantages of virtual recruitment, plus whether it truly works for companies that utilise it.
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What are the advantages of virtual recruitment?
When it comes to ‘digital’ recruitment, there’s a few clear advantages that technology provides:
Removes restrictions around location
If you’re hiring for a remote role, which itself is becoming an increasingly common concept, virtual recruitment is a great way of casting a wider net and removes barriers around location.
Say you’re hiring for a business based in the South of England but the role is fully remote. If you relied solely on face-to-face meetings, you’d typically be restricted to professionals in a certain radius, meaning you’d miss out on potentially quality candidates that are further afield.
Likewise, if you’re hiring internationally, it’s incredibly difficult – and expensive – to organise the logistics around multiple face-to-face interviews.
Virtual recruitment not only opens you up to a wider audience but can save you money in the long run.
Virtual recruitment can help you save time
One of the key reasons many people often adopt virtual recruitment is that it saves time, which is an incredibly important, and often overlooked, resource for a business.
Modern software often integrates a broad range of automation and testing that provides results whilst saving time. An online competency test, or a psychometric test, for example, can automatically screen and rank candidates based on the information they provide.
Likewise, virtual interviews are easier to arrange, there’s less time needed on either side in terms of travelling and they can be done from anywhere, which itself mitigates the potential for time loss
Finally, virtual hiring generally reduces the total time it takes to hire, allowing recruiters or hiring managers to vet and process a larger shortlist in a much shorter span of time.
Reduces stress on resources
If you’re hiring regularly or undergoing large recruitment drives on a project basis, virtual recruitment can help you save money over time.
Online recruitment doesn’t require travel or accommodation costs, it doesn’t require hiring a space out for larger interview days and it won’t necessarily require multiple people being involved, which itself means saving resources.
In terms of cost, the technology required to facilitate virtual recruitment is often inexpensive, especially if you’re simply opting for video calls.
What are the disadvantages of virtual recruitment?
If you’re considering adopting virtual recruitment, here’s some of the common disadvantages you might find:
It’s inherently impersonal
In the modern recruitment process, many candidates find virtual recruitment to be quite detached or impersonal. A face-to-face meeting will always offer a more personalised touch and feel more bespoke, which itself is a selling point for any recruitment agency.
From a recruiter, or hiring manager’s point of view, it can also be difficult to really get the measure of a person over a video call.
At a time when recruitment is increasingly focused on culture fit during the hiring process, a face-to-face meeting allows a hiring manager to read body language, see how a candidate reacts during a conversation and can offer subtle insights into how they might act in a workplace, which is more difficult to do over a Teams call.
Use of AI within the interview
An emerging revelation around virtual recruitment is the potential for a candidate to use AI to commit identity fraud or fraudulently answer questions about their skill set.
A rise in the use of AI-assistance during interviews is increasingly leading to ‘bad hires’ and represents one of the main reasons many companies, such as Google and Deloitte, are advocating for a return to in-person interviewing.
This is also one of the main reasons many hiring managers are tailoring interviews to focus on ‘soft skills’ and culture fit. An answer to a technical or knowledge-based question is now just a click away on ChatGPT, whereas questions around culture fit are much harder to fraudulently answer.
Potential for a high-volume of poor quality applications
When recruitment is largely done online, you run the risk of opening yourself up to a larger volume of potentially poor applications, especially if the process includes more automation.
This is where it becomes critical to have effective screening, clearly describe what you’re looking for and have a distinct outline in place around experience and qualifications, which removes some of the potential for poor quality applicants.
The issue is, all of the above requires both manual input or additional resources, which may negate the savings you make by adopting virtual recruitment in the first place.
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