Three Ways to Streamline the Hiring Process for Your Online Company

Three Ways to Streamline the Hiring Process for Your Online Company

Most mid-size to large companies already have a hiring process in place that allows them to interview potential employees at a fairly rapid pace. However, if the company you run isn’t a brick-and-mortar business, then the hiring process that you choose must meet the special challenges that Internet companies face every day. The greatest of these challenges is that you rarely meet the people you’re interviewing face to face and that the turnover for online companies is usually larger than that of a brick-and-mortar business. In order to combat this problem, you must understand that the process of hiring long-distance employees is vastly different than traditional hiring processes.

Freelance Employees

When you have an online company, many of your tasks may be completed by freelance talent. Freelance workers can be found on a variety of websites and range from graphic designers to writers to software developers. These freelance workers may be looking for full-time employment or simply to use their talents on a part-time basis. Hiring these workers may be a hit-and-miss situation due to the nature of freelance work itself. To make sure that you don’t waste time, profiles must be read carefully. Weed out ones that do not have any experience or references, adding only one or two new recruits to your interview pool per session (you never know when new talent might turn out to be the most dedicated). Try and focus on quality rather than quantity, and keep your pool small.

The Interview Process

Once you have a dozen or so prospects, you should spend a day or two on the interview process itself. Since you are hiring long-distance employees, it won’t really be possible to sit down with them. Thanks to the advent of video technology, programs like Skype allow you to video conference with people all over the world, so this is one possibility if you really want to get a feel for people’s facial expressions and body language. Otherwise, you can interview people over the phone or even through instant messages. If you have a large company and have a lot of potential employees to interview, then investing in recruiting tracking software to help you keep track of them is crucial.  Of course, it’s always hard to tell who will work out and who will drop the ball the minute you give them a new assignment, but it’s best to give everyone the same chance to prove their worth.

Cut Dead Weight Right Away

One of the easiest ways to lose money is to continue to use employees who are continuously late with their work, make excuses, and generally miss deadline after deadline. Some employers keep people like this on simply because the hiring process is so tedious. However, with decent software in place that tracks your recruiting, you can keep a steady rotation of reliable people in place. You can also save time by lining up potential prospects to interview when you need to so that you never have to waste time by scouring profile after profile on multiple job sites.