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Crossing borders – the pain of recruiting abroad

Finding qualified candidates is getting more difficult every day. Especially when you are recruiting in a specialized field of work. According to a survey of Indeed (2016), held under over one thousand tech hiring managers and recruiters, almost 9 in 10 hiring experts (86%) find it challenging to find and hire technical talent, with over a third (36%) describing it as “very” challenging.

For this reason, more and more recruiters tend to spread their horizon towards candidates from abroad. At the same time, cross-border recruiting also bring its own challenges. Here’s my advice on how to address some of these challenges and how video interviews can help to overcome them in the easiest way.

Timeline

In recruitment, time is money. Being able to introduce a shortlist of the best candidates to your hiring manager or client within a short time-frame is of the utmost importance.

Just think about the hassle of setting up interview timeslots in one, or multiple, different time zones.
Using a video pitch or automated interviews, candidates get the chance to present themselves online (and motivate why they are the right fit for the position) via video at a place and time that is convenient for them. This not only provides you and your candidate with a lot more flexibility, it also allows you, and the reviewing party, to gain more insight into your candidates and make informed decisions on who should move forward in the process.

Cost

So you have made a first-round (or maybe already second-round) selection – but now you have to speak to them to further assess their fit. Do you bring them into the office, with all cost that come with flying them in, booking a hotel, to finally meet them and decide in a split second that this will not be the candidate that you are looking for? A costly mistake! Why not add an extra step where you can meet your candidates face-to-face via video to make a final decision on which candidates should be invited for the final on-site interview?

Using a video platform to schedule and conduct an interview is made easy with the live functionality. Just set up a time in the system and you and the candidate will be invited in a fully branded environment. And the best of it all is that you have the ability to add parties to the interview and record it for reviewing purposes.

Identifying the best candidate

You screened and assessed all applications, so now comes the real struggle in cross border recruitment, how do you asses if the candidate possesses the skills they say they do? For instance, language testing: can you test if the candidate in question speaks the languages they say they do on their CV? Do you send them a language test or schedule a phone call – with the possibility that someone else is able to perform the tests for them?

Sending the candidates an automated interview really gives you the ability to assess the level of the language spoken since you can simply ask them to answer the questions in the language(s) needed for the job. With Cammio’s competency based question library, you are also able to screen candidates on the sought after competencies in advance, so coming up with that short-list with actually qualified candidates will never be painful again!

The use of video is not really new to the recruiting process as every recruiter has probably used a platform like Skype.
But switching to a specialized platform makes the experience for both candidate and recruiter so much more professional and easygoing. Isn’t that what we all want?

Happy (cross border) hiring!

 


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