Rethinking Hiring, Onboarding and Engagement in a Remote World

Recruiting the right talent and building a cohesive team are critical to moving your business forward. The COVID environment has upended many of the in-person processes that we’ve all come to rely on in our hiring, onboarding and employee engagement efforts – processes that have been critical to ensuring the right fit, both from the company’s and individual’s perspectives.

For many organizations, the new reality and broad acceptance of remote work has created an opportunity to examine their approaches to talent acquisition and retention, adopt new technologies, diversify their talent pool, and, in some cases, improve processes that were long overdue for a change. Below, we share practical strategies and perspective from leaders across our portfolio on hiring, onboarding and engaging teams in a remote environment, both at the executive level and at scale.

Keep Your Framework. Re-architect Your Processes.

Your overall hiring framework likely hasn’t changed; your focus on skill set and cultural fit remains the same. But while the general outline of the interview process may look similar to your pre-pandemic approach, the remote environment requires more creativity to effectively connect with and evaluate new talent.

Amanda Richardson, CEO of Summit-backed CoderPad, a leading platform for candidates to demonstrate their technical skills, notes the effectiveness of using technology to help rethink and improve how you identify, evaluate and hire candidates. “The COVID pandemic has accelerated a shift away from the traditional interview. We’re seeing more and more organizations leverage technology earlier in their hiring processes; some are even posting open assignments to their careers pages to attract a broader set of candidates and create a more welcoming experience.”

Tools like CoderPad can also help reduce the bias inherent in many in-person processes. “Using online assessment tools can open the door to a much wider and more diverse pool of candidates and help you to improve your outcomes in the process,” adds Richardson. “A realistic work sample helps candidates truly shine no matter their background – and helps organizations to see beyond the logos or schools on a resume.”

Remote relationship building presents another – perhaps the most significant – challenge of a remote process. After the initial phone screens and one-on-one video interviews, we’re seeing organizations dig deeper to get to know candidates, including holding group ‘lunches’ over Zoom or curating virtual roundtable discussions with team members across the organization. The key is to create more opportunities for interaction than in your typical in-person process, offering your best candidates a chance to “interview the company.” We believe facilitating more conversations creates trust with candidates – which is more important than ever in a remote environment.

Summit-backed Klaviyo, a SaaS data and marketing platform, has added more than 60 new team members since mid-March, including additions to its executive leadership team. CEO Andrew Bialecki emphasizes the importance of thinking outside the box for new ways to get to know each other. “We’ve met candidates outside for walking interviews and created outdoor experiences with key internal stakeholders – a conversation at a park or at a picnic table. In some ways, these experiences feel more intimate and are more revealing than your standard interview across a table in a conference room,” notes Bialecki.

Reference checking is often thought of as a final or near-final step in the candidate evaluation process. But we believe it is more important than ever to take the time to conduct detailed references – and to do this early and often in your process. Including a broad and diverse set of references can help to reduce unconscious bias in your hiring process by offering invaluable insight into your prospective team member and helping you understand areas for development and ways to unlock potential.

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Emphasize Empathy

The COVID crisis and ongoing civil and social unrest are impacting people in many different ways – from concerns around mental and physical health, to stresses around work-from-home situations, to childcare challenges as an uncertain school year begins to take shape. An empathetic acknowledgement of the social, emotional and economic challenges can pay dividends as you build relationships during the hiring process and work to integrate new team members.

“COVID is a huge common denominator that everyone is dealing with – and it’s really become a place to start a dialog with candidates, employees and even customers,” notes Shawn McCarrick, CEO of Summit-backed VeriShip, a data analytics company focused on the shipping industry. “As a leader, you have to make people feel comfortable that you understand and acknowledge their personal challenges. Candidates are really putting a premium on that right now. A successful hiring and onboard process hinges on the ability to make people feel integrated and accepted as quickly as possible.”

McCarrick, who joined VeriShip as CEO in June, adds that the current environment is much different from traditional remote work: “I’ve been a part of international firms with global teams, and I have gotten my head around working remote. But we’re not working remote now. For many of us, we’re working from home. And that makes a huge difference for employees trying to juggle families, work and life.”

Amanda Richardson echoes this sentiment. “It’s incumbent on you as a leader to help set your team up to succeed in the work-from-home model. Consistent, proactive outreach is key to understanding what’s really going on with individuals. Speaking up and sharing emotion may not necessarily come naturally to many, so it’s important to be empathetic and open the door to that communication. Doing so will help you build a more integrated culture.”

These days, uncertainty abounds. We all want to feel connected on a human level. And we believe employers who can make candidates feel comfortable and accepted as quickly as possible are going to be better positioned to grow and support their teams.

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Increase Touchpoints — and Make Them Purposeful

In the absence of get-to-know-you group lunches or dinners, and casual water cooler conversations, it’s vital to create more purposeful touchpoints throughout the employee lifecycle – from recruiting to onboarding and beyond.

Andrew Bialecki has begun sending an email to fellow Klaviyos once a week, sharing personal thoughts, calling out team members and celebrating some wins. “We end each of those emails with a list of the individuals who started that week, and I encourage everyone to spend 60 seconds to either drop an email or send a message on Slack. And we’ve found that to be super-impactful as well – imagine it’s your first day on the job and you’re getting dozens of emails from people all across the company. It’s not quite the same as bumping into people in the kitchen, but it helps to create a lot of relationships.”

Amanda Richardson estimates that CoderPad has increased touchpoints with candidates by more than 50% during the interview process, and by more than 300% from signing date to end of month one for onboarding. “We’ve really doubled down on keeping in touch with candidates – letting someone go dark for a couple days makes us more nervous than ever. We’re certainly sharing the kind of traditional content or perspectives that we’ve shared in the past, but also items from our ‘water-cooler’ Slack channel to give candidates a little sense of the culture and a reason to reach out.”

New hires come into the organization with a lot of momentum, and it’s important to harness that energy early – especially since new team members won’t have the benefit of making face-to-face connections. Bialecki describes how Klaviyo has used the remote opportunity to overhaul the growing company’s onboarding processes. “We’ve rearchitected our onboarding to give all new hires 30-45 minutes with every single member of our leadership team during their first week with the company. It’s been incredibly impactful in terms of people’s understanding of our businesses and feeling close to leaders. The remote environment has actually made the logistics of this much easier.”

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While the COVID environment has upended long-standing recruiting and onboarding processes, it’s also creating new opportunities for organizations to rethink and improve how – and who – they hire and then how to engage those team members even before day one. With geographic barriers falling, companies have access to a wider and more diverse talent pool than ever before, while candidates have more options to consider without the additional hurdle of re-locating. We believe organizations that take a fresh look at how they’re engaging candidates and team members will be well-positioned to expand their teams and seize the opportunity of remote work.

“We’ve rearchitected our onboarding to give all new hires 30-45 minutes with every single member of our leadership team during their first week with the company. It’s been incredibly impactful in terms of people’s understanding of our businesses and feeling close to leaders. The remote environment has actually made the logistics of this much easier.”

Andrew Bialecki

CEO, Klaviyo

“Online assessment tools can open the door to a much wider and more diverse pool of candidates and help you to improve your outcomes in the process. A realistic work sample helps candidates truly shine no matter their background – and helps organizations to see beyond the logos or schools on a resume.”

Amanda Richardson

CEO, CoderPad

“COVID is a huge common denominator that everyone is dealing with – and it’s really become a place to start a dialog with candidates, employees and even customers, as a leader, you have to make people feel comfortable that you understand and acknowledge their personal challenges. Candidates are really putting a premium on that right now.”

Shawn McCarrick

CEO, VeriShip

“The remote environment has really shifted how companies think about finding and evaluating technical talent – and in some ways, it is for the better. The traditional whiteboard-based technical interviews of the past always carried some inherent bias. Using tools like CoderPad, companies can efficiently assess technical talent, allowing candidates to demonstrate their skills in as close to a real-world setting as possible – from wherever they may be geographically.”

Neil Roseman

Technologist-in-Residence, Summit Partners

“Recruiting is all about engaging people personally and making an emotional connection. You’re asking someone to make more than a professional decision. It’s a life decision. And the current environment has thrown us a huge curveball, upending the ways in which we’ve traditionally gotten to know candidates and new hires. Companies are having to get creative in how they’re finding and engaging new talent.”

Dayton Ogden

Head of Talent and Recruiting, Summit Partners