While hybrid workplaces have gained traction in recent times, they definitely require some fundamental shifts that some workers are bound to struggle with. Furthermore, many of the candidates entering the workforce now haven’t been particularly trained on how to excel in a hybrid work environment.

On that note, let’s discuss how to assess candidates for a hybrid work environment, particularly the crucial areas to focus on:

Cultural fit

Many hybrid workforces struggle to achieve the same level of productivity as their earlier on-premises versions largely due to workplace cultural inconsistencies. It can be quite hard to build meaningful bonds with workmates you barely ever see physically, making remote collaboration more difficult.

In fact, while 83% of organizations reported a successful pivot to remote work in a January 2021 PwC survey, only 5% believed their company culture would survive a permanent shift to remote work. As such, up to 62% of them said they’d need two to four days a week in the office to keep things smooth.

Unfortunately, a candidate’s ability to blend in with the rest of the pack isn’t something that can be easily captured on paper like an academic qualification. It becomes even harder to assess in remote hiring processes where there’s minimal face-to-face interaction with the candidate.

Nevertheless, a video interview conducted with the right tools can go a long way in revealing a candidate’s suitability for a hybrid work environment. A smart video interview platform can help you measure personal attributes like professionalism, communication skills, sociability and energy levels by relying on artificial intelligence (AI).

Consequently, you’ll be able to determine how well a candidate will get along with teammates in settings related to a hybrid work environment such as virtual meetings and live document collaboration. More importantly, such a platform enables you to package the right questions neatly, dispense them at scale and collect the responses with minimal human administration. By doing so, you can focus on discovering and implementing other new remote hiring trends rather than being tied down by the interview process.

Tech-savviness

In most cases, employees in a hybrid work environment have to perform tasks from different places, meaning that they need to be proficient in remote work tools. This is why you should list all the software that they might encounter and incorporate some tests into the hiring process.

Luckily, technology has advanced to the point where you can simulate immersive work environments and scenarios to gauge how a candidate would perform when actually on the job.

Job-specific expertise

For any job description you put out there, applicants will have variations in the skills they possess that are relevant to that particular job. One candidate may have a background in data analytics and customer service while another may possess great business acumen and excellent relationship management.

Some of these traits can be indicated by education history while others are evidenced by previous work experience in projects related to the advertised job. When combing through resumes manually, it is easy to overlook some details that make a candidate ideal for the job.

In that sense, it’d be nice to have experts from different industries laying out the most important skills to have for jobs in those sectors, and the best indicators of those skills. This way, the best applicants can make it to the interview stage swiftly.

With a smart recruitment platform, you can utilize embedded workmap frameworks to tell who’s best for the job, be it in accounting, healthcare, procurement, marketing, public relations, IT or any other discipline. The platform will automatically sniff out any information that proves a candidate’s appropriateness for the vacancy.

All-in-all, while resumes tell a good part of the story, practices like behavioral profiling and psychometric testing will continuously gain prominence in remote hiring. According to a joint study by StandOut CV and Job Description Library, the amount of video interviews being conducted rose by 67% from 2020 to 2021.

Therefore, if you’re searching for a comprehensive tool for assessing hybrid workforce candidates, sign up for Interviewer.AI and experience the combined power of video interviewing and AI.

Interviewer.AI is a technology platform purposely built to support Recruiters and HR teams in finding top talent for their companies. Interviewer.AI is a state-of-the-art video recruiting software that uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to screen in advance and shortlist the candidates that meet the criteria set. HR teams use the software to make the recruitment process more efficient and shorten the hiring cycle.  Learn more about how companies benefit with video interviews for hiring. Learn more about how Interviewer.AI can help your business. Increase your hiring team’s efficiency using a combination of resume scoring, skill assessment, and asynchronous video interviews. 

Sunny Saurabh is the Co-founder and CEO of Interviewer.AI. At Interviewer.AI, he is focused on building the penultimate step to hire great talent. He wants to make hiring more equitable and help businesses hire top talent effortlessly.