How to Implement Asynchronous Hiring?

If you already know what asynchronous hiring is and what its undeniable advantages are, then it's time to put your awareness into practice. This means that you need to understand how asynchronous hiring works step by step and what tools you need to arm yourself to implement it.

Asynchronous hiring steps

Create the company's hiring flow

Decide how many selection steps are sufficient for you, and which candidate skills are more critical to evaluate.

❗️Just remember that complex multi-step selection doesn't mean you'll get a funnel of great candidates. Quite the opposite — strong specialists often: don’t have time for this, aren’t interested in proving their skills, and are convinced that their experience perfectly demonstrates their competence.

Optimize the process

Employers need to say the same things at every standard first interview and ask approximately the same questions. Therefore, it is quite reasonable to optimize this part. You can record a video that talks about the company, its mission and goals, about the job and its challenges, and asks questions related to this job to potential candidates. When you send it to the candidate, communication still stays "alive" and somewhat personal, rather than using just the company's website page, for example.

❗️Your open job video has all chances to become a killer feature of your hiring. So we advise you not to make it the same like sending a dull email. The point is not to read the same ol’ text, but to start a live dialogue. Talent must be willing to respond to you. Be open, welcoming, and friendly.

Review candidates, test them and give your feedback

Get your job replies in the asynchronous interview way and move the strongest candidates to the next stage using the same asynchronous interaction: chat via text or video messages, send the test task, ask additional questions after that.

❗️ Very often all the "asynchrony" and "novelty" end on a company's first pre-recorded video, then — welcome back a long silence, formal answers, or even their absence. We call for the return of human dialogue to hiring. Asynchrony allows you to respond when it's convenient, which means that you can find the right time to be really involved when reviewing and recording the response, and find a few minutes for helpful feedback to the candidate instead of ignoring them. Actually, asynchronous hiring and a humane approach leaves the employer with much fewer excuses. And it will immediately affect both — the hiring brand and hiring results.

Regularly communicate with candidates, reach out to them if the decision is delayed for some reason just to say that the process is going on, but there is no answer yet, or the process is on hold. Just keep the candidate informed via an automated video or text answer, and their experience of your company will remain positive — even if you don’t end up making an offer. 

Make an offer

Schedule a final face-to-face interview before or even do without it.

If you look at the steps — it seems that nothing has changed fundamentally. But a couple of details — asynchrony and video chat-first interactions — actually change everything.
Again, we want to note that the point is not to record a video invitation for candidates and hang it on the career page. The point is to reduce all the cumbersome recruitment tools to one chat and all the formality to a zero-level. Turn your hiring from a dead phone into a live conversation where people are on both sides, not functions.

Asynchronous hiring toolkit 

Finally, to create a smooth remote recruitment process and a better candidate experience, you need to get the right tools in place.

If your hiring is not limited to hiring a couple of specialists per year, then it will be a little difficult to do without some kind of ATS (Applicant Tracking System). Although some employers manage to run their hiring using Excel spreadsheets or Notion. It all depends on the organization of your processes and the size of the candidate funnel.

Then you need to choose a video interview service to create the question-answer video exchange, and any convenient messaging app or email to follow-up with, provide feedback and update candidates on the status of their application.

For communication and collaboration with colleagues about candidates directly on their video responses you can use Slack or any business messaging platform you use within your team.

If you still decide to schedule a meeting with the candidate for the final interview, add to your toolkit a calendar, a meeting scheduler app like Calendly, and the symbol of 2020 — Zoom.

It looks simple, doesn't it? All the components of your asynchronous hiring can even be free. But let's draw a simple analogy. You have sneakers, Internet and YouTube with training programs, and your apartment probably has a 2 square meter space, maybe even a pair of dumbbells, with a shower, that means... there is everything you need for training, and you can start right now, practice regularly, achieve the desired shape. But why do people still go to a gym? Because everything there is created specifically for exercise and everything you need — fitness equipment, trainers, atmosphere — is all collected in one place for you to spend time productively.

In the same way, you can implement asynchronous hiring in your company, using just one service, asynchr, that has brought together all you need. One-click candidate sourcing, video chat for asynchronous communication with the candidate, assessment tool, simple internal ATS more like the familiar Kanban board, and much more. The service is free, although inside you can purchase different boosts for your job.

This is the last and most decisive argument we can make in favor of starting hiring asynchronously right now. Just enter your job details, and talent searches, communication, and hiring will keep moving even when you are asleep. Precisely as in the way muscles grow after a good workout, only, in this case, you will not even have to sweat.