Recruiting and onboarding new employees during Corona

A lot has been written about home office and remote work during the Corona / Covid-19 crisis. We also wrote a blog post about our experience, but more on a social than on a tool or process level (everyone has probably heard now that there is a videoconferencing tool called “Zoom”).
But what about hiring? What about onboarding new employees remotely?
As we at VSHN already gathered quite some experience with both topics, want to share this experience with you.

Recruiting employees remotely

We were searching for several new #VSHNeers, both in the technical area and non-technical within sales & marketing, when the Corona pandemic hit the economy and life of millions of people.
We as a company agreed on 100% home office, which works brilliant since day one, but how to continue our hiring efforts? How can we figure out if someone is #VSHNary if we can’t meet them in person?
After a short discussion and because we are always trying to be practical, we figured out we have to somehow transform our current physical interviews to online meetings. Our (physical) recruiting process looked like this: a first 1h in person or video call and after that, the 2nd round for which we planned half day to allow the candidate to meet as many VSHNeers as possible including a lunch break together with the whole company. Our recruiting process is described in detail in our handbook if you are interested.
At the end, we basically moved the whole structure and all parts of the interviews, meeting different people in groups of 2 and also a quick test afterwards to fully remote. Everything except the lunch break, which is a shame because that was the moment when the candidate meet the whole company and talk to other VSHNeers who were not involved in the interviews. But other than that, the recruiting process was shifted to remote.
It actually worked pretty well, the feedback from our candidates was also very positive and we were able to already recruit new VSHNeers fully remote. As a nice side effect, moving the recruiting process remote also helped us to further streamline it and make it more standardized. One important thing we learned is that you need one moderator who is responsible for the whole meeting process and the video calls, so that the candidate has one go-to person for questions.

Onboarding employees remotely

This month (May 2020), already two new VSHNeers started their journey at VSHN. Delia and Sandro are currently trained fully remote by their “Götti” (mentor) after meeting once in person to receive their new work laptop and office keys.
Of course, it is not an optimal start that we can’t meet in person to get to know us. Video calls work perfect for technical things, but it’s really hard to grasp the non-obvious like the company culture. But as we all know, it will only be a temporary situation and we hopefully all get back to normal soon, so we have to make the best out of it. But of course we are all looking forward to meeting each other again in person soon.
We believe having a “Götti” (mentor) for new starters is remotely even more important than physical. It just makes it easier for the new hires to ask questions and just have someone to talk to about all the non-standard or documented things.
We will keep you updated about our remote experience and hope this helped you a bit.
If you want to learn more about how we at VSHN work remotely together, check out our handbook.
All other Coronavirus / Covid-19 related information and how we cope with the situation can be found here.
Thanks for reading and all the best.