What is Virtual Recruiting?

The recruitment landscape is evolving. More and more companies are now actively recruiting, hiring, and onboarding without ever meeting candidates in person. Whether it was the plan or not, recruiting strategies are moving away from in-person experiences. Instead, they’re going completely virtual starting in 2020-2021. 

In the past, companies placed a lot of emphasis on on-campus recruitment by visiting a select group of schools. These in-person events are exceptionally time-intensive, expensive, and laborious. And, recruiters are limited by time and geography. One could even argue that on-campus events are a bit old-fashioned and don’t usually lead to finding untapped talent.

On the other hand, the shift to virtual recruiting has opened up a wealth of new opportunities and advantages for talent acquisition teams. The digital recruiting strategy helps to increase your reach to meet more underserved candidates, ease the administrative burden, and save you time. There’s no need to travel non-stop for months when you can widen and deepen your candidate pool without ever leaving your workspace.  

What is virtual recruiting?

Virtual recruitment is a hiring process that relies on technology to meet, interview, and hire candidates—without ever meeting them in person. This framework requires a delicate balance of tools, processes, and people to be optimal. Elements of virtual recruiting include virtual job fairs, online info sessions, portal sites, social media, video interviews, online surveys, and digital assessments.

There are multiple ways companies can adopt this hiring framework. While some companies set up their own in-house virtual recruiting platforms managed by their talent acquisition teams, others purchase software that fulfills their needs. Some businesses prefer to work with 3rd party recruitment agencies that handle everything for them end-to-end.

What is the value of virtual recruitment?

Most university recruiters have relied on physically traveling to a handful of schools to meet, engage, and recruit candidates. While face-to-face time shouldn’t be undervalued for the personal connections it builds, virtual recruiting has opened up new opportunities for these recruiters. Here are some of the benefits of virtual recruitment:

• Alleviate administrative burden
• Boost diversity by widening your talent pool
• Ongoing, consistent communication so you'll be top of mind
• Save time and generate ROI
• Accelerate the hiring timeline