Need to fill a vacancy with a relevant candidate really quickly? Fill out the form and we will contact you today

Leave a request

Increase efficiency while working remotely

Lena Volk
Lena Volk June 22, 2018

 

WFH, work from home, recruiter, recruiting

When I started freelancing, I wrote an article about my first impressions. It was a year and a half ago, some work habits formed, my favorite team appeared... :)

Today I will share the decisions which I make while working remotely, as well as the main applications and tools that help me to work effectively in a distributed team.

During my remote work, I have noticed several important things which help me to work more efficiently:

High-quality work

Here I mean the time I am busy when I work without the distraction of social networks, etc. This is especially important when dealing with tasks related to texts (for example, writing articles or job descriptions) and numbers. At such moments, I can even turn off all the messengers so that nothing distracts me from work.

In my opinion, this is significant in the work of any it recruiter, because in a day you can talk to a large number of people, but in fact in the evening you realize that you've done almost nothing out of work.

Organize your workspace

I met two types of people. It is easier for some people to organize a separate office/room/desk, so they separate work and personal space. That is, they work when they sit at their desks, and relax in other places in the flat.

I belong to the second type of people who are bored with working in one place. I like to start working at home in the morning, then I can change the atmosphere and go to the coffee shop and work there.

Or I can move around the flat, start working on the couch, then at the desk, then just sit on the carpet in another room, etc.

And yes, I can work in the morning in my bed under the blanket, when it is raining outside and there is freshly brewed coffee next to it :) Why not when I have such an opportunity? :)

Tasks for every day

In addition to long-term plans, I pay special attention to everyday tasks. This helps to understand how busy the day is going to be and to keep in mind things which should be done.

By the way, I noticed that if the tasks were written in the evening, you stop thinking about them and, as a result, you sleep much better :)

Listen to your inner state

I don't have a fixed work schedule from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. One day I can work late at night and the next day I can hardly work if I don't want to. I also choose tasks not only focusing on deadlines but also on my inner desire to do something specific at the moment.

Am I in a creative mood? Then I am creating a vacancy in Canva.

Am I in no mood to communicate with people? I am involved in candidate sourcing and database replenishment.

On the contrary, sometimes I want more communication. It means that I am actively writing to candidates/clients, arranging calls/meetings, etc.

So I rarely force myself to do something, maybe that's why for me work is a pleasure :)

Teamwork

Teamwork is very motivating! When everything falls out of one person’s hands, the other one will cheer her/his up, and it gets easier.

Or you wake up without a mood in the morning, and you see a lot of wishes for a wonderful day on Skype! Do you know how cool it is to rejoice at an accepted offer, not just alone, but with the whole team?! Personally, I can't imagine working in any other way.

Since I started talking about the team, I will also share with you the tools that help us to work together.

We are all in different cities: London, Dnipro, Kyiv, Bila Tserkva, and this does not prevent us from working effectively :)

I think, first of all, this is due to the high level of self-organization and self-motivation of each person! Remote working is impossible without it)

In addition, the following tools help us in our work:

Cleverstaff. Here we maintain a database of candidates. A vacancy is assigned to each person, all comments and all communication of one of us with candidates is in the database. All information is open and we see the work of each of us during the day. Well, a big plus of the database is the ability to upload a candidate's profile with one click on a button on Linkedin.

Trello helps us visualize the recruiting process. The board has all the stages of recruiting and we move cards with candidates. This allows us to see the stages where the movement is slowed down and to solve the problem in a timely manner.

We use Telegram, Skype, Slack for internal communications and communication with clients.

We also communicate with each other in a chat on Telegram, and with clients mainly on Skype + mail.

Zoom. We started using Zoom for calls. Skype doesn’t work properly for our team, so we tried several apps for calls and chose Zoom.

Google Docs. At the moment it helps us so much document flow :) There we store all the information for work, including job descriptions for candidates, information on companies, etc. But I'm still looking for a perfect tool for these purposes.

That's probably all. Of course, there are also several separate applications that help us in recruiting, but this topic is for a separate article :)