Keeping Track of Your Appointments While Working Remotely

5 min read |

Last Updated on 13 December 2023

Remote work was a trend and became an urgent need. The whole world was not ready to solve such several pressing issues simultaneously. Still, the first wave of panic and uncertainty is already over. All that remains for us is to adapt and hire and interview potential candidates remotely. This article will tell you how to keep your appointments in order, feel productive, and work from home.

How to Effectively Manage Your Appointments Despite Your Location

It is not easy to switch to remote work, especially if you have long been accustomed to your office environment. Moreover, people with whom you will interact remotely may also feel like fish out of water. Therefore, a competent approach to appointing and conducting interviews is even more critical.

Start Your Day with a To-Do List

The easiest, oldest, most logical, and effective way to keep track of your appointments is to see them before your eyes regularly. Plus, there are other tasks you need to do today. We recommend not reinventing the wheel and write down all your tasks in a regular notebook. Once you’ve done that, you can transfer all your tasks to Google Calendar and plan every hour, but you need to keep in mind that sometimes plans can change.

Take Advantage of the Software

We are handling nearly every business we have with the help of software nowadays. We’ve grown so accustomed to technology that we’d feel like we lack an arm if we weren’t allowed to use some apps or services. So software, once again, comes to the rescue to arrange your appointments while working remotely. The right appointment scheduling software for your remote business can save you a lot of trouble and increase your efficiency tremendously.

Determine the Average Time You Need to Conduct an Interview

You need to know this to assess your effectiveness and productivity sensibly and clearly understand how much candidate’s time you can take. Yes, unusual situations also happen. For example, after ten minutes, you can know that the candidate is categorically unsuitable for your company, despite its attractive background. But in any case, you need to understand the average indicator to plan your day correctly and have time to conduct other interviews.
Using the right software could make all the difference.

Don’t Conduct More Than Two-Three Interviews per Day

As long as artificial intelligence has not replaced you as an interviewer, you need to understand that your possibilities are not unlimited. Moreover, it will most likely be difficult for you to concentrate on remote work for the first few weeks. Productivity and attention to detail may be degraded. That is why it is not worth it to overload yourself with additional interviews. It’s best to plan them early the next morning to start the call with a fresh mind.

Try to Dock Your Work With Your Child’s Rest

After most businesses switched to remote work, it became normal for a video call to be interrupted by a child. Perhaps one of the positive consequences of this quarantine is that society has become more loyal to parents and their children. However, it is still more convenient to work in silence, and even more so, to conduct interviews. Therefore, to keep track of your appointments and make your meetings effective, try to plan your working schedule so that your working hours coincide with your kid’s resting time.

Interview Them With Your Company’s Future Strategy in Mind

Many companies have changed their business strategies radically. Many companies say that they will no longer return to the previous business model or allow some of their employees to continue working remotely. Moreover, many employees would like this after experiencing the flexibility and convenience of remote work.

Therefore, when selecting and interviewing a candidate, always plan. Do you hire them to invite them to the office after quarantine? Or is this issue not yet resolved entirely? Or does your company’s strategy involve a complete transition to remote collaboration?

We’ve collected some more tips in case of the latest situation.

What If You Need to Hire a Remote Worker While Being Working Remotely

Make a screening. Fortunately, this action is standard for hiring both remote and full-time employees. And of course, And of course, have long been known. You can do this manually by using various online data collection methods. If you are using a professional platform to outsource your work, let’s say, to content creators, you can select them on platforms such as Pick The Writer. All the necessary testing and evaluations are already done for you, saving you time and resources.
Prepare the right questions. Indeed, it would be best if you asked some questions regarding your candidate’s remote work experience, the ability to meet deadlines, his/her motivation and expectations, and so on.
Choose the best software. For example, with HireVue, you can conduct video interviews plus get insights from machine learning systems on how a particular candidate can fit your team and your company. In addition to standard Zoom or Skype video interviews, you may use Spark Hire to record your meetings and then analyze them.
Conduct an interview and provide feedback. If you have chosen the right software, it will be most comfortable conducting an interview, analyzing it, and giving feedback with an offer or rejection. Make sure to explain the reasons in the latter case.

The Current Issue - Remote Work, Pandemic, and Work Tracks

There is one more question that you most likely cannot get around in your interviews. This is a question about how remote workers are controlled and whether your candidate has experience with remote workers monitoring. However, let’s recall that the essence of remote work is to provide results within deadlines, no matter where, when, and how “an employee from home” will do their job.

Yes, suppose it is an hourly rate, for example, as is the case with software development. In that case, this information is tracked by employers remains necessary. But if the result is more important than the process, then it does not matter if a boss can track an employee’s location on Slack. When the result is more important than the process, the question of “Can employers know if you are not doing anything working at home?” does not make sense.
Therefore, when conducting an interview, you immediately need to say what is expected from the potential candidate - a process or a result. You should lay out a contract in which there should be no room for questions. That’s why it’s vital to polish your knowledge on how to write a contract and lock everything in beforehand.

Conclusion

So, remote hiring, and even remote hiring of remote workers, is becoming a standard practice. Just a little bit more time and we will fully adapt to this. Companies will most likely develop an even more intelligent hiring strategy to solve as many issues as possible, involving as few resources as possible in the process.

This post is guest submission from Anna. Anna is a specialist in different types of writing. She graduated from the Interpreters Department, but creative writing became her favorite type of work. Now she improves her skills while working as a freelance writer for Online Writers Rating to assist a lot of students all over the world and has free time for another work, as well. Always she does her best in the posts and articles. For any related queries, contact editor@vantagecircle.com