Today, you don’t need to have an office for you to hire. You don’t even need a physical company to operate a multi-million-dollar business. This is courtesy of digital recruitment and the ever-growing contingent of digital nomads and freelancers that shun the traditional forms of offices.
However, this convenience comes with its fair share of challenges. In this article, we will look at the legal challenges that companies must navigate in the digital hiring process.
1. Background check and due diligence
To hire effectively, you must evaluate the candidate. A background check is an effective tool when it comes to analyzing the potential fit of the person you are about to hire. To start with, digital recruitment tends to use social media as a potential tool for evaluation. However, there is a lot that a person posts online that is protected and may never be used to determine the eligibility of the candidate.
Things such as religion, political affiliations, opinions on topical issues, and others may prejudice the applicant if not treated delicately. Further, you might expose yourself to legal liabilities if you use publicly available information to prejudice a candidate. Without a considerable level of objectivity and legal guidance, conducting background check can open yourself to litigation.
2. Drafting of contracts
Unlike in traditional business offices where the company had control of the working environments and added workplace safety and health plans for employees, digital staffs are independent. You cannot control the workplace environment. It, therefore, poses a serious challenge when it comes to workplace liability. In case of a personal injury during work, how will you treat the case if you are the employee? Maybe, you will rush to a personal injury attorney Tampa. How will the recruiter handle it?
Alternatively, you may have digital recruitment and fixed workplaces, a person’s character online may not be the same character in person. Legal challenges can emerge if you hire a person who misrepresents himself.
In such scenarios, the company is always in a dilemma either to terminate engagement with the person or to institute a legal process against the person. Sadly, the later always tend to have a negative impact on the firm once it gets into the mainstream media.
Both ways, the legal process can be cumbersome. Recruitment agencies and consultants have to supplement digital with traditional channels of hiring to be safe.
3. Your profile as a company
Digital hires tend to have a two-way interaction. A person will conduct his or her due diligence before even responding to your interview request. It, therefore, follows that the company ought to have a good online profile for it to attract the best. If your company has had constant legal proceedings with its employees, you may have a very hard time attracting real talent.
In short, the company is prejudiced by its own social media profile. How you treat work-related injuries, disputes, talent development and recruitment, corporate culture and others ought to be attractive. It, therefore, becomes imperative how you engage, especially in the legal sense, with your stakeholders.
4. Integrating the hires with your corporate culture
At what point do you confidently introduce your potential hires into your corporate culture? Part of modern hiring involves bringing the potential hires into the workplace. In short, evaluating the cultural fit. This is not just a legal question; it is more about how you share your corporate culture to an outsider who is not bound by any contractual obligations. He or she may share whatever he learns with your competition.
