How to Hire Remote Employees

How to write a remote job post

Writing a great job post is more critical than ever. Remote candidates are less likely to learn about a job opening through face-to-face networking, so the job ad does more to sell them on the position.

By defining your remote company culture, you’re halfway there. You already have key characteristics to sell to potential candidates with the best fit to your company culture. The next step is to hone in on the attributes that make your next hire successful in this position and share them in a way that resonates with the best candidates.

Identify remote success stories on your team

When developing your job brief with the hiring manager, ask, “Who on your current team thrives working remotely? Who is doing better remotely than they did on-site?” Their responses help to identify the specific skills needed for that team and overall work culture.

Ask your remote employees about what they like and dislike about working remotely. What tools work especially well on that team? What would they look for in an ideal coworker? Use these responses to formulate your expectations of a new remote worker hire.

If you remote employees respond with any insightful quotes, consider sharing these in the job posting, or on your Careers or About Us page. A simple anecdote such as, “I love working here because the virtual happy hours make me feel like part of a team,” can speak volumes to the right candidates, far more than the standard company values page.

Ideal skills and attributes for remote workers

While every job is unique, there are some skills especially well-suited for remote work. Consider these core skills:

• Self Starter. Unless you’ve installed tracking software and cameras to monitor your employees (and that itself can turn-off many prospective employees), you need remote workers to self-motivate better than the average office worker.
• Tech fluency. As office workers we often take for granted the amount of tech support done behind the scenes, from network management to device repair and support.  Remote workers won’t have the benefit of this: they need to take responsibility for their home network, and understand the new tools for remote collaboration.
• Strong communication skills.  When working together in-person, 70 percent of communication takes place through body language.  When your team operates primarily through chat, phone, or structured video calls, you miss out on much of the nuance.  Your best candidates, then, are those who can communicate effectively through your company’s default online communication channels.  
• Reliable judgment.  While many on-site workers can rely on colleagues at nearby desks to help make quick decisions, remote workers more often find themselves needing to make judgments without this support; worse, these decisions can often occur and be forgotten until the ramifications appear months later.  This issue shows up more often in journeyman professional roles such as banking, recruiting, and sales, but it can become an issue in any remote job, depending on the prevailing company culture.

At first glance, these skills may look generic, and important for all employees, but consider how your employees honed these skills working in the company adapted with the office.  Slow starters, for example, receive implicit encouragement from free coffee, bright lighting, and the energy of their nearby coworkers.  Poor communicators and fresh recruits find encouragement in nearby colleagues who spot kindred spirits.  Tech laggards attract support with their loud typing and cursing at their computers. In remote work, you lose all of these serendipitous moments to support coworkers who fall behind in these areas: you need to either hire for competency, design explicit support systems, or both.

Tips for remote job descriptions

Before the pandemic, most remote workers lived in a developing country, or they had a requirement to stay home, such as a new family or caring for a parent.

Today, however, the pool of candidates who have worked remotely is far more extensive – and the number of jobs available is just as abundant. At one time describing a position as “remote” might have been a differentiator to attract good candidates. In today’s environment, you can no longer just announce a job as remote —- you need to differentiate the position from all the other remote job openings.

Here’s how to make your job post stand out:

• Lead with your remote orientation. Are you 100% remote?  Remote friendly?  Emphasizing this in the headline is now table stakes. 
• Include photos of the hiring manager and recruiter: for those candidates who feel isolated in their current company, this can immediately resonate.
• Describe your remote work culture so candidates can imagine what would have to change in their work style – and attract those who fit best.
• Share a remote success story.  Something as simple as a Zoom recording of employees talking about what they love in your company speaks volumes to th0e candidate.

Some of these may feel unfamiliar: you’ve probably never seen a job post with so much media. When you hire for an office position these don’t matter as much, because the candidate will feel the entire company vibe throughout the interview process. With remote work, however, these small nuggets can help you stand out by bringing your office vibe to the applicant.

How to interview candidates for remote jobs

When hiring for remote jobs, plan to conduct the interviews via video or audio conferencing; many remote job applicants will be put off if asked to come into the office for an interview. Consider some changes to your traditional interviewing process. We’ve found these three criteria make the biggest difference:

• Who interviews candidates about remote work
• Specific interview questions to ask around remote work
• Video interview experience

Identify your remote interview specialist

For most companies, remote working is a relatively new concept. The employees who thrive at it are the exception. Just as you might identify a specific team member to conduct a technical interview, identify a specific team member to conduct a remote skills interview. Ideally, this specialist thrives in the remote environment, has a successful track record, and is fully tuned-in to the corporate culture.

Interview questions for remote workers

The most important interview questions for your company reflect your remote work culture and the specific needs of the job. That said, here are some questions to include in the interview:

• How does “working remotely” differ for you from working in the office?
• What do you see as the pros and cons of working remotely?
• Did you work remotely before Covid?  If so, what changed for you during the pandemic?
• Do you work remotely now?  What are the things you like and dislike the most about it?
• Are you familiar with our remote work culture?  What’s one thing you would change to make it fit you better?
• How do you stay engaged with your team while working remotely?
• What do you need in your workspace to be successful at your job?
• Describe where you work. Do you have a dedicated office? Is it a kitchen space, a coffee shop, a shared working space, wherever you can place your laptop? What new tools or technologies can we provide that would help you better succeed?

You may also consider some behavioral interview questions for remote work:

• Talk about a time when you had to work remotely, or wfh, with someone whose communication preferences were very different from yours.
• Tell me about a time when you had a miscommunication with your manager, and you weren’t in the same office. How did you resolve it?
• Describe a time when you had to make a decision for your company, and you couldn’t reach your boss or colleagues,
• Give me an example of a time when something in your home office stopped working.  How did you get it resolved?
• Tell me about a time when you were under a lot of pressure from work and home responsibilities.  What was going on, and how did you get through it?
• Describe a long-term project that you managed remotely.  How did you keep everything moving along without the convenience of a shared office?

Video interviews

We all know how to join a video conference, but video interviews require a higher level of preparation. While we give friends and coworkers greater latitude to commit video faux pas, small issues like a spotty internet connection or a messy background take on greater meaning in interviews, which often form our first impression. It’s no surprise then that many candidates experience Zoom anxiety.

As an interviewer, here are some tips to make the candidate feel at ease and make it a great video interview for both of you:

• Provide clear instructions to log in.  Your candidate might use the same tool ten times a day, or they may have never used it before.  
• Establish your video expectations.  If you want them to turn on their camera, share this in the calendar invite, and start the call with your video on.  
• Respect their time. While the interviewer who shows up late for an office interview can provide the candidate with more time to observe the office environment, showing up late for a video interview only serves to increase the candidate’s anxiety.
• Set your camera at eye level.looking away from the camera can communicate a lack of engagement.
• Record the interview. Reviewing the video later can offer vital feedback on the candidate you may have initially missed as well as pinpoint rough spots where you can improve the experience in the future. Always inform the candidate that you are recording and ask for permission to proceed.

Read More: 86% of Companies are conducting job interviews via video conference

Onboarding remote candidates

Remember the excitement you had when you joined your last on-site job? As you opened the front door for the first time, you knew that you were stepping into another stage in your career. You spent an entire day with HR, filling out endless paperwork, but comfortable knowing that this was expected. Then you arrived at your new desk, surrounded by new tech to figure out. Your manager took you around to meet your colleagues, and by the end of the week you had lunch or coffee with many of them. You stayed late and saw what time others left for the day. Throughout your first day, you were surrounded by reminders that this was your new work home: the faces, the smells, the inconsistent A/C that only blows cold when it is raining outside.

For remote new hires, these moments don’t exist.

Instead, you start a new job and receive a few bits of tech by mail, but your work is largely at the same desk as before. Your boss might introduce you to people, but you don’t see new faces who can become your work friends. When your boss signs out of Slack, you don’t know if they’ve left for the day or just taken a coffee break.

If the engagement hooks are gone, then, you need to intentionally re-create some of the moments they would have in the office.

• Send a company welcome package.  Many companies now send a box of branded swag, but even a welcome note from the team will make the new employee feel welcome.  
• Establish an onboarding plan.  Many employees feel most comfortable when they know what is expected of them.  By providing a comprehensive plan with expectations around their first weeks and months, you’ll help them settle into their new role.
• Use the buddy system. New remote employees can’t just sit in the break room and start conversations, so you’ll greatly improve engagement by nominating buddies to support them in their role and in the culture.  
• Set up first meetings with their team members.  Every company has a different culture around scheduling meetings, so making the effort to arrange the first meetings helps to get the momentum started and make collaboration easier down the road.
• Convey enthusiasm. For many new employees, the biggest thing lost in remote work is the enthusiasm generated by working in person with others.  Some may prefer less enthusiasm —- I do— – but a little bit here can go a long way.

Read More:

• MIT on Onboarding New Employees to a Hybrid Working Environment
• How Trello onboards remote team members