7 Unknown Facts About Remote Hiring

In the light of the COVID pandemic, remote hiring has become highly relevant. Now, even with everything going back to normal, many companies are embracing remote hiring and offering fully remote jobs to people all over the world.

This is primarily because of the benefits of remote work, including higher productivity, increased employee retention rate, and reduced business expenses.

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However, it’s not just the interviewing aspect that has changed, it’s about the entire hiring process. From sourcing to interviewing, remote hiring, training, and of course, working has moved online.

But remote hiring is not the same as the traditional hiring process. There are a few other things that you need to consider while offering fully remote jobs.

Here are seven important tips to optimize your remote hiring strategy:

Prioritize collaborative hiring

Include your team in the decision-making process. From sourcing the candidates to interviewing them and providing relevant feedback, collaborative remote hiring will help you dive deeper into their personality, expertise, and experience.

This also allows future team members to access, evaluate, and get the chance to know a potential team member during the recruitment process. This will help the team collaborate more effectively after a new remote employee joins the team.

Additionally, if the candidate is expected to collaborate across different teams, involve key stakeholders in those fields in the remote hiring process.

Optimize your video interviewing process

With zero real-life interaction, a video interview is the first opportunity for you to know your candidates on a personal level.

However, not everybody is comfortable with video interviewing. Additionally, your chosen video interviewing software might be prone to glitches.

Here are a few things you can do to ensure this process is a little less stressful for you and your candidates.

Give your candidates all the necessary information in the interview invitation.
In case your video connection is unexpectedly interrupted, have a backup plan, like shifting to a different platform if the issue continues.
Double-check your tech prior to your video interview. This includes both your hardware (laptop/computer, headphone, microphone, wifi router) and your software.
Join the meeting a few minutes early. Put your candidates at ease as soon as they join the call.
Let the candidates have a clear understanding of the follow-up processes.

Have a trial period

Most companies don’t have a predefined trial period in their recruitment process, especially for fully remote jobs.

When it comes to remote hiring, having an assessment stage can be very helpful in ensuring that the candidate is a good fit for the company.

The candidate might nail the entire recruitment process; however, they may be unable to get things done once they join the team. Work ethic and commitment are factors that are difficult to evaluate during the remote hiring process.

Therefore, working with them on a trial period will help you determine without a shadow of a doubt whether the candidate is a good hire.

Working remotely is a skill

The personality traits and skillsets you’re looking for are different with remote hiring. Even if the candidate might breeze through your hiring process, that doesn’t mean they’re a good remote worker.

Coby Chapple, the Product Designer at GitHub, mentioned a few critical characteristics for remote workers.

Written Collaboration. Most of the communication that happens with a remote workforce is written. Therefore, the candidate must know how to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate through text.
Self-discipline. You can’t micromanage your remote workers. However, for you to trust them, they should have a strong sense of accountability.
Decisiveness. With a global remote workforce, you need to work with different time zones. This means there might be instances where they need to make decisions without someone else’s guidance. Therefore they should be decisive in simple and critical matters.
Customize your questionnaire

While judging someone’s work ethic and self-discipline might be difficult without a trial period, there are a few ways to do it. One of the best ways is to add a few remote hiring-specific questions to the interview-question set.

Here are a few questions that Kevin Sheridan, author of The Virtual Manager, says you should include in your questionnaire:

Time Management: How do you prioritize your work?
Personal Drive: Mention 3 things you’ve done in the last 12 months to improve yourself.
Decisiveness: What did you do when a manager wasn’t present, and you had to make a decision?
Team collaboration: How would you manage to work for more than one supervisor?
Resourcefulness: If you’re facing an issue but don’t know the solution, how do you proceed?
Preferred mode of Communication: How would you stay in touch with your team members and supervisors?
Routines & work environment: Describe your remote workspace.

Adapt your job descriptions for remote hiring

With remote hiring, mentioning whether or not you’re hiring for fully remote jobs is a good idea. Be as specific as possible and try to give as many details as possible while crafting the job description.

Include keywords like ‘working from home’ and ‘remote work’ for suitable candidates to find your job posting.

If you have any specific requirements like the number of overlap hours, mention it.

Choose the right job portals

While there may be several recruitment platforms where you can publish about your company’s vacancies, you will save a lot of time and effort if the platform is as targeted as possible to the people you’re looking for.

Since software development is the only vertical they target, you can find the perfect fit for your company within a week, if not less.

You can choose from the top 1% from a talent pool of 700,00K+ skilled, pre-vetted software developers with excellent technical and communication skills.

The best part? There’s no risk!