While hiring talent remotely, there are common snags one should better avoid. To avoid making the same mistakes in the future, learn from our own hiring process experience of remote employees.
Since our incorporation, we’ve interviewed more than 1,000 remote developers and other profiles of employees. As a team, we’ve overcome several challenges and are ready to share our experience with anyone interested in hiring talent remotely. From the beginning, you can learn and understand the common mistakes which could have been easily avoided if already knew about them. Whomever you hire remotely, the mistakes mentioned below are universal and can be applied for business or any profession whatsoever:
- Time waste: recruit someone who doesn’t have any idea about remote work.
Remote working employees require a different skill set as compared to the in-house workforce. Primarily they need to be more responsive and available as per your time zone. Secondly, an employee must have a strong understanding of the remote work nature and the self-discipline requires. Ideally, a potential candidate must have remote work experience, and if that’s not workable then should be at least comfortable and mentally ready to manage isolation that arises from work from home experience.
- Resume based hiring only (asking wrong or irrelevant questions)
To know your potential candidate in the beginning a resume is a great option. But, what does a candidate’s resume essentially tell you? It only shows you what the candidate has done up till now, what it doesn’t mention is how well the candidate has accomplished those things or how productive they are going to be for your company’s future. In short, hiring talent based on a resume alone doesn’t make much sense especially in the case of remote hiring. Thus, to make better decisions you should know how to ask the right questions. Here are some of the main questions you should ask while hiring a remote employee.
- Ask and check whether their environment is appropriate for remote work and if it’s suitable to manage meetings.
- Ask about the use of technology and if they possess any backup plans in the case of disruption.
- Ask how they manage distractions and deal with burnout.
- Ask the reason behind choosing remote work compared to in-house.
- Ask beside work if they have any other commitments and how well they manage their work/life balance.
You’ll be surprised but these more or less simple questions often get overlooked, which might potentially lead to making wrong hiring talent decisions.
- Depending on one source for candidates
While searching for candidates never depend on one specific source, just because not all sources of talent hunts are created equal. Let us take an example, if you post a job opening on freelance platforms like Freelance or Upwork, you’ll surely receive so many applications, but how would you which one is best? Therefore, try to figure out such a website that deals with just a specific set of applicants who have the required skill sets. For example, if you are searching for developers then try Soshace, TopTal, or Gun.io, or in the case of writers try TextBroker. In short, look for niche websites that guarantee you’ll be able to hire the top talent in their respective fields, moreover the talent that have all the required skills for remote work.
- Giving a long test with no compensation
Once we also had made a big blunder that cost us a lot. While in the hiring process, we give candidates 10 hours of technical tasks without compensation. What happened was that one of the annoyed developers wrote a huge article post on social media. He can relate to the story of how he spent 10 hours for free and didn’t get the job. His post was viewed by thousands of people and of course, it didn’t do any good to us. But after that, we have learned from our blunder and now, instead of giving the long test, we give a bunch of tasks that don’t take more than an hour and a half. By this, the time of interview has dropped dramatically and still we able to find the best talent.
- Possessing no documented hiring process
For remotely hiring also, it’s necessary to have a well-documented recruitment process. When you have various recruiters working together then it becomes mandatory to have a defined process. For the same positions ask the same questions from the candidates so you’ll end up with a picture of who did the best on the interview and tests. On the contrary, different candidates having different questions who applied for the same position probably always give a guarantee of poor judgment and subjective hiring decisions.
Conclusion
All the details mentioned above are not to discourage you from hiring remote employees; in fact, we believe remote workers are more productive than compared to their office counterparts. But definitely, it takes time and dedication to recruit the best talent. By following the above-mentioned tips for the hiring process you’ll do the best job in recruiting the best talent on the market.
I am an Entrepreneur and Angel Investor. Board Member of TiE SoCal Angels Fund, and CEO @ Optizm Global, the executive search firm. We are a Right Fit Recruitment & Placement Agency.
I’m the Co-Founder of “StartupSteroid” the platform to connect founders with investors.
As an Angel Investor I look for Business Plan, Cashflow, Core Team, Board of Advisors, Secure IP, Quality Investors, Monetization Models, USP, Scalability, Strong Returns, Growth Market, and Board Role.
