Finding top talent is always difficult. If you are running a remote company, you need to create a great recruiting strategy, because the world is going towards remote work (as we all have learned) and you are now competing against big companies to attract, and retain the best talent.
We’ve done a lot of research looking at best practices applied by leading remote companies, and we also want to share our own experiences.
TLDR; if we can summarize this post in 3 tips, here they are:
This is an essential step for your recruiting strategy, there are a few common attributes that remote workers should have to be successful, and there are others that are quite unique for your company and culture.
This understanding will be helpful when you are writing your job description, interview questions, and the rest of the content that you probably want to create to tell the world how your company works remotely. We believe that these are the key aspects of successful remote workers; they are:
We’ve seen that remote workers that have been working as freelancers already have a good self-discipline and are good at decision making; they already know how to be independent.
Think about the new job opening and write a great description of it. It’s not only about the role and responsibilities but also about the company culture, how the life at the company is. When it comes to writing a great post, it’s usually good to keep these elements in mind:
Nowadays there are great tools like Textio to help you analyze how effective the job post will be. It helps you write a great job description that is clear and attractive for candidates, and that is also inclusive and gender neutral.
It’s highly encouraged to be transparent about the compensation and perks, companies nowadays are very open with this information. If you cannot show the exact salary then try showing a salary range; this guidance is highly useful for the candidates, and many that are a good fit may not apply if they don’t see this information.
Other tips are:
The first approach should always be to start getting candidates from your own network. You can create a referral program so that your employees can recommend people they know, then pay them a referral bonus if you end up hiring the candidate. This is a reliable and effective way to hire.
Also, try these approaches:
It’s a good practice to get applications with unique insights, so define some key questions for your candidates to respond during that application process. It cannot be only about sending a resume.
Prepare in advance a plan to evaluate the candidates, including the questions for that role and for each of the interviews (depending on how many stages of your interview process there are). Make sure you evaluate the soft skills that are important for your remote work environment and team culture.
Once you have filtered your application list, have some video calls with the top candidates.
Depending on how many remote employees you're hiring, this process can be simple or it may require some tooling to be more scalable and successful.
There are many tools available for you to make a great process.
At DailyBot, we love doing test projects with the candidates. Depending on the role we create some scenarios or tasks, the result helps us understand and evaluate the candidate's problem solving skills and then some. In some cases you may want to pay the candidate for this test project, depending on the effort required or the candidate's situation, for instance, if your candidate is currently a freelancer, consider hiring them for some freelance work first.
As an example, these are some test tasks we use in the process:
Once you have the ideal candidate, check the references: if they have worked remotely in the past (ideal) ask questions about how their remote work performance was, how independent they were, etc.
And finally make an offer, sign, and repeat!
I hope you have found these tips useful, happy recruiting!
- Mauricio
