Four Tips for Hiring Remotely
Originally published on Content by Cory.
You’re a hiring manager and you know that your team needs more people, but the office is closed through 2020, nobody is flying, and how do you hire someone you’ve never met?
Let’s be real: hiring can be terrifying at the best of times. You want someone on board soon, but making a poor choice means more work for you and many uncomfortable conversations. Hiring remotely adds new challenges. You can’t meet candidates face-to-face to get a sense of their personalities. Assessments and exercises are harder to orchestrate. The mail carrier rings the doorbell just as you’re discussing salary and … did they say fifteen or fifty? If this world of remote everything is new to you, it’s okay! We’ll get through this hiring cycle together with four tips that I picked up from many successful hires.
1. Set clear expectations on location and flexibility
Is this position remote-because-pandemic or remote forever? Do you expect a candidate to work from their home office, or can they truly be anywhere? (Does anywhere include poolside?) Is your perfect candidate available 9–5 in your time zone, or is a shifted schedule acceptable?
“Remote” and “flexible” get interpreted differently by different folks. As a hiring manager, you need to know exactly how remote and how flexible your role is. Roles that are heavily collaborative need lots of time overlap between team members — that’s a hassle to manage with some alternative schedules or time zone differences. Some people prefer remote work even though they’re within commuting distance — if you expect them to be back in the office post-pandemic, let them know now.
Ideally, you include these expectations in your job posting, but if it’s already published, it’s a great topic to cover in the phone screen.
2. Make time for small talk
When someone comes into the office for an interview, it’s natural to spend five or ten minutes engaging in casual conversation. You chat as you walk to the conference room and as you wait for another interviewer to arrive, right? (If not, please start doing that!) Small talk has a purpose beyond filling those moments: it helps both candidate and interviewer to relax and lets you both get to know more about each other as people. When I hire, I don’t just want a robot with a specific skill set — I want to hire a person with outside interests, pet peeves, and passions.
When you sign into a Zoom call, the small talk doesn’t always come naturally. You can lose out on the opportunity to build camaraderie and learn more about your candidate. Make a conscious effort to block some time at the beginning of an interview — just for chatting.
3. Include an offline candidate exercise
Candidate exercises are a way to see how someone actually performs the job before hiring them. I prefer to schedule them between my initial phone screen and the final set of interviews. If your usual exercise is done in person, it may take some adjustment to make it work remotely. Unless your exercise is a presentation, I suggest that an offline, asynchronous activity is better than one done over video conferencing. Most of our jobs (luckily) aren’t done with someone standing over our shoulder. You’ll get a better idea of someone’s ability if you let them do the work without that pressure.
Disclaimer: Remember that candidates have lives (and often jobs). Keep your candidate exercises short (1–2 hours).
Another Disclaimer: Never use candidate exercises as an opportunity to get work done for free. Never. Ever. EVER.
4. Give bonus points for previous (successful) remote work
One of the best ways to gauge whether a candidate can effectively work remotely is to find out if they’ve worked remotely and how they handled it. Personally, I like to ask what challenges someone faced during previous remote or distributed work. “None” is a terrible answer, by the way. There are challenges working remotely! (There are challenges working in-office too.) Both honesty about challenges and the ability to solve problems are qualities that I always want to see in a candidate.
Building an effective and fulfilling remote team requires effort. New hires can’t rely on water cooler conversations to build rapport. Your ideal candidate knows that. I ask remote folks how they stayed connected with teammates. There isn’t a single right answer to the question: maybe they joined monthly happy hours with their team. Maybe they made sure to check in with one or two team members each week. Or maybe they haven’t dealt with this particular challenge before, but have good ideas of how they would.
It’s possible to find awesome team members remotely
Although it might be new to you, it’s possible to successfully hire new team members virtually. Go in with clear expectations of what “remote” and “flexible” mean for your role. Get to know your candidate beyond their resume by engaging in small talk. Give them an opportunity to shine with an offline assessment. Figure out if they can handle the specific communication challenges of a remote team. And be optimistic — remote work can be awesome, especially with the right team members.
