With Remote Working Being the New Norm, How to Hire the Best remote Workers

Before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, about 7 million people in the US alone were working remotely, an increase of 44% since 2015.

Job flexibility was already being considered as one of the crucial factors in employee retention - 54% of employees even willing to leave their current jobs if they got an alternative with a more flexible work schedule.

With the COVID-19 outbreak, the number of organizations in the world offering WFH (Work from Home) facilities has shot to 88%. About 16 million US workers started working remotely from March 27 to follow social distancing after WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic. Although this has been an effective decision to prevent massive job losses and business shutdowns, new challenges have been identified, including productivity issues and increased diversions, especially in companies that didn’t have such a policy in place before.

There’s no doubt that remote working is going to be there for a while now, and it’s high time the organizations put together robust business continuity plans to ensure smooth operations. Now organizations have started looking for dedicated and experienced remote workers to ensure the proper functioning of the system without affecting productivity.

If you are a business owner (or manager) wondering how to hire efficient and dedicated telecommuting employees for the long term, the following suggestions may help.

Create a special hiring team
Hiring remote workers is very different from recruiting regular employees, and you need to create a knowledgeable and well-trained hiring team for the same. These team members need to have extremely effective communication skills, they should be able to engage the candidates online, be comfortable with taking interviews online, and should be able to gauge cultural fit through online interactions. Needleless to say, this team needs to be self-disciplined and highly motivated.

Know what skills to look for
Apart from the skills they need to excel in their respective positions, the remote workers should be good in communication, collaboration, time management, self-discipline, and technical know-how. Make sure you ask your hiring team to evaluate each candidate based on these skills. It’s hard to train the employees on such power skills, especially during such critical times. So it is best to hire those who already possess these skills. You can create a pre-hiring assessment program in the form of an interview questionnaire or an online evaluation form to enhance the screening process.

Choose the right platform
Besides the regular job portals, you should know where to find experienced remote workers in and publish your job ads on those platforms. Most of the time, these portals are packed with remote working professionals and freelancers, who would jump at a long-term opportunity, thus making your hiring process hassle-free. Once you select a few candidates, you can send them a pre-employment assessment form through mail to evaluate their skills and find the best professionals for the project.

Offer them a paid assignment
Before you sign a long-term contract with the remote working candidates, you should give them a test project to find out if they are the right fit for your company. Evaluate their efficiency in terms of accountability, punctuality, and dedication. Select the candidates who submit the project on time with minimum flaws and agree on revisions, if needed. As you’re going to pay them for the test, make sure you give an assignment from the project you’re planning to hire them for. That way, you can test their abilities to work on live projects with real deadlines.

See if they are a good cultural fit
As remote working employees can’t be hired in a face-to-face interview, you should develop a robust plan to evaluate if they are a cultural fit for your organization. This can be best done through one-on-one conversations. During this conversation, you can ask them questions about their motivations to work, what excites them, their approach to problem-solving, how they manage stress, their abilities to manage distractions, how they do work planning, how do they ensure work-life balance, what are they passionate about, etc. Answers to these questions will give an idea about their cultural fit.

Create different types of screening processes
Unlike regular interviews, the virtual ones should have more than one screening process to find an eligible candidate for the final round. While the first stage should be on the values and culture of the organization, the next one can be on the experience of working remotely. The final round should be focused on the skills required for the specific job role. Educate your hiring team on the same so that they possess all necessary know-how of conducting the interviews seamlessly.

Wrapping it up
With or without COVID-19, remote working is here to stay. It is high time that organizations set up the right teams, processes, and tools in place to find the right candidates for the job and ensure their smooth onboarding.

What is your remote hiring strategy?