Asynchronous Hiring Process Framework

The ideal asynchronous hiring process ensures a transparent and efficient approach to finding the best candidates for a company. This comprehensive framework covers every stage, from crafting job specifications to conducting interviews and evaluations, maximizing flexibility and effectiveness for both the organization and the applicants.

The Framework:

Step 1 - Create a transparent Career Page.

Develop a clear and updated career page with the company's mission, culture, and values accessible to the public.

Step 2 - Provide a comprehensive Job Specification

• Company and Job Title Intro: Briefly describe the company, job title, mission, and job's contribution to the mission. 

• Job Responsibilities: Detail the work, desired outcomes, and team context, if applicable.

• Ideal Applicant Profile: Describe desired soft skills, values alignment, and any non-ideal traits. 

• Company Benefits: Explain the company's operations, reasons to join, and provide transparent compensation figures. 

• Application Process: Share the entire hiring process, application details, and additional company information.

• Application Rules: Include a mandatory field in the application to filter out speed-applicants and bots.

Step 3 - Develop an application Process: 

• Application Start: Begin with a LinkedIn profile, proof of motivation (cover letter or video), and job post consideration. 

• First Round: Survey - Filter applicants based on LinkedIn and motivation, then send a short survey to qualified candidates. 

• Second Round: Screening Call - Filter applicants based on survey results and conduct a 20-30 minute screening interview. 

• Third Round: Test Work - Assign short, relevant tasks to demonstrate skills, and consider compensating applicants for their work.

• Fourth Round: Panel Discussion - Have team leaders and members evaluate test work, and invite qualified candidates for a panel discussion on a relevant topic. 

• Final Round: Offer - Extend an offer to candidates who pass the panel discussion.

• Notification and Feedback: Inform candidates not moving forward at each stage, providing personalized feedback for those who advanced further in the process.

Throughout this process, all steps (except for the screening call and panel discussion) can be conducted asynchronously.

Applicant filtering, survey result reviews, test work evaluations, and panel discussion voting can also be done asynchronously, maximizing flexibility and efficiency.

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Remote Leader Selection Framework

Introducing the Remote Leader Selection Framework: a comprehensive framework for identifying, evaluating, and hiring the best asynchronous leaders for your organization. This systematic approach ensures that you find the right leaders to drive your company's growth and inspire your team, ultimately setting your business on a high-paced growth trajectory.

1. Define desired qualities: Identify the key traits and skills you want in an asynchronous leader, such as being inspirational, focusing on delivery and results, trusting and caring for their team, and operating in a modular setup.

2. Create an Asynchronous Leadership Scorecard: Customize a scorecard with six zones to evaluate potential candidates. Each zone will have a range of 1 to 5 points, with a maximum total of 25 points. A candidate should score at least 20 points to be considered an excellent leader for your company. The zones:

   • Remote work experience: Prioritize candidates with remote work experience. Assess this through a screening interview and references. Assign points based on the extent of their experience.

   • Communication skills: Remote leadership relies heavily on written communication. Test their skills by having them write a clear and precise briefing for a given problem. Evaluate their briefing for clarity and effectiveness.

   • Inspirational mindset: Leaders should be able to convey the company's mission to others. Assess their ability to summarize and communicate the mission in an inspiring manner, preferably through a video or other suitable platform.

   • Management skills: Leaders should be able to scale the company up, build processes, and grow their teams. Test their approach to building a team with limited resources and assess their plan for modularity, timeframes, workflow testing, working with freelancers, and alignment with the company's mission.

   • Leadership personality: Test their personality traits, focusing on curiosity, organization, warmth, empathy, calmness, and supportiveness. You can use tests like the Big Five Personality Test or the Integrity Test.

   • Chemistry (with less weight compared to the other zones): While chemistry is less crucial in asynchronous work, it still plays a role in building trust. Assess chemistry subjectively on a scale of 1 to 5, but don't let it overshadow the other zones.

3. Screen candidates: Conduct interviews and provide tasks to assess candidates based on the scorecard criteria. Gather information about their remote work experience, written communication skills, ability to inspire, management capabilities, personality traits, and chemistry.

4. Evaluate scores: After assessing each candidate, calculate their scores in each zone and their total score. Compare the candidates' scores to identify the most promising leaders.

5. Consider additional factors: Besides the scorecard evaluation, pay attention to candidates who demonstrate commitment, motivation, adaptability, and an ability to think beyond silos and practical terms.

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3 Ways You Can Hire Someone Remotely

Every business comes to this point eventually – when they hire their first employee who is not a founder or owner of the company. Hiring is often the most neglected issue when it comes to running your business. However, I would argue that it is by far one of the most critical parts of your business. Many companies just straight-up outsource the hiring process, which I can relate to if they have large teams, the retention level is low, or it is harder to find people with the necessary skills. However, for small- and medium-sized businesses or startups, hiring shouldn’t be outsourced, and it always has to be done at the managerial level. Your people are vital to your success. 

Now when it comes to remote hiring, it’s not that much of a difference compared to hiring someone locally and in person. There are some subtle and minor tweaks you should do though. When you decide to hire remotely, you need to consider three factors: 

1. How much time you can spare on the hiring process?

2. How much time do you need from the new employee to work for you?

3. How urgent is it to fill the position?

First, you need to check your calendar. How much time can you dedicate to the hiring process? You need to make a decision, on average, a daily 1 hour is required to find the best candidate, and you need that hour for a couple of weeks. Second, do you need someone to jump on a project and then leave, or do you need someone for the long term? Do you need him to do only one thing, a couple of hours of work per day and that’s it, or do you need someone full-time? Last, how urgently do you need someone? These are the questions you need to ask yourself before jumping right into the hiring process.

Option 0: Bet on locals first 

The first move you should consider is to hire locally. I know it sounds weird, as I’m advocating remote business here, but trust me, hire locally first. Hire in the usual way but this time offer the work-from-home option. Who knows, you might find someone not far away from you who wants to work with your company but doesn’t want to relocate or go to your office. Work from home option is a good call here. Run through your peers, friends, co-workers, their friends, and local networks. Anyone who comes with a strong personal recommendation is better than anyone straight out from the internet. Go to local meetups and hire from there. If you already have a user base, hire from there. They are a comfortable cultural fit as they know your business in and out, and if not the best applicant, they can recommend someone. If you couldn’t find anyone locally because of the scarcity of talent, then you can go online and hire remotely. 

Option 1: Remote freelance sites

Most entrepreneurs would argue that they need someone right now and they don’t have too much time for the hiring process. So let’s see that option first. If you don’t have time to hire someone, but you need someone pretty much now, you have two options: remote freelance sites and remote recruitment companies. If you need this person for a short term to solve one specific problem, go to remote freelance sites. If you need this person for the long-term to work with you on several projects, contact a remote recruitment company. 

Remote freelance sites are sites like UpWork, PeoplePerHour, Fiverr, Freelancer, and countless copycats. Most of them have the same features: they list freelancers and their services, pretty much their skills based on a public profile. Everyone who hires them can leave a public review. All payments and paperwork are done through the freelance site from which they chunk out a small percentage. Most of these sites are charging employees with these fees, but some, like UpWork, are charging employers also. 

What’s great about these sites is that you can get someone onboard in a matter of hours, plus you have all their references listed publicly on their profile. 

The bad news though is most of those who are featured on these sites are cheap low billed soldiers of fortunes, with mediocre skills. If you need someone for not-so-complicated work, that is fine, but if you are looking for a senior-level type of work with high added value, you should look elsewhere. 

Of course, there are some gems in here too, there are some talented people on these sites, but you have to fight your way through hundreds of mediocre applicants to get to those few shiny ones.

Option 2: Remote recruitment services

Remote recruitment services might be your best bet for long-term employees with high-end skills. Companies like Toptal, FlexJobs, StackOverflow, Coworks, and many others offer sort-of-like traditional recruitment services. They pre-screen applicants for you and deliver only the best for your job post. Some of them work like outsourcing agencies where you can “borrow” contractors for short- or mid-term projects. Not all of them but they tend to manage the paperwork for you as well during the employment so no worries on contracts and payments, you pay only the recruiter as an umbrella company for freelancers. These solutions are great because you can have instant access to a pre-screened high-end workforce, but I wouldn’t recommend them to those who are planning for the long term. First, these companies are a bit pricey, which is understandable, considering they do a lot of legwork for you. Second, most of them “borrow” or “transfer” employees for you, but the employee will stay within their umbrella. To me, that only works, if the project needs immediate attention, but it’s not for the long term. Loyalty is crucial when it comes to employment, anyone who’s “lent” through a network cannot be loyal to a business. If you need someone for a short period, but do a tremendous high-value job, fine though.

Option 3: Remote job boards

As you can see, these solutions are closely related to the term outsourcing. You need someone for one task, you need it fast, and you look for external, offshore sources. However, if you want to build a genuinely successful distributed business, you need someone not just to do one task or job, but also to bring new insights and culture to the table. You need someone full-time, and you need to make sure they are a good fit for your free current team and your future dreams. For that, you don’t just need someone “borrowed” or “jumped in” – you need someone with dedication, loyalty, excitement and plans to work with you. Well, that needs to be worked on by you too. You have to dedicate time to hiring someone online. You have to put up a job specification for your site and some of the most relevant remote job boards and wait for a catch. Job boards like JobEspresso, Dribble, AuthenticJobs, RemoteOK.io, WeWorkRemotely, Remotive, or startup sites’ job sections like Angel.co/jobs are an excellent way to start. However, in the end, you need to market your post to get the best candidates. 

The first action you need to do is to write an excellent job post and use it as your outreach platform. 

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How to write a great job post

You have to write a fantastic job post, no matter if you are looking for someone for the short-term or the long-term. If you need someone urgently or you can dedicate time to go through a longer hiring process – none of this matters, you still have to write a fantastic job post. 

What is the goal of a job post?

First, of course, you need the job post to attract the best of talent. However, you also want to minimize clutter: you don’t want to waste your time on highly speculative applicants. You need someone who fits your ideal candidate description.

The hiring process can be intensely long, and even if you are looking for a short-term jump-in candidate, you need to make sure you save time from the very beginning: your job post. Your job post is also a marketing platform for your business, and here you can openly share anything relevant to your company, your long-term goals, your values, and basically anything that helps others to understand your business.

What makes a job post impressive? In a nutshell: transparency, details, and vision. In short: being transparent on what needs to be done, whom you are looking for and what you can provide for the ideal candidate.

In your job post, be as transparent as you can. It’s the internet, and candidates don’t have the option to walk into your office and check your way of work – so you have to be upfront and overshare. Provide enough details about your business, the job requirements, your expectations, and the compensation – in this order. 

Being transparent about your business is crucial. The more you share, the more likely you will find someone who’s a cultural fit for your business. If you don’t provide enough information, you will raise the number of speculative applicants, and they will suck away your time. Tell them about your current team and where is the gap you are looking to fill now. 

Be prompt and provide details on the required skills and capabilities on your side. Be detailed on what your expectations are, and let these out so candidates who read your job spec will feel like they were called out from the crowd. Be very transparent on the compensation as well, and I’m not just talking about salary and money. Please make it clear that there’s a long-term plan here and they have the option to work with you and make an impact on your business. 

If you can, be transparent about how the hiring process will look like: the number of rounds, possible test work, and pre-screening. Also, please skip the jargon and the bullshit, and be humble and straightforward. There are no growth gurus, marketing ninjas, code junkies, and dev wizards. Some terms might be justified like “happiness engineers” for customer service people, but these are rarely acceptable. 

Your job posts shouldn’t be too long though and make sure you stick the how-to-hire part only at the end with a bonus “what to write in the email subject” that can help too – that makes sure they’ve read the article till the end. You have committed your time to write this post, don’t shy away to ask for a commitment in return from applicants.

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The fully detailed remote hiring process

A comprehensive summary of the remote hiring process. We focus on remote freelance sites, remote job boards, and remote recruitment services. From application to test work.

It is where you need to dedicate time – the longer the term you are planning with the candidate, the more time you need to commit to hiring. If you are looking for someone for the long term, you have to adopt a longer process. If you are looking for someone for the short term, you need to adapt to the procedures already in place with recruitment and freelancing sites. Let’s talk about the short ones first.

How to hire someone from a freelancing site 

We’ve talked about freelancing sites: they are your go-to sites when you need someone relatively urgently, for a short period, and for a simple, specific task. One of the biggest, if not the most prominent site is UpWork, formerly known as oDesk. Most of our upcoming examples are based on and can be applied to this site, but you can learn from them and use them on other sites as well. 

First, you don’t have much choice in the hiring process when you go to these sites. It’s pretty straightforward and all based on the site's features. Most of these sites have three significant features, which help you to pick the best candidate for your job.

They have public freelancer profiles, where they can market themselves and their services. Some of the sites even have tests, which the freelancers can take and publicly share on their public profile, showcasing their skills. They can add a portfolio, references, and any material that can justify their expertise. They can state their minimum hourly rate as well.  

They have public reviews on the freelancers. The reviews were written by previous employees who hired them through this site and completed the project. These reviews are open, usually based on a rating system with comments. 

They have public work and activity logs. The sites measure how much time the freelancer billed out on the website or how many users ordered their services. How quickly they respond to new requests. How much money they have made through this site? There’s also an in-house rating system where the site rates these freelancers, like “rising star” or “top performer.” 

It is all transparent – so it seems, but more on that later. First, let’s discuss what you need to do. We discussed the importance of a job post, which is true here as well. There are countless project details on these sites which have zero or no information on the project. E.g., “I need a WordPress website,” and that’s it. That doesn’t work that way, even if you are short on time and you need someone now, spend some time on that job spec and put it up with details. You will save time in the long run. I know it sounds common sense, but if you register as a freelancer on these sites and browse through the jobs, you will see that around only 10% of the projects are detailed. You can, however, skip the company vision and anything long-term related, you are looking for someone to jump in now, so stick to the proportional details only. Be very detailed about what you need. 

Many of the freelancers are going only for volume on these sites – they apply to 100 jobs per day so they can get 1. They don’t even read the whole spec. So you need to make sure you will get only those who do. Add something unique, a message at the end of the job spec, that ensures they’ve read it through. Something like “to apply, please write a balloon at the start of your application” can work. With this, you can make sure that you will get someone with attention to detail – which is super important. You also won’t have to read through all the bots with a standard application script – so you will have more time to spend on those who are worth it.

On some sites you can set up a location rule, making sure you only hire someone from the US. I strongly advise not to set this rule up.

1. First, you are hiring remotely and trying to build a globally distributed business – why would you exclude others then?

2. Second, only set this rule up if you need to be in constant contact with the freelancer. By continuous contact I mean, you can’t wait a couple of hours for a response. In that case, excluding anyone outside your location makes sense due to the factors of difficult communication that have to do with different time zones. 

On sites like UpWork, everything is public and transparent – you should use that feature. Check their previous works, their past reviews, and the number of projects they’ve completed on the site. Avoid those who are entirely new to the site – let others test them out first. Avoid those who promise too much or, have too many work capabilities and skills. No one is an expert on all aspects of marketing. They don’t. Check if they are available at all: how quickly they respond to inquiries, what is the percentage of their current job completion. You want to make sure they will have their attention on you and can deliver your project on time. 

Avoid the very cheap ones. Everyone has a price in mind, avoid those who have an average hourly rate that is only a third or less than the price that is in your mind for that job. Good work needs to be valued, and if a freelancer is not assessing his work enough to set a valid price for it, there must be something wrong. It might be super great desperation or just not real value. Neither one should work for you. However, also avoid those who want to work with you on 2x-3x of your price in mind. They are usually not worth the value. 

If you follow these rules, you can narrow the applicants down quite a bit. From the pool, only engage with those who have the highest values: the highest amount of hours they worked on the site and the highest numbers of good reviews they have. Once you write back, check how long it takes for them to reply. If that is more than a day, leave them. Ask for references and previous work as most of the public reviews only feature the experience of working with the freelancer but the actual example of the work. Most freelancers have a portfolio page or even feature their work examples on their profile though.

How to hire through a remote recruitment company

Here the process is smooth – I mean, this is why you use a remote recruitment company, to not spend time on the actual hiring process. There are some minor things you should focus on though. 

Make sure the recruitment company you use has a track record, and an excellent talent pool and not just another outsourcing agency. Use the big ones, Toptal for example, even if they are more expensive than others. They will make sure that the talent you get is truly talented.  

Make sure the contract and paperwork are kosher. Look for satisfaction guarantees – if you don’t like the talent that has been delivered to you within a trial period, you don’t need to pay anything. These recruitment companies tend to work with long-term projects, so it is crucial for you to learn whether the talent is worth investing in or not. Consider this as a probation period.

Note that if there is no recruitment fee, that fee is calculated in the payment of the freelancer. Many recruitment companies work like this: no cost to hire someone through them, but everything works through them. You get a contract from the umbrella company, and they deliver talent for you. You pay the umbrella company, and they spend the talent. It’s a minor thing, but you should be aware of that when you hire someone for the long-term: their fee is a bit higher than usual. 

All in all, finding talent through a remote recruitment company only works if you seriously don’t have time, but you need someone to work for you more than just for a couple of weeks.

How to hire from remote job boards

It is the ideal situation, everything else so far was an alibi. You need someone as a full-time team member, and you are willing to invest your own time in finding that special someone. 

The recipe, however, can’t be a general one here as all businesses are different, depending on your team size or your expectations. If you are an already established business with a solid non-distributed team behind you, hiring is different remotely than for a startup, which makes their first-ever hiring.  

The sort-of-general recipe looks something like this: you write an excellent job post. You put it up on remote job boards and your social networks and wait. If you have circled your job post through multiple sources, you end up with applicants. Then you do interviews with the most promising ones, then ask for test work if needed to prove their capabilities, then another meeting to see if they fit culturally, and then hire them. Sounds easy but it’s not that simple. Let’s start with the circulation.

You have committed your time to hire someone and this time, you don’t recruit through a freelancer site or a recruitment company, so candidates are not just ‘there’ for you. You need the best and broadest visibility ever so your job post will get to everyone’s desk – possibly to that exceptional one’s desk too. Consider putting out the post to LinkedIn Groups. Circulate through the traditional remote job boards. Put it up in your newsletter, Twitter, social networks, and site. It should be in the footer of every email you send out to anyone till you won’t find the One. If there’s still no answer, consider throwing some ads on the job post. Seriously, you need the best possible coverage for your job spec. You can worry about filtering non-qualified candidates later.

How to filter applicants

Once you have applicants, filter them out. Start with the ones which I call “dust,” those who didn’t get what the job is all about or who look like professional fakes. Reject these promptly but politely. A nice quick email will do. Then move on to those who see at least a bit promising. Filter out those, who can’t comply with the basic needs: their skills don’t match your criteria. Remember, you are looking for someone for the long-term so having skills to do the job is a must, but even more importantly, you need to work with them for a very long time hopefully, so the cultural fit is even more important than skills. Consider skills and capabilities as the primary line of requirements – it doesn’t get the candidate anywhere yet, just to the front of the door.

Look for the five essential elements and test them out:

1. Previous remote working experience. It is necessary, and you don’t want someone who’s just starting out to work remotely. Working remotely is entirely different from working traditionally. If they have worked remotely for more than a year, even better, this means remote working is great for them, and they did their first lags and mistakes, and now they are productive, proactive, and cooperative in a remote working environment. 

2. Expert communicators. In a traditional office, you have a kitchen where all the conversations are going. Also, it is easy to tap someone and grab a bite outside and talk. In remote working, there are no such things – however, there are some supplements to these habits. You have to look for those who are experts in written communication. Anyone who’s oversharing everything in writing but still manages to stay sharp and on point is excellent. Look for someone who thinks “what’s not written down, doesn’t exist.” Having slight graphomania is better than having zero communication. You don’t want to work with someone remotely who communicates in 3-words sentences only. 

3. Natural born project manager, even if the job is not about project management. Your best candidate has to be able to prioritize tasks and has to do them independently. There’s no office where you can walk onto someone and ask: what’s up? Due to timezones and work-from-home issues, there might be hourly lags between feedback on inquiries – there’s no time for always debriefing and re-briefing. Your candidate has to have basic project management skills, or they can’t survive in a remote working environment.

4. Proactivity. It is essential for every employee but even more important for remote workers. As you can't overlook their time, as they are not in the office where you can see them – however, I would argue if you have the same control over your regular employee – they sometimes finish off tasks before the deadline. So they sit on it. It is where proactivity comes in, and they have to be able to stand up and claim responsibility and ownership. 

5. Trust your first impression. I know it sounds harsh, but this matters. If someone walks into your office for a job interview, you always have a first impression. Sometimes they can talk themselves out of it and assure you, that they are worth your time. In remote hiring, you have the same issues, but this time, your candidate is super transparent. You can look up online, and you can do a background check, you can check the credentials, you can surf and peek into their lives. Most of them are public, and there is nothing wrong with doing a background check. If something looks fishy, don’t even bother to move on with them. Trust your gut and only hire someone whom you trust.

How to interview applicants remotely

Let’s say you narrowed them further to a small selection. No matter what job you are in or what stage your business is in, your next step is to get a first screening interview with the top candidates. These interviews are one-on-one interviews. The goal of these interviews is the same: check how the candidate communicates and how the chemistry works for you. Here, little things matter. Pay extraordinary attention to how the candidates communicate during the process, before, during, and after the interview. 

• Before the call, are they flexible enough? Do they suggest more slots for their time to talk? Are they considering time zones if there’s a lag between you and them? Are they proactive? Do they send calendar invites to you, or do you need to carry that over? Do they offer multiple ways to connect, Skype, phone, or Hangouts? Are they on time? Do they have an excellent setup to talk with you? 

• During the call, do they have an excellent internet connection? I know it sounds harsh, but we are talking about remote work. Are they in a quiet place or is there a lot of background noise? If they can’t commit to a safe and quiet place for the interview, how could they manage future talks with your team with a setup like this? Do they ask questions about the job and the team you have, or just trying to sell themselves? Also, this can’t be rationalized but does chemistry work between the two of you? Did they do their background check on your business? If yes, that is great, they are interested in you. 

• After the interview, do they follow up proactively? If you asked them anything, do they send it over ASAP or entirely forget to send it? Do they mail you with further follow-up questions?   

How to test applicants remotely

After the interview, many candidates will be disqualified. You act like you always do: reject them even more politely, as they’ve spent time talking with you. Let them know they are dismissed quickly, and it is polite. They might hunt for other jobs as well and still wait for your feedback. With those who qualified during the interview, you should do a test job.  

It can be tricky because it highly depends on the position you are about to fill. Also keep in mind that if the test job requires more than a couple of hours, you should pay for their time. Some companies even pay a flat fee for the test job, regardless of the time. It’s polite and respectful. Note that the test job’s goal is simple: it is done only to test their skills. Nothing else. Let’s say you are hiring a marketer. The candidate has excellent skills, and it got confirmed by a background check. The candidate also did great during the interview, sharp, proactive, prompt, and not too pushy and their chemistry worked too. However, you are a developer shop that wants more clients and this candidate only worked for SaaS startups before. The candidate might have a unique approach to your company that is misaligned with your goals. So even if on paper everything is fine, you still need to make sure that the candidate is the right candidate solely for you. 

On the test job, ask for something presentable and deliverable. Even if you pay for it, the test job shouldn’t take more than a day of work. It should relate to the position, so if you are hiring a developer, ask for a code on a non-relevant project of yours. If you are hiring a PR person, ask for a copy of a press release with a couple of journalist names to pitch the article. If you are hiring a customer service agent, bring out some issues and let the candidate answer the questions. It’s up to you and your business, but keep it relevant, brief, and reviewable. Set a deadline and let them know that they are free to ask anything but that doesn’t change the timeline. You need to check the quality of the test work of course, but also keep an eye on how this small project has been managed, and how the candidate communicated.  

How to make sure applicants are a great fit

Those who made it through here are worth hiring. There should be only a handful of them. From now on, only one thing matters – culture. I know this hasn’t been highlighted here before during the process, but this is the most crucial part. Everything that has happened until this point was to test if the candidate can work remotely and can deliver value to your company. However, none of this matter if they can’t fit into your team and company culture. Now testing this out is tricky, and seriously there are no general recipes for this. It all depends on what your company culture is. The last interview should test this out. 

There is no recipe on how to test the cultural fit, but I always recommend one approach that is indeed working for others. The method is the podium talk. Sure you can test personality traits through various tools and assessments, but ultimately, your team has to work with someone new. So your team has to make the call. Anyone who made it this far is worth hiring as they have the skills and capabilities, plus they can work with you. From your point of view, anyone from your now narrowed shortlist would be a great fit. So why you are the one who picks? Let your team choose whom they want to work with. 

Gather around all of your team for a video call and invite the candidate to join. Let the candidate speak on a topic of her/his choice. Let the candidate know beforehand that the interview will be about a speak-up event for your team where he/she needs to pitch something to your team. The speech somehow has to be connected to your business. It shouldn’t be more than a short presentation, followed by a Q&A. It is excellent as this podium talk lets your team engage with the candidate and the candidate has the chance to peek into your business and your team. After the call, let your team vote anonymously for the best talk and hire the winner. Write back to those who didn’t make it but highlight that they were on the very end shortlist and you might be getting back to them with actual work.

How to do a trial period for new employees

Now you have a winner, but make sure you still test the applicant before the employment. I mean, not on paper as most of these employees will work on a contract basis with you but more in your mindset. Be upfront and tell them that their first month is a trial period. Some companies even offer a lower base salary for the first months. In this trial period, keep a close eye on their work. There are a couple of ways you should do that.

Some companies who have a SaaS or any service that needs customer service support, throw the trialing applicant into customer service first. A significant amount of their time should be spent on customer service to learn more about the product, the customers, and the main issues. It is done for everyone, even if you hire a marketing director who did customer service ticketing years ago or haven’t had the chance to do it before. Companies who do this, don’t evaluate the work based on the sharp customer service the applicant provides but on the way the applicant works.

Some other companies, like Buffer, have new employees bootcamp. They do serious and sometimes offline onboarding for newcomers to further test out if the new candidates are a good fit for the company. During this time the applicant gets a base salary but not doing actual billable work but only tests. 

Others attach the newcomer to non-relevant projects first to test out if they can be a good fit. Even others assign them to the most critical project, the deep dive, to see how they react to pressure. 

It all depends on your business, but ultimately you should test before you buy. A trial period salary is excellent as it shows the candidate that during this time, they are undergoing a testing period. Once it’s done, their compensation rises to normal levels. If it turns out that your candidate is not the best fit, you can still turn back to other shortlisted ones. Now that you have a new remote employee on board, your job is to keep them happy, motivated, focused, and productive.

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