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