What is your hiring process for remote workers?

Since location isn’t a factor, you can hire people who work around the globe and span different time zones. With a location-diverse workforce, your teams can cover more working hours, better support customers, and monopolize on sales opportunities in different regions. One of the biggest challenges of remote work is the lack of serendipitous interactions people have in the office, whether it’s around the water cooler or bumping into a colleague in the elevator. Thoroughly review the candidate’s work history, skill set and — if assigned — the returned performance task before starting the call. Print out the potential hire’s resume, too, as well as your list of questions, so you don’t click around your screen looking for them during the call. Make sure you have the candidate’s number and email handy so you can easily connect.

• This is where you’ll get to know your candidate and give opportunities for your hiring team to ask questions and build rapport with your potential new hire.
• Video interviews allow you to meet candidates without leaving your desk, which can make a huge difference when you’re scaling and have multiple interviews per day or week.
• Most interviews will turn the tables at the end, giving you the chance to ask the questions.
• As a way to keep the interview flowing, try to maintain a structured conversation with the candidate, just as you would with a standard interview.
• If there are multiple interviewers, one will lead and the others will shadow.

Make a good impression in the video interview by dressing professionally and practicing before the meeting. If you’re conducting the interview from a location other than the office, make sure your surroundings are clutter-free and quiet. Give the candidate time to ask questions at the end of the interview. You might notice a new Slack notification or be tempted to check the time. Maintain focus on the candidate so you can connect with them and build rapport better. Think about your company, remote work policy, and the role to determine if bringing the candidate on-site is necessary.

Increases Employee Happiness and Retention

Regardless of the position that you’re hiring for, you must dress professionally, even if the interview is being conducted from your home. If the candidate is presenting their portfolio or a detailed proposal, your video conferencing platform ideally needs to support screen sharing. Consider the structure of your remote interview and select the optimal platform to run a remote interview based on that.

If we remain interested, we invite the person in again to present to us , observe us working, and complete a timed writing exercise . We also show them our custom recruiting software tool and have them play https://remotemode.net/ around so we can assess their technology skills. We arrange a coffee with the candidate being considered and a few team members so both can ask questions and get a better feel for fit with office culture.

Value add interview

Those leading the interview should encourage candidates to identify solutions or support mechanisms that may help them succeed within your remote team. For those people with limited experience in a remote work environment, working from home can be especially disorienting. In most cases, remote workers have to manage their own schedule and time, which can lead to procrastination and a lack of formal structure. Additionally, remote workers generally receive less supervision and direction. Whilst it can be comforting to not have a boss breathing down your neck, many professionals work better when they have ‘in-person’ guidance from their supervisors and co-workers.

We have lost a few people during this trial period – some our decision, and some the candidates. Ultimately, this allows us way more insight than a traditional interview process would into how good of a fit someone is for our team . If we are hiring remotees and they are not able to come to Cologne/Berlin for an onsite meeting, we hire them without having met them in person. You don’t want to email a video link or phone number to the candidate at the last minute. Send an email to the candidate beforehand letting them know exactly what to expect for the interview, including the time, joining instructions, meeting password, and anything else they’ll need. In the event that an unexpected technical issue arises during your interview, you’ll want to have a backup plan ready to go.

Learn to Conduct a Remote Interview

We are constantly working to find more tangible ways to develop practical processes to enable belonging for all. Everyone at Remote is responsible for striving to deliver on this mission, which must manifest in proactive tactics and strategies that scale with us as we increase remote interview process the speed of our hiring plans. You can enter notes directly into the platform during the interview, but try to mute yourself as you type to minimize distraction for the interviewee. You live, breathe and eat code, and have fun figuring out how to solve problems.

• When you’re conducting remote interviews over platforms like Zoom, it’s more challenging to hold your focus than a normal face-to-face conversation.
• Prepare ahead of time so you can use interview time for interviewing, not reviewing resumes and asking questions that could have been discovered beforehand.
• As a business manager, you need a close-knit team to grow and expand your company.
• Many employers conductpre-employment skills assessmentsor ask employees to complete a sample project during the interview process.
• This involves getting to know the relevant systems the candidate will be working with like email, JIRA, source control, QA and communication tools.

To get this done, we use Typeform, a beautiful and intuitive platform that creates surveys and manages analytics. We recently adopted Gem, a sourcing CRM, to help supercharge our sourcing efforts, and we couldn’t be happier with the tool. Gem allows our recruiters to find great candidates, create talent pipelines to keep track of everyone, and send out personalized, automated outreach to get candidates excited about our roles. All the hard work is about to pay off, but we’re not quite ready to pop champagne bottles. At Help Scout, we love to make offers over video chat whenever possible, so the hiring manager will email the finalist and ask if they have a few moments to connect for some good news.