Ways to Build a World-Class Remote Team

Building a Remote Team requires a different approach than your regular hiring process. Here are 5 ways to build a world-class Remote Team.

Employees are loving the benefits that are offered by remote-work like flexibility, autonomy, and better work-life balance. Some companies like Shopify, Twitter, Facebook are considering a permanent shift to remote work in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak.

Whether you want to hire a remote employee for a particular role or for a full workforce you need a different approach than your regular hiring process. In this scenario, you are not just looking for the right job skills but also the candidate’s suitability with working in a remote environment. Understanding how to find dedicated candidates and how to build a world-class remote team is very important.

Where to find candidates for recruiting?

First thing first, you must know where you can find potential candidates for your company. Here are some of them:

Company’s Network

Every company maintains a database of candidates so that they can reach out to them in the future. They then send out a “We are hiring” mail to these candidates who were great but could not be a part of the company. These candidates are the ones who have shown interest in the company so when they receive these emails they tend to re-apply quickly.

Often candidates are not actively searching for jobs online, but they tend to confide in their friends who are employed to know about any job openings in their company. Hence informing your employees about any job opening is mandatory to fill the position faster.

Ask teammates to find candidates

Some companies take an aggressive stance and tap into their employees’ networks. They simply ask their employees to spread the word in their network, and if their referral manages to fill the position, the reward will be awarded to that employee, under the company’s Employee Referral Program.

Job Boards

Job boards specifically ask their users what in particular are they looking for, are they interested in work from home, internship, or full-time employment. It becomes easier for the recruiter to search and filter out their prospective candidates, if lucky they can strike gold here.

Share Share Share

With social media being so handy, the more you spread, the more chances of getting a perfect candidate. Use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or any other social media channel you have access to, to let your connection know that you are hiring.

Sourcing candidates for remote teams is comparatively hard, but you should keep track of the source from where you are obtaining the best talents and make sure you utilize that source to the fullest in the future.

How to build a world-class remote team?

Look for the right skillset

To find a successful remote team, make sure you find the right set of candidates. When going remote you should look for personality traits that show to be highly productive in a virtual environment.

These traits include communication skills, organizational skills & time management ability to make independent decisions and work autonomously. To evaluate these qualities, video interviews, online tests, assignments or tasks can help to make sure that they are a good fit for this type of work culture.

Use of hiring tools

Hiring tools help you achieve transparency and hire collaboratively. When building a remote team it’s difficult to maintain simultaneous communication with your candidates hence having a single platform like an Applicant Tracking System helps you create a perfect hiring plan, from sourcing candidates to onboarding.

With hiring tools, recruiters can easily track which candidates are moving along the interview stages, build up their talent pool, improve employee retention, and carry out consistent evaluation throughout without any biases.

Sharing the company’s vision and values

Vision and values are what shapes the company’s brand identity and aspirations of what they want to be in the future. This, in turn, shapes your company’s culture and perception of people about your brand. Hence your vision and values should be conveyed to both your employees as well as your target customers in the market.

Your employee indirectly represents your company. So, each of the existing employees and the employees to be should be aligned with the company’s vision in order to accomplish laurels and awards. If they aren’t aware of the company’s visions and values, educating them should be your top priority.

This is important especially when you are dealing with a remote team. You have to be creative with your ideas. For example:

• Welcome Remote team members as a group
• Create communication channels where remote members get to know more employees personally
• Empower your remote team

Creating and sharing your vision statements with your employees, breaking down your company’s culture into core values, and reinforcing to the entire team can drive your employees to work much harder towards the company’s success.

Customized application for different roles

Companies can opt for a value-added application process instead of simply asking for candidate’s resumes. Emphasize on asking questions which will not only educate the candidate about the job profile but also the interviewing team about the candidate.

Companies like Zapier ask their candidates questions like:

• How would you prioritize these upcoming integrations and why? Office 365, Flickr, Marketo, Wunderlist, Pocket, Ontraport, Hootsuite, and Joomla
• How would you get in touch with the following people (don’t actually contact them): Editor at Lifehacker, Andrew Warner, CEO of Slack?

These questions help the recruiters to understand the candidate’s approach to key responsibilities. Also rather than asking for a cover letter from the candidate, the recruiter can ask for a sample pitch email to evaluate the candidate’s writing skills. Candidates excited about your company are willing to complete these extra tasks, often with enjoyment. Those who aren’t serious just skip your tasks or forget to do it, turning this unique application process into a filter.

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