Five Lessons Learned from Losing New Remote Hires: Testing Candidate Remote Readiness

At Ergeon, our fully-remote model allows us to source talent globally, access true domain experts, and have a fair, transparent company that can grow very quickly, and still maintain a strong, positive culture. Having worked remotely for the past 12 years, I am personally driven by the countless individual stories I’ve collected of how remote work has changed my co-worker’s lives. To succeed, our company must avoid the usual pitfalls that result in broken remote relationships and make people lose faith in this model, and that starts long before a new hire’s first day.

If new Ergeon staff leave our fully distributed team in their first two weeks, I know two things. One, we’ve most likely done something wrong, and two, there’s a lesson to be learned. It’s painful to realize, but certainly possible in these cases, that we’ve wasted someone’s time, someone’s talent, or given them a less than stellar experience with our company. With over 75 hires in the last 12 months and several early departures, we’ve made it a priority to adjust and reform as quickly as we possibly can.

Here are five ways we’ve grown to better set up our new hires for success.

1. Reflecting our Company’s Remote Experience through the Recruiting Process

The more closely your recruiting process can imitate your company’s distributed work environment, the more respectful and authentic it will be for your candidates. In our earlier days, we lost great team members because they were surprised by something once they started their role. People like to know what they’re getting into, and the sooner candidates can have a sense of this, the sooner both sides can decide if it’s a good fit.

• Efficiency: Our faster-paced culture is emulated in our recruiting process. Quickly moving through the interview steps helps us evaluate the crucial trait of responsiveness and has the added benefit of respecting applicants’ time and their many options. We’ve certainly lost more than one good candidate to other opportunities, which are abundant once you remove location as a constraint.
• Tools: In our interviews, we use the same tools that our teams use every day at work. For all interviews, we invite candidates to a Google Hangout — not a Skype call, or a phone call, or any other tool they suggest. Familiarity with our tools is nice to have, but this process also allows us to gauge a candidate’s comfort level on video, which is our primary method for meetings, training, recording assignments, assessments, etc.
• Written Communication: The ability to express oneself clearly in writing is a crucial skill for a distributed team using asynchronous communication across multiple time zones. We include several opportunities for candidates to demonstrate this skill, whether in a longer-form application question or in a written assessment during the interview process.
• Real work: Our Bootcamp is as close as applicants get to being a full-time member of our team. This final stage of our interview process is a paid experience where both candidates and the company can determine if it’s a good fit. Candidates are given full access to our systems and work on real problems with future teammates. They are given feedback and opportunities to learn and improve. Bootcamp can often reveal any issues or misunderstandings and is an authentic way to test fit, both by the candidate and our team.

2. Sharing our Remote Culture

Believe it or not, we’ve hired people who have decided just not to show up on their first day. As a developing format for employment we’re working against stigmas (albeit shrinking ones) that remote work opportunities are spam or not “real” jobs. It’s our job to validate the remote-work model. After being burned a few times by no-shows, we doubled down to show off our remote culture and career growth opportunities throughout our entire recruiting process. We really emphasize our unique and positive culture to impress upon candidates that this is a real company where teammates form real relationships. We’re working on developing guides that describe what it’s like to work for our distributed team and testimonials and video clips from staff with advice and messages about a day in the life at Ergeon.

Not surprisingly, we’ve found that candidates who already view remote work as a huge benefit or aspiration are some of our happiest, most satisfied, and longest-tenured staff. We’ve lost people in their first week because they decided that working on a distributed team was just not for them, or they struggled with schedules or isolation. Don’t mistake me: working on a distributed team is not everyone’s end goal, but there’s a lot that can be done to best prepare someone and set expectations for working on a distributed team. During our interview process, we talk about our monthly culture initiatives to connect people in entertaining ways across the globe, like our competitive annual health and fitness challenge or photography contest. We also offer resources to aid in the adjustment to working remotely during onboarding and send every new hire a ‘Remote Welcome’ pack with swag and resources to help them feel part of the team from anywhere.

3. Equipment and Internet Requirements

This point might sound harsh, but we’ve learned this lesson the hard way. We thought that we were being kind by being lenient, but we’ve separated from team members in the past because they could not consistently complete calls with our customers, or their equipment was crashing while running several applications simultaneously. This led us to integrate an annual tech fund into our company benefits. When all work is dependent on a network and technology, a fast, reliable internet connection and adequate equipment are non-negotiable.

While you can get a sense of someone’s connection speed and equipment through required interviews on live video, we discovered that we needed to go a step further by establishing and publishing minimums for both internet connection speed and equipment specifications. Beyond asking about a candidate’s setup, we require an internet speed test result and computer spec diagnostic directly in our application. While we don’t disqualify applicants based on these results, they do shape the conversation around our minimum requirements. If an applicant does not currently meet minimums, our job offer is contingent upon his or her proof of an upgrade.

We also learned that further workspace improvements can increase staff satisfaction. For example, through our benefits, staff can choose to upgrade their equipment or improve their workspace, wherever that may be. This perk has been used for anything from a second monitor or upgraded memory to an ergonomic desk chair. Noise-canceling headphones are great when you need to focus, but more importantly, we also offer all new hires a headset with a noise-canceling microphone, so they can be heard and understood, no matter where they choose to work from.

4. The Non-Office Work Environment Still Matters

The additional freedom that comes with location independence means people can experience fewer interruptions, set their perfect temperature, and enjoy complete silence or loud metal music. That being said, we’ve lost new team members because we didn’t set clear environment expectations for different roles or we didn’t give people the support to succeed in their own workspace.

While loud music and buzzing conversations can help some people find focus, they don’t provide a great experience for our customers. By failing to clarify an appropriate work environment for our open roles, we’ve unfortunately had to separate from team members who could not later adjust to workspace requirements. Now, during our interview process, we observe and discuss the expectations for various factors like noise level and interruptions, especially for our customer and candidate-facing roles. If candidates cannot demonstrate the ability to provide this type of work environment, our company may not be a good fit for them at this time. It sounds severe, but discovering this mismatch weeks into a new job is not only inconvenient but a huge waste of time for a strong candidate who could be excelling somewhere else. Or in the best case, we stay in touch, and our paths cross later with different opportunities.

We’ve also learned the importance of setting company-wide remote work best practices, especially for those newer to working on a distributed team. We’ve lost more than one good person because we did not provide enough support or education, especially to help those navigating the transition from an office environment. We set aside time for all new hires to review our remote work guide and take a quick quiz to test retention of the most important points. We also provide extra guidance for first time remote workers, through 1–1 meetings and quick tips. For example, our HR team and direct managers engage often with those working primarily from home to help them find ways to create some separation between work and life. This separation might come in the form of a home office room, a curtain, bookshelf, or even just a great set of headphones. As part of our interview process, we now directly address the remote work environment and the importance of a solid remote setup.

5. Transparency around Hours and Availability Expectations

Because we are currently a fully distributed company across 26 countries, multiple time zones are a reality for all our teams. While all Ergeon staff is exposed to these time differences on a daily basis, we have had to work hard to get to a place where we clearly express our availability expectations. What this looks like for many staff is an integration of life and work. Maybe your day starts with an early morning call with team members on one continent, but you have time to take your dog for a long walk in the middle of the day. You might have to join a call from an entirely different continent later that night, but you’ll get to pick your kids up from school and spend a few work-free hours with them beforehand. While you’re still working traditional weekly hours, your days may look different as part of our distributed team.

We do our best to respect everyone’s local time when scheduling meetings, but one of the biggest changes we’ve made is focusing on true transparency in our job descriptions and interview discussions. From the very beginning of our process, we make sure that expectations are clearly set around:

• Times of day, and days of the week we expect someone to be available
• How many hours per week we expect
• What an actual schedule of someone in this role looks like
• A clear explanation of any “off-hours” work, based on that person’s time zone

When asked, “Is the type of work and the amount of work required of you what you expected when you took on this role?”, new hires in the last 12 months have answered “yes” 90.7% of the time. This number has improved significantly from 68.8% in the previous year. We’ve found success in aligning our availability requirements with a reasonable time zone schedule and focusing our recruiting efforts in those areas. For example, all of our customers are located in California; therefore, we focus our recruiting efforts for customer-facing roles mainly in Central and South America, or time zones only one to two hours on either side of PST. And while we do consider candidates from other time zones for these roles and many applicants express their ability to maintain an alternate schedule or work different hours, we’ve seen that off-hours burnout can be devastating. We make sure to address this concern in any first-round interview and openly prefer a candidate with a successful track record of working alternate hours over an applicant who is gung-ho to give it a try.

This new focus has saved everyone time and reduced the costs and pain associated with churn. More than that though, it has helped us preserve our close-knit culture by ensuring that all our staff feels respected, supported, and part of a unique community that values how not where you work.