How to Hire Employees for a Remote Company
There are professionals that aren’t equipped to work from home
Research shows that the average hiring mistake costs fifteen times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss. Think about the lost time, energy, and money that it represents.
Great people build great companies. However, there are professionals that aren’t prepared to work from home. You need to find, interview and hire the right people for your remote company.
Hiring great professionals allowed me to build a profitable business. Understanding how to hire employees for my remote company helped me find those professionals.
Covid came and forced the whole world to work from home. That affected many people’s routines as they didn’t know how to work without an office.
If you want to build a successful remote company, you need to learn how to hire employees that can work from their homes.
They manage themselves
“Great people are self-managed. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do they will figure out how to do.” — Steve Jobs
There will be no boss behind employees when they are working from their homes. There is no way to know if they are working or not. As a leader, you need to trust your employees. For that, they must know how to manage themselves.
Professionals that know how to do that are organized and have ownership of their work. They are pro-active and figure out the best way to get things done. You need to find professionals who know how to be productive and don’t depend on a boss to keep telling them in detail everything that needs to be done.
Many people complain that there are no team members at your side to ask questions when you doubt something. However, that is no excuse to step up when in need of help from the team. Great professionals find ways to solve that in a remote environment.
As a leader, you also have to play your part after hiring. You should explain what your company wants to achieve. You should ease your employees’ work the most you can. You should let them know that you expect them to manage themselves.
Managing is everybody’s job. I was the CEO of my company, and I was responsible for setting the company’s vision. That helps facilitates everyone’s job as they understand what needs to be achieved. I didn’t care how they did their job.
The essential thing is that all employees help my company achieve its goals by finding ways to improve their work. Everyone understood that they were responsible for managing themselves.
To confirm if candidates know how to manage themselves, you can ask questions like:
- How is your current work routine?
- How do you organize your day?
- When you find a task that you do not have experience or knowledge of, what is your reasoning to complete it?
- Tell me once that you had to work without supervision.There is no time to waste micromanaging people. If your employees are demanding too much of your time, you probably hired wrong or didn’t explain to them well what needs to be achieved.
They work well with others
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — African proverb
Many professionals think that when they work from home, they can work all by themselves. They think they don’t need everybody else. They are selfish, or they want to work quietly in their rooms without talking to others. You need to run from these people.
Knowing how to manage oneself isn’t enough. You need to find professionals that also work well with others. They need to understand that everybody is working from their homes to help the company achieve its goals. They need to help each other with that.
Working from home still means working as a team player. You cannot let selfishness interfere in your company’s way. Professionals that work well with others know how to communicate. Even though there is no office to talk face to face, there are other ways to do that.
For my company, I chose never to hire people that have never worked before in their lives. There is a mindset shift when they start working for the first time. When they have no experience, they don’t know how to manage themselves and work with others yet. It’s much harder to help inexperienced employees when you don’t have an office.
To confirm if candidates work well with others, you can ask questions like:
- A colleague of yours warns you that you will need your help to complete his task, but you end up having an unforeseen event, and you will not be able to help him. What is your reaction? What do you do to resolve this conflict?
- When you are going to do a task that depends on several other people, how would you organize the execution of it?
- Do you prefer to work in a group or alone? Why?
- How do you act when you know you won’t be able to help your colleague?You need to find professionals willing to help one another to make a great company even if they do not share the same environment. There is no space for selfishness.
They pursue growth and learning
“You don’t build a business — you build people — and then people build the business.” — Zig Ziglar
All industries change fast. You may have found people that manage themselves and work well with others. That isn’t enough, though. You also need to have people working with you that can adapt fast. Otherwise, your competition will do a better job than you.
Our society is growing so fast that a small part of what we learn in a year is useless in the next one. Remote work became popular recently. The ones that adapt better took the most of the situation. If we don’t pursue growth and learning, we will be left behind.
To achieve my company’s goals, everybody in my team should be looking for new ways to generate better results and improve their work. They knew how important it was for them to improve their work environment. I paid them well and let them decide how they wanted their home offices to be.
Many things changed since I started working from home. I had help from my employees to better adapt to that. We tested many different things and kept doing the ones that worked best for us. I had to fire employees who did not adapt to new environments, though. They stopped learning and could not help the company anymore.
To confirm if candidates pursue growth and learning, you can ask questions like:
- What have you been focusing on learning recently?
- What books in your field have you read?
- What are the recent theories and practices in your field that you are skeptical of or disagree with? Why?
- What do you like to have in your work environment?There is no time to babysit employees about their learning. You need to find professionals that adapt fast to new environments. You need to find professionals that pursue growth and learning.
Final thoughts
Finding good employees isn’t easy.
Finding good employees for a remote company is much more challenging.
Although I never hired people that have never worked before in their life, I didn’t mind hiring people that have never worked from their homes before. If they have working experience, they will be more likely to adapt to a remote environment.
Remember that there are people that aren’t prepared to work from home. Your goal should be to find people that are and coach them to improve their job even more. For that, you should find professionals that:
- Manage themselves
- Work well with others
- Pursue growth and learning
