One of the most significant ways COVID-19 changed the workplace is by making remote work possible for many types of employees. It turns out that employees like remote work so much that they don’t want to return to normal — or even adapt to hybrid work — because they have not experienced a loss of productivity.

In 2022, the debate about bringing people back to the office reached peak intensity. Companies like Apple and GM announced return-to-the-office policies only to walk back their request after employees protested.

• A Monster survey revealed that 40% of workers would quit if they were forced to return to the office even one day a week. 

• According to the Future Forum, the remote work debate was a tug-of-war between executives and employees: non-executives are more than three times as likely as their bosses to want to work fully remotely.

When it comes to hiring, remote work opens up talent pools. Companies can attract candidates who live in faraway states or rural areas – and they might be more likely to be from diverse groups.

• One survey found that remote jobs attract 2.2x as many candidates as non-remote​ jobs and 2.2x more women.
• In September 2022, remote job posts on LinkedIn comprised 14% of all posts but received 52% of all US applications.
• On Ladders, a site for jobs that pay over $100,000 per year, 36% of all postings for professional jobs were remote in 2022, up from 4% in 2019.

The power of remote work is flexibility

Workplace flexibility – on or off-site – is a productivity driver for people who want balance as they attend to life demands or caregiving responsibilities.

• Workers with full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity and 53% greater ability to focus than those without the ability to shift their schedule. 

The availability of flexible work options has a direct impact on companies’ ability to hire and retain employees.

• A 2022 survey of CEOs revealed that the number one driver of attrition was the inflexibility of work options and hours.
• Remote-friendly companies experience 33% lower turnover, demonstrating the importance of hybrid/remote work as a driver for retention as well as productivity. 

Allyn Bailey, Executive Director, SmartRecruiters Hiring Success Services, shared her perspective on hiring in the era of flexible work in Worklife, ‘A lot of messiness’: Will hybrid working ever really work?.

“Those [employers] that are not offering some sort of flexibility or employee autonomy are having a hard time competing for top talent because people just won’t apply. That’s what’s pushing a lot of the HR strategies.”

Questions to consider for remote and hybrid hiring

In 2023, talent leaders will need to consider their teams’ ideal makeup and workflows in the era of distributed work. And recruiters will need to revisit their processes to ensure alignment. Allyn Bailey suggested this future-minded, people-driven approach:

“HR teams need to take a deep breath and ask three questions: What does the real world look like today for people? What does the business need? How do I think about forward-looking strategies rather than trying to retrofit what I thought worked before?”

– Allyn Bailey, Executive Director, Hiring Success Services in Human Resources Director, SmartRecruiters exec: Here’s the problem with hybrid work

As you think about forward-looking strategies, consider the success of your current remote/hybrid processes and look for areas to improve. Here are some additional questions to consider:

• Which teams work best remotely together? Which positions can we make fully remote? 
• Which geographic areas will we recruit from? How will this change our recruitment marketing strategy?
• How will we manage the mix of off- and on-site interviews for candidates hired for hybrid roles? 
• What promises about time on-site can we make to candidates that we know we can keep? How will we communicate our policies in job ads and during the recruiting process?
• How will we build an equitable hiring process that evaluates candidates without bias – including proximity bias?
• What does effective onboarding look like in a hybrid/remote scenario? How can we ensure everyone starts on the same page and is set up for success?

There’s not likely to be one answer to these questions, so you will need recruiting software that can adapt to any scenario – and partners who can guide you. We’d love to help.

In today’s global economy, more and more employers are turning to remote or distributed workforces as part of their hiring strategy. This requires a certain level of trust in remote employees to be organized and productive self-starters. To screen for these soft skills, recruiters should tailor their questions accordingly.

There are many advantages to using a remote workforce—such as the ability to draw from a larger talent pool and cut back on overhead, to name a few. Optimize the value of your remote team by hiring employees that not only have the right skill sets, but can also work autonomously and stay productive with minimum supervision. 

To determine if candidates for remote positions will be an asset to your organization, it’s important to ask the right questions during the interview process. To that end, here are 12 questions every recruiter should ask when hiring for a distributed workforce:

1. What are the biggest challenges you often face at work?

This question helps you understand how the candidate works and what may potentially trip them up. A thoughtful answer also indicates that they have the mindfulness and self-awareness to continuously make improvements so they can become a more productive member of the team.

2. What does your typical workday look like in your current role?

Gain insights into how well a candidate organizes their day and prioritizes assignments. Employees who apply a clear structure to their days tend to be more productive and able to devote their energy to high-value tasks that matter most. 

3. How do you start your day?

Employees with a morning routine, which puts them in a positive mindset, are typically more focused and creative. They’re also less stressed and more likely to have healthy habits that will help them stay productive.

For example, something as simple as meditating for ten to fifteen minutes every morning can have a profound impact on an individual’s alertness and sense of well-being for the entire day.

4. What do you do when you’re not working?

This question will give you an idea as to a candidate’s ability to maintain a work-life balance. People who pursue a variety of interests and have a balanced social life tend to be more effective in managing their time. They understand the approach of working smart (not just hard) and are able to focus on important tasks that will yield the greatest results.

5. How do you switch off from work?

It’s often hard to leave work behind when the computer is just right across the room. However, the ability to limit work hours allows an employee to stay mentally and physically healthy, which is the key to maintaining productivity in the long-run.

6. How do you prioritize your tasks?

Productive team members focus their time and resources on tasks that will move the needle the most and have the ability to prioritize their assignments autonomously. This question helps you identify candidates who can manage their workload effectively to get the most done while maintaining a certain level of quality.

7. What does your work environment look like?

Experienced remote workers have a consistent work environment that allows them to screen out distractions and stay productive. They should also be equipped with a computer, a reliable internet connection, and other tools necessary for the job. If the role requires the employee to communicate with clients or customers frequently via phone or video, the candidate should have a dedicated workspace to ensure that they won’t be interrupted.   

8. What are your biggest challenges when working remotely and how do you overcome them?

Remote working comes with its own set of challenges (e.g., finding a quiet space, battling the occasional feeling of isolation) so look for employees who have developed strategies to prevent these issues from impacting the quality of their work.

9. How do you deal with distractions?

Many remote employees work from home and they may encounter more distractions than in an office environment. Distraction is a major productivity killer so it’s important that employees have developed effective techniques to help them focus and use their time intentionally. 

10. How do you stay upbeat and positive during your workday?

It’s often harder to get out of a rut when team members are working on their own. Negative moods can lead to lower cognitive performance and limit the ability to think creatively. An ideal candidate should have developed coping strategies so they can minimize the impact of mood fluctuations on their productivity.

11. What do you do when you have a question but your team is offline?

If a team member is located in a different time zone, they may encounter an issue when no one else is online to assist. Look for candidates who are resourceful and have developed strategies to handle various scenarios independently. They should also demonstrate the ability to weigh the severity and urgency of the issue at hand so they can react appropriately.

12. Can you share a time when you took initiative at work?

Remote team members need to work autonomously with minimal supervision. Look for candidates that are driven to achieve results. This question helps you identify self-starters who are willing to take initiatives and go the extra mile. These employees also tend to be more confident, which often makes them more productive and creative.

Final Thoughts

As remote work becomes more and more commonplace, it will be increasingly important for recruiters and hiring managers to know exactly what to look for in prospective candidates. The questions outlined above will help you to find workers who can contribute to your company’s success, even from afar. 

Interested in more tips and tricks on how to make the most of interviews for remote jobs? Familiarize yourself with the benefits of video interviewing!

When you’re looking to find the perfect person to fill a remote spot in your team, you have to start with the perfect remote job advertisement. Doing so will improve the quality of candidates at the top of your recruitment funnel. 

Perhaps it’s your first time hiring remotely, and you’re not sure what to include in the job posting. Maybe you’ve already got remote team members, but you’ve been having issues with the hiring process. Well, have no fear! Below, you’ll find four tips from the distributed workforce experts, Remote-how, on how to write the perfect posting for remote jobs and find the super star candidates you need to succeed.

Do the Research

This is perhaps one of the most important aspects of creating a new job advertisement. Have a look at your competitors and similar roles they are offering on their careers page. You’re probably looking for similar kinds of candidates, so it’s a good idea to check the requirements they’re asking for.

Take note of the skills they are looking for, as well as how they prioritize and communicate relevant information in the posting. These points will probably make up the core of your own job listing, and will help you to avoid forgetting any important details.

You can also use this method to get inspiration for the formatting of your advertisement. Some well-known companies that frequently hire remotely include Buffer, GitHub, Basecamp and Automattic. Their careers pages are excellent examples of remote job postings to use for reference.

Pro tip: SmartRecruiters platform lets you view example advertisements from other SmartRecruiters customers for inspiration when creating job postings.

Define the Exact Remote Conditions

Many people think remote work entails flexibility in terms of location and schedule. This, of course, is fairly common, but some jobs may require the occasional day in the office or for workers to be available at very specific times.

When writing job postings for remote positions, make sure that you explicitly state the terms and conditions. This will make sure that you don’t get to the interview stage with a candidate, only for them to find out that the remote arrangements aren’t what they’re looking for. 

Specifically, consider the following:

• Can your remote employee travel while working?
• Do they need to work hours according to a particular time zone?
• Will they need to make trips to specific locations at any point throughout the year? 

“During the offer process aside from the standard compensation information, it is essential to specify work hours and time zone expectations, what equipment and resources will be provided by the company, and any fun perks or benefits you plan to offer them as a remote employee. I would also provide the schedule for their first week of onboarding so they can prepare to dive right in!”

Casey Carr Jones, Director & Head of People Operations at Remote Year.

Below is a posting for a remote content writer position with Buffer. You’ll notice that they clearly define working hours, specifically which time zone candidates should be in. This sets the correct expectation for their remote arrangements up front.

Get Your Team Involved in Drafting the Advertisement

If you’re managing a team of multiple remote team members, it will be especially important to get them involved while drafting the job posting. By virtue of distance, you might not always be aware of their paint points or which additional skills they could benefit from in a new hire.

In an office environment, keeping up to date with hiring happens fairly naturally. Here in the remote world, you’ll have to make sure to over-communicate HR processes and hiring plans. By letting your team know and allowing them to voice their needs and concerns, you’ll have a better chance of hiring someone who will be a better fit for your team and its objectives.

To that end, we recommend the following two-step process before posting job advertisements:

1. Notify your team of the position you’re hiring for and ask for recommendations and any requirements they may need or can recommend. 
2. Following this, draft your job posting and present it again to the team. Allow for review, take notes on feedback and then make a final decision on the advertisement. The process needs to be cooperative and fit everyone’s needs to maximize new hire success.

A Remote Job Requires Different Skills, Benefits, and Perks

If you’ve only hired for on-site workers, you should think about the skills you’ve specified previously in requisitions, and whether or not they’ll translate for remote workers. Nine times out of ten they won’t! While both traditional candidates and remote ones will need more or less the same technical and hard skills, it will be especially important for remote workers to have certain soft skills like problem solving, time management, and communication. Since they’ll be working independently, it will be essential for remote workers to be organized self-starters capable of meeting deadlines without direct supervision.

Also make sure to mention any great remote-based perks that you have! It’s no use talking about a membership to a local gym by the office when your employee is possibly thousands of miles away in another country.

In the same content writer posting referenced above, Hotjar also takes care to clearly state the benefits available to remote staff.

Conclusion

We think you’ll find the tips outlined in this article very useful when posting requisitions for remote candidates. For actionable advice on the next step in the hiring process—conducting remote interviews—be sure to check out this informative post.

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Gauging the talents of in-person candidates requires skill and experience, but qualifying that same talent remotely poses particular challenges of its own.

Telecommuting has been on the rise since the early 2000s with SHRM reporting that 68 percent of companies now offer remote work options, up from 54 percent in 2014.

So, what do we know about the remote worker? The New York Times (NYT) helps us answer this question (though they themselves acknowledge the definition is somewhat nebulous)…

“The most complete definition is someone employed full time at a private, nonprofit or government organization, who works at least half the time at home.

“The typical telecommuter is a 49-year-old college graduate — man or woman — who earns about $58,000 a year and belongs to a company with more than 100 employees, according to numbers culled from the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.“

Remote work/ telecommuting options can save companies money (the same NYT article found that the US federal government saved an estimated $32 million by asking their employees to work from home on snow days). And, numerous studies have shown remote workers are more productive and work longer hours.

With more and more companies seeing telecommuting as a viable option for their employees, it follows that remote interviewing will increase in popularity as well – from initial phone screens to online technical skills tests.

For many, the idea of remote interviewing can be daunting, as it’s common to rely on in-person meetings to get ‘a sense’ of a candidate. To surmount these initial growing pains, the following provides top tips for recruiters and hiring managers looking to win at remote interviewing.

1. Find the best ways to connect.

During an interview, so much is determined by body language, which isn’t something that always translates over a screen. A survey from Twin found that 50 percent of interviewers eliminate candidates based on the way they dressed, behaved, or expressed their body language.

That’s why it’s important to try to find communication solutions that will best replicate the benefits of in-person interactions (while also remembering judgments based on appearance and clothing could be biased so it’s good to eliminate that criterion from the application process). To do this, try using different communication tools for the various stages of the interview process, such as an audio tool for the preliminary screening and a video conferencing option during later rounds.

While there are plenty of business tools that perform one of these tasks well, implementing a unified communications system will ensure an organized approach when communicating between multiple candidates.

2. Prep the tech.

Delays caused by technical difficulties can completely disrupt a scheduled day of remote interviews, at times with costly consequences. Within the span of a year, a single employee can spend 91 hours, or over two work weeks, of their time fixing computer issues.

Technology snafus can make a company appear unprofessional and will ultimately decrease the time recruiters and hiring managers have to evaluate each candidate. Prepare in advance for a day of remote interviews by asking the following questions:

• Does this room have a strong internet connection/cellular reception?
• Is all of the necessary equipment plugged in and turned on?
• Does the candidate have the interview information, including time, date, and links?

3. Choose the team wisely.

A re:Work study found that having three interviewers in the room led to hiring the best talent 63 percent of the time, while a team of seven would increase hiring success to 72 percent.

Having multiple perspectives of a single candidate is typically a good thing, but when interviewing remote applicants, streamlining an interview team to a smaller group will help reduce interruptions and simplify communication.

Phone calls or video conferences should include only the core team necessary to make the decision.

If the team can’t be winnowed down, assign roles to each person, including which team members should be speaking and which are responsible for silently observing and notetaking.

4. Become an effective listener.

In-person interviews offer plenty of opportunities to demonstrate active listening, from securing eye contact to head nods. Since 93 percent of all communication is nonverbal, these tiny cues are essential for establishing an understanding between interviewer and interviewee.

During a remote interview, it may be difficult, or in the case of a phone call impossible, to represent any of the visual cues that show listening. Fortunately, there are other ways to show active listening…

• Looking into the camera as a way to replicate eye contact.
• Eliminating outside noises that may interfere with the interview.
• Waiting a few additional seconds for a response before speaking accommodates the time the interviewee needs to think of a response and compensates for any lag time or delays in the signal.

Don’t forget to share with your own remote interview hacks! #HiringSuccess

Typically thrust upon HR departments with instructions to meet quotas and boost statistics, the untold truth about diversity hires is that many don’t stick around, and it’s for lack of true inclusion.

If there’s any truth to hiring managers favoring candidates culturally similar to themselves, how then, is the white male-dominated tech industry expected to more accurately reflect the spectral nature of our population? According to Bärí Williams, VP of Legal, Policy & Business Affairs at All Turtles and former Head of North American business operations for StubHub, it begins by asking the simple question: “How can we do better?”

In 1960s America, models for business diversity stemmed from affirmative action and equal employment opportunity compliances, which all too often looked more like tokenism. In a relatively more enlightened 2018, businesses are taking on the challenge to undo this mindset. LinkedIn’s 2018 Global Recruiting Trends study shows a greater focus on making diversity stick than previous years, with 78% of companies prioritizing diversity to improve work culture, and 62% to boost financial performance.

As the next wave of business leaders emerge, Williams, an Oakland native with a career centered around the Bay Area, believes we are moving closer to more inclusive company cultures, because society is, despite certain trends to the contrary, moving towards inclusivity. “It’s interesting watching how differently my eight-year-old sees the world,” she says. “The only president he’s ever known is a black man, and then one candidate running after him is a woman.”

However much American politics appeared to be progressing, the results of the last presidential election are a stark reminder of how complacency can quickly unravel years of progress, and for Williams, avoiding complacency is paramount. “It’s great that diversity doesn’t feel like an anomaly to my son, and it shouldn’t, but you also have to work hard to ensure that it’s not.”

While working at Facebook, before StubHub, Williams noticed how all of the company’s business partners — consultants, service providers, hardware, and infrastructure suppliers — reflected the majority company makeup. So she set out to diversify Facebook’s business operations.

She launched the social media giant’s supplier diversity program, building relationships with minority-owned businesses that facilitated the company’s business operations. This ranged from producing branded Facebook swag like hoodies, stickers and pens, to catering, staffing and photography services for company events. As a result, Facebook made itself more accessible to these communities, while providing new economic opportunities and demonstrating a commitment to improving their quality of life.

For Williams, building an inclusive culture that’s “woven into the fabric of the company” is key to achieving true diversity and inclusion. This means not only hiring racially and gender diverse talent, but finding “non-traditional ways to reach your benchmarks for diversity,” through untapped channels, in order to identify non-obvious candidates.

And while the Global Recruiting Trends report shows that more tech companies are already approaching the question of “How can we do better?”, 38% of companies surveyed struggle to find diverse candidates to interview.

For Williams, the reason is clear: many tech companies do not contain diverse populations, creating a vacuum for companies desperate to source diverse candidates, and with a lack of diverse candidates in surrounding communities, it’s no wonder why tech companies struggle to source, hire, and retain non-white male talent.

A solution is for companies to explore other channels. “Maybe it’s more remote work, or flex schedules,” says Williams, “or allowing people to commute back and forth between certain cities. Diverse populations don’t want to live in cities that feel inhospitable, don’t have amenities they want, or don’t give them a sense of community.”

And the problem isn’t simply sourcing diverse candidates. Fourteen percent of companies surveyed by LinkedIn struggle to get diverse candidates through the interview process, and 8% struggle with getting diverse candidates to accept offers.

But there has been progress. Recruiting software startup Lever manages an even 50:50 male to female workforce, excludes photos from applications and uses inclusive job descriptions, and promotes support groups for women and LGBTQ employees. SmartRecruiters launched the industry’s first AI-powered recruiting assistant, solving the problem of identifying great talent, on any ATS, without selection bias. Internet radio company Pandora offers bias and assumption training to promote a positive workplace environment, eliminated “cultural fit” from job applications, and host happy-hour fundraisers for black history month and female leadership to align the events with company values.

Williams urges hiring managers and recruiters to judge non-traditional candidates through a different lens. “Value that candidate’s unique experiences and perspectives,” she says. “Judge them holistically and allow them to authentically be themselves.” According to Williams, these practices make employees feel valued and give them a sense of belonging.

“Everyone has had an instance in life where they have been excluded from something,” says Williams, explaining how inclusion is an easier concept for people to grasp than diversity. Channeling that feeling of isolation or exclusion can motivate someone to ask, “What can I do to make this person’s life a little easier today, or, what can I do to bring in a second or a third person?”

Promoting diversity and inclusion should not an objective for HR departments but a company-wide goal, where all employees must echo the question ‘How can we do better?’

“More than being mentors, it’s about being sponsors,” says Williams. “Mentors will give you guidance once you’re in the room, but sponsors will advocate for you when you’re not.

“Diversity gets people in the door,” she says, “inclusion keeps them there.”