Remote working has long been a popular work option for those who despise the 9-5 routine office. Many employers provide it as a means to fetch the best and right talents all over the globe. According to Remote.co statistics, giving remote option can leverage employer talent’s pool. With a remote option, employees can feel more productive and engaged with the company, it reduces stress as employees can work in their comfort, and most importantly, it reduces the costly turnover rate.
However, recruiting remote employees is different from hiring in-house workers. When recruiting in-house staff, talents will spend most of the time in the office so managers can observe closely their behaviour. But a remote worker is another story. Albeit you can do an online interview, remote employees will not be able to be present in the office for often. As consequences, HR team cannot monitor their behaviour easily.
See also: Seven Smart Strategies for REMOTE Team Onboarding
In order to bring the best of remote workers, make sure your remote candidates have the following traits to ensure they can collaborate well with in-house employees and are able to deliver the best without the boss around.
While you can talk directly to in-house employees, you might not easily reach remote staff. That said, emailing or texting will be the most important means of communication with them. Therefore, when looking for remote employees, make sure they possess strong written communication as the inability to establish one could delay productivity and efficiency.
Measuring written communication skills can be done as simply as asking a question to the candidates during the interview. Ask them to describe their skill sets. If the candidates can explain as clearly as possible, provide you with a clear explanation, and provide you new insight, that means you might have found the right ones.
Your remote workers will not be surrounded by a supervisor who can monitor day-to-day tasks and completion. So, it is important to find someone who is a self-starter. Someone who knows how to stay motivated, work without being told, and remain productive without being monitored. This trait includes good time management and initiative.
Lack of communication and slow responses from remote workers can be frustrating and unproductive, especially for an urgent task. Additionally, since you don’t have regular face-to-face time with them, you cannot just go over and ask what happened. For this very reason, your remote candidates should have a sense of “over-communication”. Over-communication is best to have for remote workers because it shows their enthusiasm for work and their reliability.
When handling a task to a remote worker and they come up later with a bunch of questions, what will likely happen? Of course, the task cannot be done on time, you will spend more time replying questions instead of doing your job. This leads to more problems rather than solutions.
In another case, you hand a task to remote staff. He understands the bigger picture and tries to complete it based on their understanding. Googling an answer, text you when needed only, and have self-determination as well as focus to just complete the task that you gave.
Which one do you think is the ideal remote worker? Most would say the second individual. To know if your remote candidate is a natural problem solver, you can test them with a rather complicated question or task. Give them time to solve and emphasise that they can ask you whenever they have a problem for the task. By doing so, you can identify how active and intuitive they are when dealing with any problem in the future.
Read also: Managing Communication Frequency with Remote Team
