While hiring remote employees a different skill set is required. Your regular hiring tricks might not work there. Great office employees don’t necessarily make for great remote employees. Knowing the skill to manage your completely remote team requires some new tips.
While hiring a remote team that you will be operating from distance, a company needs to close at their work ethics, communications skill and time management. Of course, added to the skills they are required to complete their job. Though these soft skills mentioned above will help ensure timely deliverables.
Here are a few tips that you can try while hiring a great remote worker and ways to hire a remote employee.
How to hire a remote worker
One effective way to hire remote employees is to use your existing employee’s referrals. The research suggested that the best way to hire a remote employee is a referral source.
Which can give you many advantages, such as employee referral can halve your recruiting time, which takes 29 days to hire as compared to using career sites which can take up to 55 days. Also, the referral source cuts down our advertising costs and agency fees. One study shows that 46% of referred hire lasts for at least a year.
Use social media advertising. Local group meetups can also come in handy. Your own company’s website and blog can also help your way through.
Look for more than just technical skills
Of course, the leading qualities that companies look for while hiring are technical skills, experience, or even stellar references. But while hiring a remote employee you should look for high levels of emotional intelligence.
Upon asking for communication and collaboration skills one of the biggest HR representatives said “We want people who are passionate about communities and building them. We look for people with high emotional intelligence along with skillset.”
Employees working remotely need to work autonomously and required to communicate with the rest of the team on a regular basis. Use advanced tools to keep track of employee engagement activities. That also helps to communicate with your employees on a regular basis.
Do not confuse it with synchronous communication. Remote employees must have communication skills to work on their own. At the same time keeping other employees together to achieve important project milestones, or if their colleagues have a question along the way.
Positive and negatives of remote hiring
In the era of remote employment, every other company is trying to attain the benefits of remote workers. But it has its drawbacks too. Let’s go through positives first.
- Lowers business cost: With a remote team, you can reduce your premises cost, employee travel, and equipment cost. A large organization like cisco and Aetna have reduced up to $270 yearly.
- Widen your talent pool: As you hire a remote worker you instantly extend recruiting enclosed within geographical reach.
- Diversified staff: Having a diverse team through remote hiring can ultimately expand the knowledge pool of the company.
- Environment benefits: Having a remote team can eventually decrease carbon footprints which is a huge benefit to the environment.
Negatives of remote employment
- Issues with communication & collaboration: This probably is the most obvious drawback of remote hiring. The inability to communicate face-to-face can lead to many problems, especially if there are language barriers.
- High turnover & weaker attachment: Of course high turn over should be among the positives but with the weaker attach and being unable to keep staff sufficiently engaged and valued can make it hard to maintain. And will require planning of effective remote hiring strategies.
- Technology issue: Remote working is entirely technology-dependent. However, there are inevitable times when things break down. While working with a globally dispersed team, they may be in the region where the internet is not that stable and technology is not that advanced. Tools like employee time tracking software can help you to solve this kind of issue.
Conclusion
In the end, a remote employee is very similar to your office-based colleagues in a way that they want to be respected and should have resources to be productive and successful. Build a culture that gives all that to every employee, even if they’re miles or oceans apart.