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βTo remain productive, effective remote workers need to be able to give themselves structure without the crutch of a standard office environment.ββGreg Caplan, CEO, Remote Year*
The characteristics of people who will thrive as remote workers mirror the practices of successful remote teams that we laid out earlier (and we cover in more detail in Being a Successful Remote Worker). Youβre looking for candidates that are:
Clear and frequent communicators. Written, asynchronous communication is a cornerstone of successful remote teams. While you can teach this, depending on the size and makeup of your team, you may not want to dedicate time to building this from the ground up in a new employee.
Intrinsically motivated/self-disciplined. While this is a positive characteristic in any employee, itβs table stakes for someone on a remote team. They wonβt require the external structure of a physical office, and can autonomously manage their time productively.
Capable of taking initiative. With clear goals, a remote member of your team will be able to get the necessary work done without needing to regularly check in, and are capable of unblocking themself.
Comfortable with longer periods of solitude. Many remote workers seek this out, but someone new to this style of working may be surprised by its impact on their mental health.
When assessing someoneβs ability to work remotely, they donβt need to have remote experience per se. You can look for proxies of remote success by screening for specific attributes. Some common ways these can manifest are:
A nontraditional background
Previous roles that required a lot of autonomy
Unusual or uncommon skills
These things tell you that the candidate didnβt have a path laid out for them to simply follow; they needed to take a lot of agency in figuring out their path. This level of agency correlates well with remote work success. (Thereβs nothing wrong with a traditional in-office background; it just doesnβt provide any insight on this specific point.)
If a candidate has worked remotely, itβs much easier to ask them about their specific experience and determine whether theyβll succeed. If they have not, you can ask them about what challenges they expect, and what adjustments they plan to make. Youβre looking for thoughtful, specific answers. Successful remote workers tend to be self-structuring people who prefer to make plans and stick to them.
βcautionβIf candidates are blasΓ© about the unstructured elements of remote work and have no experience with it, they might not have the skills to create their own structures and routines; or, worse, they might have no idea what theyβre getting into. Youβll want to probe more for how they might handle these challenges.
Another tack is to ask candidates questions about how they like to work when theyβre happiest during the workday, and about times theyβve felt especially fulfilled or frustrated at work. Itβs important to listen carefully for whether you can provide that. Long stretches of quiet time, alone in a room with music? Remote work might be a good fit. Lots of team whiteboarding and brainstorming over lunch or a happy hour? This person might suffer in a remote team. Do they get frustrated when theyβre alone with a difficult challenge (and so will struggle when they get blocked in a remote role), or do they prefer the chance to mull over problems independently? Do they get most frustrated when a colleague interrupts their focused work with a question, or when they have nobody around to collaborate with?
βimportantβOf course, your team structure will make a difference here. Some remote teams do a lot of collaborative work, and others are more asynchronous. Some are essentially teams of one, with each person working on a discrete project, and others are very collective. Itβs likely that the work will require a combination of autonomous focus and decision-making, and collaboration. So someone who has the self-discipline, focus and initiative to succeed in a remote environment, but prefers a more collaborative work style, might be very happy in a remote team where teamwork and collaboration happen daily.
When youβre discussing your team, itβs always best to be very upfront about what it will be like, and what kind of challenges someone might experience. For example, if your team is chaotic and communication is haphazard, you would candidly share this. Some people might respond gleefully that they thrive in chaos and enjoy the problem-solving that chaos necessitates. Others might be visibly put off, or even withdraw. Or you might be looking for people who will help make your system more streamlined, and some candidates may be excited by that challenge, while others will be looking for a company that already has a sophisticated remote communication structure. The additional reason to do this is that youβll want people to know what working at your company is really like, so that if they know they wonβt succeed there, they will filter themselves out. The alternative is replacing them and hiring again for that role in a few months. In sum, to help candidates reflect on what will make them happy and successful, it pays to be honest, explain your motives in sharing challenges, and that youβre truly seeking to understand whether they will enjoy the environment. This includes clarifying that itβs not a test and thereβs no hidden agenda; you both want to find a situation that works for everyone.
If a candidate will be remote, itβs important to assess how they come across in the context of your remote team. Youβll want to create a hiring experience that in some ways mirrors how the candidate will end up working, to test whether the candidate will succeed in the remote environment. For example, if the position youβre hiring for calls for mainly written communication, some video discussion, and a lot of audio-only calls (for example, conference calls), then itβs important to get an idea of how successfully they use these communication mediums. Hiring based on a phone screen and an in-person interview for this role wouldnβt be a realistic measure of their on-the-job performance. Instead, we recommend that at least some part of the process be done online, via video chat and, ideally, using written communication as well.
βimportantβIf your company has co-located employees as well, itβs important to use the same methods to interview candidates who wonβt be remote. Theyβll have to be working using the same mediums as remote employees, and will be communicating more asynchronously and in writing as well, so you wouldnβt want to presume theyβll need a different skill set.
An onsite-only interview process can obscure communication issues, because some candidates will compensate for their weaker verbal and written communication with effective body language. Body languageβnonverbal communication competenceβdirectly affects communication: research shows that people are judged as competent based on factors like what clothes they wear and how confident they appear.*
Nonverbal communication competence is a personβs ability to transmit or interpret information via nonverbal communication, such as clothing, body position, gestures, and facial expressions.*
βcautionβThe risk with an onsite or in-person only hiring process for remote workers is that you hire someone who comes across as a strong communicator on the basis of their body language and appearance, rather than the content of their communication. In this scenario, the new employee then fails in the remote context, because they canβt use the body-language skills that they rely on to communicate, and their written and verbal communicationβwhich didnβt get assessedβturns out to be inadequate.
To avoid this trap, youβd need to assess how well the candidate performs without those extra body language signals by evaluating their verbal and written communication abilities, which are the main avenues of communication available to remote workers.
For assessing written communication skills, a written assignment can be helpful. This can take a number of forms:
A sample email. Ask the candidate to describe their expected work progress for a small task, as well as its outcome.
Take-home assignments. These could include a documentation component like a coding assignment that includes writing (like creating a README file and instructions), or a plan for getting user feedback on a new feature.
A text-based interview. Have the candidate and interviewer communicate over instant message chat instead of phone or video. Automattic, a fully remote company of several hundred, interviews over text-based chat only.
Itβs important to look for clarity and tone in written communications: the most common failure modes are rambling, unclear writing that will make working with the person a drag, and tone that reads as negative or unprofessional. Tone is notoriously hard to convey in text, and teaching this skill is possible, but arduous. Itβs critical not to underestimate the value of a candidate who is able to come across as positive and professional in a written context.
In order to assess verbal communication, a paired interview over a video call can be helpful.
In a pair video interview, two interviewers simultaneously assess a single candidate. Typically, one interviewer leads the interview while the other observes. Microsoftβs Developer Division and Twitter, among others, use pair interviewing exclusively.
A pair video interview allows you to re-create a small-group meeting dynamic. This setting allows one person to observe more closely and take notes while the other interviewer asks and answers questions. It gives a second perspective on answers, so you can compare notes. This means that subtleties in how the candidate communicates and performs in the remote interview are more likely to be noticed.
For example, did the candidate consistently refer to a hypothetical software engineer as βheβ? This can be an English as a Second Language dynamic, but it can also indicate an inclusion problem you need to dig into. Did they answer very differently when asked questions by one interviewer compared to the other? This can indicate that theyβre not equally comfortable or competent communicating well with different people.
Other common examples are engineering candidates treating more technical interviewers differently from those who may be less technical. Conversely, a strong candidate in this situation will not assume they should only talk to the more technical person, and will purposely aim their answer at the appropriate depth for both. You will want to note whether the candidate changes the way they communicate when the interviewers present different genders, races, ethnicities, or other statuses; are at different organizational levels; or have different roles.
βcontroversyβA common attitude when hiring remote roles is that itβs not possible to have these positions filled by less experienced junior candidates. The tenet that remote work only works for highly experienced, senior hires does have some truth, but isnβt the full picture.
When companies say things like βitβs basically impossible to have a junior remote worker,β what they often mean is βa remote worker who lacks strong communication skills and professional skills like goal setting and independent action will fail.β And to some extent, thatβs true. Junior hires often lack necessary professional skills because they tend to be younger. However, this is correlation, not causation. The simple act of being more junior doesnβt by itself imply lower professional and communication skills. In some cases, it can be the opposite: career changers, for example, often bring highly developed professional skills, even though their specific experience is low.