Hiring a Remote Team for Your Business — What You Need to Know

Hiring a remote team for your company is no different from a physical team. But there are apparent concerns when your remote team is spread out across continents. Like, how do you verify that Chinese University exists? Or is that Vietnamese name real?

As a recruiter, you don’t have to worry about background information. Luckily, some agencies specialize in background checks. Nearly all recruiters run background checks on their prospective hires.

Focus on finding your qualified skillset from whichever country it is. After you pinpoint the talent, put it to the test. After you are sure that these talents are what you need, hire an employment verification service to verify the applicant’s ID, degree, employment history, and criminal record.

Most businesses opt to hire verification services after narrowing down only the most qualified candidates because of the associated cost. You can choose to conduct a background check before beginning the recruitment process.

This is a practical guideline for hiring a remote worker.

Hiring Remote Workers

To hire a remote worker, you need to do three things:

• Prove that you are trustworthy.
• Put a sound recruitment system in place.
• Prove that you can trust the remote workers

Prove That You Are Trustworthy

The applicants rely on your available information to learn about your business. So put all your information out there. Where? The internet.

How To Build Your Online Presence?

Your online presence includes your business’ digital footprint. It includes your website, business information, social media accounts, and anything else that is online. Each of your online platforms should communicate three things:

• Why your business does what it does. This is your business purpose or mission statement.
• How your business does what it does. This is your culture (way of doing things) and values. Your remote team would want to know how flexible your business is, how you manage remote teams, how you get things done, etc.
• What you do. What does a day in your business look like? What do your employees say about working at your business?

This information helps your applicants visualize themselves working in your business. You can have all this information on your business website and redirect all internet traffic to that website.

A Sound Recruitment Process

You need to create and execute a planned set of actions to help you recruit the ideal candidates. Consider these three things:

The Job Description

It needs to be clearer than daylight. It will say everything that your remote worker needs to know about your business and his/her responsibility to the business.

How to Craft Your Job Description?

A great job description will clearly define the position and the responsibilities and keep away unqualified applicants.

• Use a descriptive and specific title. Show the major role and level of seniority most straightforwardly.
• Create a bullet list of important responsibilities. They should be easy to read and understand.
• Mention the minimum qualifications that your applicant needs to meet. You don’t have to mention ideals. Only the things that would disqualify an applicant from your position.
• Mention your company’s values, culture, and how your remote team works.
• Provide the application procedure. Should he/she send the application to an email or apply through a system like LinkedIn Easy Apply.

A clear job description filters out some of the unqualified applicants and provides the way forward.

Reaching the Remote Candidates

Distribute your job description (or job ad) in all possible online networks.

• Start with your network. Ask your former employees, partners, customers, friends, and family to spread the word. Use your website (on the Careers page), email list, and social media following.
• Use reliable job boards and social networks like AngelList, Career Builder, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, etc. Focus on industry-specific sites. For example, if you are looking for a developer, post your ad on Stack Overflow, GitHub, etc.

The Application Process

Be creative with the application process. Instead of asking for resumes and CVs, ask questions that help you know the applicant and simultaneously help your applicant know your business and their responsibility. E.g., why are you excited about joining us? What makes you the perfect fit for this role? How would you handle a certain problem?

Only excited applicants will get through your open-ended questions that ask for more than a degree.

Use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to integrate the application process with a recruitment management tool like Talent Wall. Such automated tools help you streamline and centralize the recruitment process for your remote team.

Prove That You Can Trust the Remote Workers

Test the applicants’ skills with a moderate project related to their job responsibility during the application or the interview.

After you get your shortlist of possible hires, conduct an identity background check. With the rising rates of identity theft cases, you need to stay vigilant. An identity background check is part of a background check to help you hire only trustworthy remote workers.

After you find your remote workforce, let the team meet and interact with each other virtually. Assign a talent lead to lead the remote team.