Great list. One thing I want to add/emphasize is to consider the remote worker's motivations.<p>I'm personally not driven by money (it's just a means to an end). So a shortcut to getting bites on a job posting is to understand that there are people working in your field who may very much like to work with you. But they are deterred by past experiences in the office that drove them to work remotely in the first place.<p>Here are a few things to consider with freelancers:<p>* They are often most productive outside normal work hours<p>* Roughly half their time is spent doing research and keeping up with the latest trends<p>* They probably left the workplace to bootstrap their own startup someday<p>* Their productivity usually goes down if they are on call or interrupted often<p>* Beware loose specs and feature creep or you might burn them out and lose them<p>* Their productivity is limited more by time and money than challenge<p>* Sometimes they solve problems completely differently than you imagined and that’s ok<p>* Their short game might stink in some areas so balance them with administrators that take care of formalities<p>* Self-actualization can be more important for them than recognition<p>* Perks and benefits probably aren’t in their vocabularies unless they have families to support<p>By them I mean me, so YMMV..
> Also, in the job posting, ask them to apply in a unique way—don't just ask for resumes. Instead, try to make the application process prove their abilities for the job.<p>I can't think of a quicker way to turn down top applicants, at least in software, than asking upfront for work that is likely to be rejected. Even the custom contact forms on companies' websites are a drudge to fill in and usually not worth it. Candidates know this and won't bother. The best approach is to have a connect with LinkedIn or just a simple email that can receive resumes. Anything else might make it slightly easier for the company at the expense of losing out on qualified applicant.
As someone working remotely, this line rubbed me the wrong way immediately:<p>> More potential warning signs are individuals who are poor at following up via email, forget when the interview was scheduled, <i>or aren't flexible with an interview time</i>.<p>Communication is a two way street. If you're looking to hire people remotely and you expect them to simply adjust to <i>your</i> timezone, you're setting up a bad remote employment relationship.<p>I've worked for years with a 10-hour offset from most of the people with whom I communicate, most recently with Heroku. A large part of what made Heroku attractive to me as a workplace was the pleasantly frank conversation about communication and limits. I'm generally available for meetings (my) 10p-midnight, which is noon-2p in SF. Otherwise, email / trello / hipchat / etc. Obviously, exceptions happen, and they really are exceptional (no "just this week" things that appear every week).<p>I've spoken to a ton of distantly-remote employees over the years and all of the stories that involved radical timeshifting on the part of the remote employee ended in a move to HQ or burnout and quitting — with a lot more of the latter.
There's a lot of good material in this post.<p>It struck me as I read through the traits of "great remote workers" (wondering, as a remote worker myself, if I had these traits and was thus a great one) that it's never going to be easy to hire a junior developer - or a junior anything, really - in a remote role: in particular, the ability to prioritise is something that you can really only acquire with experience, and "propensity towards action" is a little pointless unless you're actioning the right things; likewise, many developers, in particular, take some time to get their written communication up to an acceptable level; and as for trustworthiness... well, a junior developer is just as (if not more) likely to be honest than anyone else, but would you actually really trust that they're doing it right, based on your past experiences?<p>This leads me to the conclusion that remote working is perhaps best reserved for those with a little more experience, and that maybe this great movement away from centralised offices may never quite materialise in the way that some seem to imagine it inevitably will. Perhaps I'm wrong though!
> The email is personal,<p>The email is not personal. It has a name and a few words (the "<insert something interesting they mentioned>") but it gives no feedback on why you are not hiring them. Reading the rejection email as someone who might be receiving it, it would leave me wondering and frustrated, and more likely than not I'd reply to ask why I was rejected. You're not going to hire me, there is no reason not to just tell me.<p>Maybe this is just American culture (they seem a bit less straight-forward with negative things than the average Dutchman), but the ever-polite "hopefully you'll stay in touch" is more annoying than nice to me. Staying in touch is regular communication, not a line you should say to <i>everyone</i> regardless of how terrible their resume was and how applicable they may be as a future employee in a different position when really you're meaning to say goodbye.
I'm not sure why any venture backed startup, in an area that has local talent, would want to deliberately go the remote workforce route. It hampers your ability to scale, hurts your future acquisition chances, creates and will lead to communication redudancy, and culture distractions. It rarely works out positively.<p>In short, while I am sure that there are some instances where it works well (eg Basecamp / 37signals), I'd expect that they are the exception to the norm.<p>Note: I did build a remote startup with incredibly talented people and after a lot of soul searching and time required them all to come join us locally (or helped them find a new job elsewhere). Hardest decision we made at the company and certainly the right one.<p>NOTE 2: the best remote recruiting tool we had was to handpick whole invited to work with us. We hung out on mailing lists and read potential employees blog posts to see what kind of amazing open source projects they were sharing with the world, before trying to individually recruit them.
There is a recurring theme in this post about "putting candidates to the test" - sometimes simple testing in the hiring form (to select the ones with the highest intent) and them to "test with a project" to find out the best ones. I wonder if this is very practical for a company that isn't a popular/based-in-vally startup. I have a two part question: (a) How successful have you been in getting this level of engagement with candidates before you hired them? I would love to learn more about this. And (b) How well does this work for "non-programming" roles - that is, can you really devise practical projects/problems for people to solve. I know the business development example mentioned in the OP, but that is a small test in the form of a question - but I can't imagine what a real "project" for this type of role would be? -- sorry, thats 3 questions :) .. but I am curious to dive deeper into this aspect of the post.
Communication is absolutely key for remote teams to work. That being said, I often find remote teams using hip tools as a crutch for communication. We use Trello/HipChat/Hangouts/etc, but it doesn't mean Asana/Slack/Bootcamp/etc work as well.<p>IMO, I usually rate remote resources on the following:<p>- Are they a resource that will "finish my sentence"?<p>- Do they constantly set expectations about progress and milestones?<p>- Do they tell us when things aren't going well and need help?<p>- Do they update our communication channels frequently?<p>And we do this by putting them in a small project first and then moving forward after. The project typically has very little to do with code, but rather to see if the points are true.<p>Source: I've almost exclusively been running/working-with remote teams for 8 years now.
I have a question as a potential remote employee: If I live in a city with a very high cost-of-living, will it be difficult to find a remote position that pays reasonably well relative to my cost-of-living?<p>I assume one of the biggest benefits to hiring a remote worker is you can hire someone with a very low cost-of-living and pay them relatively relative to that. But if I'm living in a place with a high cost-of-living and the company can hire someone from any part of the world, why wouldn't they wait and find someone that's super inexpensive?
Remote teams is one of those things that can be a secret weapon.<p>I think remote work doesn't work for a lot of companies. A big part of what a company is is a culture and that culture is usually built around a physical place, for better or for worse. But, there is evidence aplenty that culture, great work and collaboration can be happen online. It's a new world and a company needs to find its own way, but if successful a remote working culture that works can be a secret weapon.
Hi OP,<p>I recently wrote a small eBook about building distributed engineering teams, based on our experience in building the team that builds odesk.com (yes, we eat our own dog food and we've learned a lot along the way).<p>People can get it for free here: <a href="http://work.odesk.com/recruit-manage-distributed-engineering.html" rel="nofollow">http://work.odesk.com/recruit-manage-distributed-engineering...</a><p>Hope this is helpful, I'd love to hear everyone's feedback about it.
Yes! A very good overview of how to hire people remotely. Removing extra (often irrelevant) constraints such as location lets you focus on other more crucial things. Also, a remote team leads to more personal freedom, goal-oriented focus, and encourages that you work via a Asynchronous workflow and thus more efficiently.
Thank you for writing a detailed guide about your best practices. It is a long-term struggle to convince managers that good remote work environment can be done (and good for both their budget and their employees well-being), and such stories definitely help this effort.
Can't help but notice that 8 out of 10 of their accepted applicants' locations are in US. I've been wondering whether american startups even consider hiring somewhere from e.g. eastern europe or africa or central asia.
Hmm, I don't know. A banner image of a bunch of white guys, and then<p>> Not everyone is cut out for remote work...<p>sort of lost me somewhere between the lines.