Building an Effective Remote Hiring Strategy
Hiring remote software engineers can help your organization in many ways. This includes boosting productivity from immensely talented engineering staff. For example: A two-year study conducted by Stanford concluded that
- Remote workers produce the equivalent to an extra day’s work each week
- 70% of employees say that working remotely is an important factor in job selection
- More than a third of employees say that they would prefer remote working opportunities to a pay increase
To take advantage of a wider talent pool, lower costs, and higher potential productivity, you must develop a strategy for hiring remote software engineers. Here are five essential elements of an effective remote hiring strategy.
Define Your Ideal Candidate
Whether hiring for an on-site or remote role, you will have defined the skills and experience you desire from your next hire of a software engineer. However, when hiring for remote employees you should pay extra attention to their personality traits and soft skills. Remote employees need to:
- Have great communication skills
- Be great time managers and able to prioritize tasks effectively
- Be self-disciplined and collaborative
- Be self-motivated
In addition, you will need to consider whether there are any time zone issues (for overlapping with your other employees) and the personality type that will fit in with your team and organization.
Source Remote Software Engineers Effectively
Remote software engineers are unlikely to search for jobs on the most popular online job boards. The most talented use specialist recruitment agencies, and hiring organizations partner with those agencies with specific search and select tactics. Increasing the visibility you give to your remote work culture on your website and LinkedIn pages will increase the likelihood that you will be viewed as an employer of choice by software engineers who prefer to work from home.
Help Software Engineers Select You and Deselect Themselves
Develop content on your online resources that helps candidates decide whether you are the organization they wish to work for and if they would fit in. Show how your remote employees work with others – the tools they use and your policies and procedures – and include personal experiences from your remote employees.
Stories of the benefits and advantages that your remote employees enjoy by working for you can help to motivate the most talented software engineers to join your organization.
Interview Effectively
When interviewing a remote candidate, ensure you have a strategy to test alignment with your culture as well as ensuring that the candidate has the experience and skills required for the job. Your interviewers should ask the same questions of each candidate, and have a standard way to assess each candidate. This removes personal bias.
If you believe the candidate has the personality and skills needed to be successful in the role, you might then conduct a second technical interview to test the key elements of their resume that will be needed in the role. It’s critical to remember that each interview should both assess a candidate’s ability to perform the job and showcase why the candidate would want to join your organization. Many hiring teams have made the mistake of having a one-sided interview process and have had a sub-optimal offer acceptance rate as a result.
Deliver a Strong Offer
Once you believe you have found the ideal candidate, consider giving them three separate options within your offer with a varying ratio of cash compensation, bonus potential and equity. Highly qualified candidates will likely have competing offers from different companies and this approach conveys the message that you’re willing to be flexible and accommodating as an employer.
Your offer should be accompanied by several reasons why you think the candidate will be successful with your organization and a brief overview of the exciting projects the candidate will be working on in their first 60-90 days.
Hire Your Next Remote Software Engineer Effectively
At Kofi Group, we work with you to define your ideal remote software engineers. We then use our extensive specialization in direct hire placement to locate the ideal candidates. We reach out to individuals in our network, verify technical skills, assess culture fit, check references, and schedule interviews for you with the best candidates.
At each step of the hiring process, we work in partnership with you – because hiring the most talented remote software engineers for you is as important to us as it is for you. To learn more, reach out to Kofi Group today.