Spend five minutes browsing Linkedin and you’ll arrive at two conclusions:
- People like acting smarter than they actually are.
- For highly skilled positions, the power dynamic has shifted in favour of employees.
Hiring has always been difficult, no matter the size of your business. However, with hockey stick-shaped MOM growth now a necessity rather than a luxury, hiring the perfect employee is non-negotiable.
Traditional hiring has been great at sourcing a large number of candidates within a defined geographical location. The in-person interviews allowed you to get a strong feel for a candidate beyond their CV.
The ship called ‘Traditional Hiring’ was sailing peacefully along, until a 80-foot wave called Covid-19 capsized it right where it stood.
Almost overnight, the things that you thought your top workers cared about…
- Foosball tables
- Standing tables
- Tennis (the mini version played on tables)
- Dogs in the office
- That gong you hit when someone does a thing
…all paled in comparison to the option of working from home.
The question arises, where do you go now to hire superstars?
Enter: remote hiring
Top local talent is almost always hired by industry big fish. Not necessarily because they pay more, but because these companies have been around for longer and enjoy more top of mind. The best want to join the best.
The good news? There’s a new breed of worker emerging that is ambitious, focused, proactive and has few opportunities in their home country. These mostly younger professionals are now popping up all over the world and, simply put, there are winners amongst them.
Give this a thought, what qualities does a person that doesn’t want to be bound to their physical boundaries and current circumstance have? A lot of the same ones you’d like your employees to have: proactivity, tenacity and thick skin.
You can hire these superstars with little extra legal effort. The real battle will be an internal one; for you as a leader, and changing your team’s work culture to accommodate the move to remote.
Why remote teams smash it
In my opinion, there are four reasons beyond the obvious that make remote teams more productive and impactful on company culture.
Longer period for ‘aha-moments’ throughout 24 hours:
At Double, the largest time difference between any two employees is 12 hours. While one’s unwinding and replaying the day in their head, the other is just entering a flow state. Multiply this by the number of workers we have, and it's no surprise someone always has a brilliant moment of insight to smash our biggest bottlenecks.
Clearer insight into actual input (time) vs output for key tasks
Once you filter out the distractions (not all bad) that an office environment throws up, you’ll have a clearer estimate of how long tasks really take, as well as the quality of the final output. In our experience, actual time per task has dropped, and output has increased. This will allow you to delegate work, as well as manage project timelines and client expectations more accurately.
Healthy competition
Without the office environment there are almost no differentiating factors between employees other than the quality of their work. This breeds healthy competition between competent and confident employees, and gives them the assurance that they are being assessed fairly.
Idea sharing + knowledge growth
Diversity is a word that has been used ad nauseum. However, access to insights from multiethnic + highly-talented individuals is one of the only ways to ‘buy experience’. The sharing of this knowledge has to be facilitated, and can be done through workshops and mixing and matching team members on projects. This phenomenon is rare when you exclusively hire locally.
Conclusion
True remote hiring has no boundaries and hires the right person wherever they may be in the world. Some company leaders claim to be visionaries, but can’t look past time zone differences and tax policies. Short-sighted, but it leaves more talent for the real mavericks to pick up.
Start by hiring remote writers, marketers, and designers. Once the hiring model and onboarding process is refined, scale as needed.
Written by Naveed