Hiring Remote Employees? 6 Tips on Hiring the Right Talent

While expanding your workforce to include a global talent pool sounds appealing, new challenges may erupt. As businesses adapt to maximise the availability of global talent to scale their operations, talents are also equipping and positioning themselves to take up virtual roles beyond geographical boundaries to achieve their career objectives. According to a CISION, 80% of employees would turn down a company that does not allow remote hiring. 

However, the reality is; with a seemingly limitless repository of potential candidates also comes an increased risk of hiring unqualified applicants because talent from around the world can now apply to your openings and this further clogs up an already overwhelmed recruitment system. 

Bearing this in mind, How do you find and hire the best remote talent for your business? Here are a few tips for hiring the best out there.

6 Tips for Hiring Remote Employees

Employer Branding

There are several ways to project your brand and attract the right talent; this might be easier for more prominent brands that are already well known across the globe. One of the easiest ways is to develop a job advert that will stand out. Your job post should clearly outline the competitive perks and your commitment to employees’ continuous learning.

Since you are hiring remote employees, an essential factor is trust. You must be able to earn the trust of prospective candidates in several ways. It will be of great value to share your company values and culture as this then provides an avenue to attract people who would properly fit into your team. 

Top Skills of Remote Candidates

Check out some of the top skills to look out for when employing remote workers :

• Good communication skills: remote employees must be skilled in utilising communication tools like Skype, Zoom, Teams and several other project management tools to execute tasks efficiently. Employees must be easily reachable and available to attend to official issues and proffer solutions as required promptly.

• Flexibility: Remote employees must be capable of adapting to the ever-changing remote work landscape and the dynamics attributed to it, allowing them to quickly adapt to new methods of doing things, new technology and open to quick and efficient work processes.

• Motivated and result-oriented: The right motivation is required to excel as a remote worker. Every recruiter is expected to look out for this skill in every candidate before hiring such a candidate. Candidates with personal goals and well thought out plans to achieve such goals can be identified as a potential right talent.

Know Where to Find the Right Candidates

To hire remote employees, identify the social media channels and job boards where the type of talent that you require would be found. There are many global and local job boards dedicated to remote jobs and industry-specific job boards.

Also, there are professional job boards targeted at specific professions depending on the particular role you are trying to recruit; there are IT-specific job boards, medical professional sites, digital marketing hubs as well as websites of any class of job you require for your company either full-time, part-time or project-based jobs. To find talent across Africa, click here to leverage our database of diverse talent across Africa.

Adopt Multiple Interview Methods

Ensure that you adopt different interview processes to assess the skill sets of the shortlisted candidates before the final decision is made. Utilise emails, video interviews, and phone calls.

For example, an email interview could be used to assess coherence to questions. A phone call would assess the verbal skills, and the video interview provides an opportunity to evaluate the candidate’s personality.

When structuring your interview process of remote talent hiring, incorporate the right assessment tool to evaluate candidates’ skills and make objective hiring decisions through the assessment’s outcome. To ensure you are using the right hiring assessment tool, you may contact our team of seasoned professionals at Workforce Resourcing to design fit for purpose assessment tools to attract the right talent.

Finally, you should consider incorporating a work assignment whereby candidates are given work simulations to evaluate real work scenarios and how they would perform before final selection.

Use these trial periods to reinforce the competencies of such candidates before extending an offer; you may also pay these candidates for the time invested in carrying out these assignments.

Design Attractive and Applicable Compensation Packages

Remote workers are keen on joining an organisation that is willing to compensate them fairly and most importantly, such payment must be attractive. Therefore, it is advised that you offer competitive compensation packages and attractive perks that would attract the right talent.

You also need to consider the cost of living in the countries where you want to attract talent from. To achieve this objective, you will require expert advice on compensation and benefits to ensure you pay fairly and adequately.

You can seek advice from compensation and benefits experts at African Ally for professional advice on developing competitive benefits packages to attract talent across Africa. 

Compliance with Data Privacy

The emergence of the digital era has brought about significant concerns on data privacy issues. Candidate’s data protection should be of utmost importance to your organisation and as such, all data privacy laws guiding your jurisdiction must be complied with.

Organisations also need to be aware of data security measures put in place by the technology tools used in recruiting employees; ensure that such technology protects your company and the candidates that utilise such tools.

Taking all these into account, hiring remote workers is not something that should be done without clear objectives. You need to have a strategy for hiring and integrating your distributed Workforce around the world into your corporate structure. Click here for more info on how to hire the right talent.