Better Hiring of Remote Employees

Discussions
#1

Through the course of growing PodcastMotor I’ve had the task of hiring about 15 remote team members, and for a lot of reasons it’s been a really challenging process. Finding qualified candidates, screening the obviously bad ones out, and then having a good process for testing/interviewing/vetting those final candidates has all been very manual and time intensive.

So I’m looking at approaching the problem of hiring, and specifically hiring remote employees, in a better way. I’m really interested to hear what other founders have seen through growing their team. Anything working particularly well? Any solutions out there make the process go a lot smoother? Job boards that give you great results?

I’ve just taken over workremotely.io and am working on a game plan for how to use the platform the previous owner created to make this whole process better for us all. Right now it’s a job board for hiring remote developers, designers, and other team members, but I think there’s a lot more to this problem that we can help with. Would love to hear your input.

Cheers,
Craig

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#2

I do not even know where to start…

I tell you this: one of the biggest frustrations is the sheer volume of low paid, low quality candidates. This is probably why TopTal has an appeal – they say they pre-screen their candidates (I call BS). I do not see how workremotely.io can be different from Upwork in this regard.

#3

Yes, something to curate the applicants for a job posting is huge in easing the workflow for employers. Not sure the best way to do this, but if it was solved correctly would be a huge problem tackled. Thanks for the input.

#4

If you’re looking for (long time) freelancers, I hire a lot via upwork but expect to pay plenty ($30 USD or more per hour) for quality. Look for freelancers that usually work long term projects with relatively high hourly fees.

#5

It’s still under very early development, but I’m currently building SkillSift to solve this specific problem of getting:

by requiring candidates to answer a specific question(s) before they can even apply.

To solve your immediate need in your current job postings you could have them do a simple but specific task, like have them upload their resume, cover letter, and maybe a simple task in excel to dropbox and have them share the link with you rather than sending them in an email. Just to see if they can follow directions. Also you could create a form in google sheets with a couple simple questions and just see how many candidates even take the time to answer them.

#6

Yes, @blake i think that’s very smart to build in some sort of tool to have applicants complete at least a very simple task (can even be non-technical) in order to pass the original screening round. Even with a few different silos of jobs (dev, design, marketing, support) you could build out a stock task for each of those job groups that everyone would be expected to be able to complete.

Love the google forms, duct tape, and hope idea to cobble together an initial version of these kinds of tools.

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