WLP236 Hiring Remotely
In today’s show we explore the art of hiring online colleagues, and bring you a couple of great interviews to dig into this in depth - from both the candidate and the recruiter perspective.
04.37 Jo Palmer, Pointer Remote ROLES
Jo Palmer
Pilar talked to Jo Palmer from Pointer Remote Roles back in February, before the world of work changed completely - and we needed to advocate for remote in a way that perhaps we might now take for granted, allowing us to evolve the conversation to higher levels.
Jo is based in a small town in New South Wales, and started Pointer Remote Roles to support her network of professionally skilled friends who had moved inland from the Australian coast to find relevant roles which used their talents and experience effectively.
She balances the two sides of her candidate/hirer marketplace carefully, starting with a Facebook group, which exploded and grew - to now encompass a range of creative and professional roles. Many businesses return with repeated and different roles, once they’ve learned the benefits of remote work, and they’re looking to expand their hiring base with employers outside of Australia soon.
But initially Jo pins down business clients quite specifically, to ensure they’re ready for remote team members - technologically, culturally and logistically - to whom they can provide a lot of support. A lot can be explored by test-driving remote working with existing team members, to identify challenges from practicalities to trust.
Jo suggests that if you’re honest with yourself about how and why you trust about your current employees, how you know that they’re working, then you’ll know what to create to supervise and support remote roles - because it probably isn’t related to physically observing them working.
“Set people up to win, rather than assuming they’ll fail because you don’t trust them.”
You will be unsurprised to hear that Jo walks the talk and trusts her team, also safeguarding their boundaries by being clear about not working at the weekend for example, and ensuring they have the technical and security tools to do their jobs effectively. She takes seriously the duty of care that employers have for emotional wellbeing, and the way this applies just as much to remote as on-site colleagues - and has particular implications for hybrid teams and adopting a remote-first mentality.
She finally reminds us that good businesses are always changing, learning, and growing - and embracing remote is just one aspect of that continuous process (which your competitor is also pursuing).
Find out more over at Jo’s website Pointer Remote Roles.
To explore the recruitment process itself, we talk to:
34.30 Morgan Legge, Convert.COM
Morgan Legge
Morgan Legge works at Convert.com (global and fully distributed), where they operate under the principles of Holacracy (find out more about that from ep146 when Morgan first joined us),
So while this is quite an old interview, we can all learn a lot from the way that Convert.com recruit for new roles.
They start the hiring process by kicking off with an open-ended video submission, inviting people to teach and tell them something, and an audio about something they messed up and learned from. These give them information about the applicant’s mindset, self-management, and how they think. Can they analyse their strengths and weaknesses, show humility, demonstrate responsibility? This all helps them identify who might fit into their team, especially within the Holacracy framework.
They also require a third written component, as that’s an essential component of how they communicate, and together that embraces the full spectrum of asynchronous conversations which go on within the organisation.
Assuming they pass this stage, later phases of the recruitment process dig in to role-based competencies, but not until they’ve established those crucial elements of communication fit. It’s a complex process, but they proceed through it steadily so as not to make it a painfully lengthy one, and it becomes really easy for the wrong people to self-select out if they don’t wish to engage with the full process. They also take deliberate steps to avoid conscious and unconscious bias in their recruitment.
If you’re looking at hiring and managing remote workers, don’t forget to check out our recently concluded series in collaboration with ShieldGEO about connection and disconnection in remote teams - here’s the round-up episode (235) which also contains links to each of the individual shows.
And don’t forget to check out all the different ways that Virtual Not Distant can help you, with every aspect of remote team leadership and practice.
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