• Hiring For Your Remote Team

Remote companies have an outsized advantage that’s rarely mentioned: hiring from around the world gives your team a range of global experiences, perspectives, and expertise. This is especially valuable if you’re building a product or service for an international user base.

A team that’s reflective of your customers is only the start of the benefits of hiring remotely:

• Exceptional Talent: Expanding your hiring pool from “local” to “global” gives you access to the most talented people in the world.
• Increased Retention: Remote work opportunities remote work provide team members with flexibility that’s correlated with higher job satisfaction and retention.
• Reduced Costs: Remote teams can opt out of expensive city hubs like San Francisco and New York and decrease operational costs.

However, hiring the best across borders isn’t without its challenges. Additionally, once you’ve made a great hire, proper onboarding is crucial for keeping them. This guide will distill down the lessons we’ve learned in growing our team at Doist to 69 people across 25 countries and 52 cities. We’ve also included advice from remote teams like Help Scout, Buffer, Automattic, and WeWorkRemotely on how they’ve scaled their teams.

Talent exists in every corner of the world; the challenging part is attracting individuals with these special skills to your company and providing them with the tools and structure to thrive. Learning the best practices for hiring remote team members will unlock the potential of your team and help you move towards your company’s mission.

Hiring For Your Remote Team

Hiring remotely presents a handful of challenges:

• Remote roles often attract hundreds of even thousands of candidates, making screening a challenge.
• Remote work requires a high degree of independence, making it essential to find individuals who display qualities like autonomy and self-motivation.
• With the importance of asynchronous communication on remote teams, it’s necessary to hire above-average communicators.

We’ll cover how to address these challenges and build a remote team with people from around the world.

One of the biggest hiring mistakes is hiring too quickly. Oversaturating your team with new hires can be overwhelming for everyone involved. In the case of remote work, where onboarding can be particularly involved, having too many individuals onboarded at once is far from ideal.

Before making hiring decisions, identify the strengths and weaknesses of your existing team and ensure that everyone is working in their personal “zone of genius”. When you’ve done this, it’s simpler to grow your team and hire people who can address your weaknesses and level up your team.

Having processes on a remote team is essential. However, process is not a constant – it can break down and necessitate iteration or rethinking. This can especially be the case if a team grows too quickly and processes that worked with 13 people break down once you hit 30 people.

We built Doist on the idea of sustainable growth. If we’ve hired a lot of people recently, we’ll do a temporary hiring freeze in order to integrate them and adequately adjust our processes.