How To Hire Remote Workers That Get The Job Done

We live in the day and age of the digital nomad. Remote workers, telecommuting, and virtual jobs are rapidly growing in popularity for good reasons. Remote workers are gaining a reputation for being more productive, happier, and easier to work with. Plus, remote workers can save your company money and help your office be eco-friendly. Are you ready to hire remote workers to your team?

From the HR perspective, hiring remote workers can be scary – especially if you’ve never hired one before. How are you going to manage remote workers? Who’s going to oversee their work? Are you really going to hire someone who works from home in their pajamas or chooses to work from a laptop at a beachfront cantina? This sounds absurd, yet it’s the direction that the working world is heading.

Hiring remote workers is new territory for a lot of HR pros. As long as your workers have wi-fi, a lap top, and a smartphone they can work from just about anywhere in the world. This opens up huge potential for you to find the perfect employees.

5 Reasons Why You Should Let Employees Telecommute

One of the key concepts that’s important to grasp is that it doesn’t matter how much time an employee spends on the job, it matters how productive they are. As long as an employee gets the job done in the necessary time frame they deserve a double thumbs up from you. Yes, this may mean the death of the 9 to 5, but it means that the people you hire have the work life balance that they desire and that’s important.

If you plan to hire remote workers, here are a few things to think about:

• Remote Work Requires The Right Type Of Person – Not everyone can be a remote worker. You need to hire someone who is a motivated and driven self starter. They must be able to work independently and be receptive to feedback. Communication must come naturally and they must not require any hand holding. Look for the right traits in your employees.
• Know What You Want – When you hire remote workers, you need to know what you want that person to be able to do before you hire them. It needs to be clearly defined from the get go.
• Look In The Right Places – Remote workers are typically found online. Advertise job listings for remote workers on blogs, freelance websites, online job boards, or company career sites. These workers most likely won’t find a job listing in the local paper or on Craigslist. Here are some of the best places to post your job openings.
• Know The Benefits of Contract Workers – Most remote workers will be freelance contract workers and not employees. There are some big differences between the two types of workers. Learn more here.
• Understand The Hiring Process For Remote Workers – Hiring remote workers is a bit different than hiring office workers. The key is to see if the remote worker can handle the job and see if they can do it remotely. Ask the right questions in the job interview, but also test their skills and productivity during the hiring process to see if they can do the work, follow instructions, and handle feedback. Always see if a new hire has previous remote work experience too.

Hiring remote workers isn’t something to be scared of. Embrace it and learn how to hire remote teams that get the job done. It’s the way of the future.