Remote + Relocation: The Present of Work
Since 2015, our mission at VanHack has been to create a borderless world for tech talent.
Well, that clearly isn’t possible these days with so many countries closing their borders due to COVID-19.
We’ve spent the last few weeks listening to the market in order to understand the unique situation. The obvious shift is that remote work has been thrust upon many companies and they are looking for ways to adjust.
However, we believe that it’s not just remote work, but the combination of remote + relocation that will allow companies to win the battle for top tech talent and survive these uncertain times.
VanHack has been practicing this combination as a way to build our own product for the last 5 years and we’d like to share our formula with you below.
This combination allows you to get the best of both worlds.
By hiring remote to start, you’re able to widen your scope to the great tech talent quickly and at a competitive rate. You’re also able to do a trial with these candidates for a few months and de-risk the hire before going ahead and relocating them to your city.
By offering relocation, you’re building in retention into the hire since the candidate’s work permit is tied to your company. Of course this isn’t something to take advantage of, but the first 50 relocation processes we’ve conducted have an average of 2.8 years of employment.
Candidates are grateful and put in that extra effort to make a great first impression in their new market.
Now, let’s go over our top tips for Remote Hiring and Onboarding in order to help you be successful in your process.
Hiring Remote – it’s different, but not really
“Hiring remote” can sound complicated and confusing if you’ve never done it before. However, it’s not all that different if you just focus on the fact that all hiring is done to solve a single issue – you have a position open, and you’re looking for the very best talent that you can find to fill it.
Naturally, there are some jobs that cannot be done remotely, but this doesn’t really apply to the vast majority of knowledge worker jobs.
The abundance of cheap, high-speed internet has brought the world together in ways that go well beyond the latest memes. In fact, this blog post was written by two authors, collaborating in real-time from halfway across the world!
So what are the key factors that have to keep in mind when you decide to try hiring a remote employee? Let’s list them out, and then dig into the details on each one:
- Don’t reduce your hiring standards – but do remove unnecessary obstacles in your hiring process
- Focus on competence – but make allowances for cultural differences and language skills
- Remember that a remote employee is as much an employee as anyone who gathers around the water-cooler (or cappuccino machine)
Maintaining Hiring Standards while reducing obstacles
Hiring someone from half-way across the world does not mean that you need to relax the standards you’ve established in your company. You should absolutely demand the same level of professionalism and competence as you would from any local employee.
However, your hiring process needs to make allowances for the fact that you can’t simply meet your short-listed candidates for a quick cup of coffee.
Time zones: You need to be sensitive to time-zones; it’s not reasonable to expect a developer to zip through a fizz-buzz test when it’s 4 AM in their hometown.
Your interviewees may need to be flexible with their schedules and agree to meet at a time that’s best for the candidate.
After all, you want the candidate to be at their absolute best – your interviewers are already working at your company and you know exactly how good they are.
Communication Tool/Platform: Your choice of platform also makes a difference. Making international calls can be prohibitively expensive in many countries across the world, so you should think about how you want a candidate to call you.
We’ve found that online platforms such as Skype or Google Meet are usually the best – but do make sure you test it beforehand, and allow the candidate to test it as well.
There’s nothing worse that logging on right on time and then finding that you need to spend 12 minutes downloading a Chrome extension to be able to talk to the hiring manager. Remember that internet download speeds can vary wildly, and what took you 60 seconds to set up may take tens of minutes for the other person.
This situation can easily be avoided by providing clear instructions along with links to any extensions/executables in your scheduling email, and giving the candidate a way to contact your organization for help in case they can’t get something to work. You can also ask them to make sure they have everything set up 24-hours before the actual interview.
Eliminate/Reduce “Gotcha!” Questions: Questions that are designed to put the candidate in an impossible or tricky situation so that you can assess a behavioral trait are typically not very useful for assessing remote workers.
Add to this the possibility of misunderstanding the question and your inability to assess body-language on a small screen. It’s best to minimize such questions and only ask the ones that may reveal a behavioural trait that is critical to the job. If you really dig into it, you’ll probably find that 95% of such questions get tossed out.
In summary, you should critically examine your hiring processes and remove any factors that have no bearing on a remote candidate’s ability to perform at the level that you expect (and should demand).
Focus on Competence while allowing for cultural differences
When we work with companies who’ve never hired a remote employee before, we start by telling them to take a day or two (or three) and separating the essential non-negotiable functional tasks of the job you’re hiring for from the not-so-essential nice-to-haves.
If you don’t go through this process, you’re almost certain to run into situations where the lack of a shared cultural background will cause you to incorrectly question the candidate’s competence for the role. And this works both ways – an otherwise qualified candidate may also question your company’s readiness to work with someone from a different culture.
- Don’t expect the candidate to know about cultural touchpoints that are relevant in your country. TV shows, sports, movies, music, literature, celebrities, etc. Talking about “Sunday’s big game”, for example, may have no meaning to someone sitting 10,000 miles (or kilometers) away.
- Realize that communication styles vary a lot across the world. Some cultures are more deferential than others, and there are places where it is considered rude to ask a direct question, or to interrupt a speaker. Spending an hour or so familiarizing yourself with that country’s general communication style will pay dividends when you interview someone for the first time.
- Focus on the must-haves. If you have a team culture that expects direct and immediate responses to any emails (and this is critical to the functioning of your team), you should absolutely bring it up.
Or, perhaps you expect code to be copiously commented – share examples of how you do it, and ask the candidate to write similar comments during the interview.
If you are able to separate out the essential aspects of the job, you will be well on your way to hiring a great new team-mate.
And hey, once they join and are a valued member of the team, your company will learn something about their culture, and they’ll learn about yours.
A Remote Employee is an employee first and remote last
This may sound like a tautology, but it’s really not. If your company hasn’t already established expectations for remote team-mates, you can easily slip into the all-too-human condition of making distant people feel…well…distant.
Before hiring someone remote (or very shortly after), you need to ensure that you have established processes and communication channels that make your remote employees feel connected to the rest of the company.
We’re about to publish VanHack’s Definitive Guide to Remote On-boarding soon, but simply thinking about how you can include remote employees in day-to-day office culture is a great start. If you want to be notified when that goes live, subscribe to our newsletter.
Contracts and Payments
Once you’ve made the hire you can use THIS TEMPLATE contract to create a temporary consulting agreement between you and the candidate.
For payments, we recommend one of the following providers:
Transferwise, Paypal, Payoneer, World Remit.
Conclusion
At VanHack, we believe that “code has no accent”. There’s great talent everywhere in the world, and we have been working to make that talent even more accessible.
If you would like to browse our talent pool of over 120,000 talented developers, click here.
And if you need more information on how you can hire the best remote talent, we’d love to help you out. Just click here and we’ll be in touch very soon!