5 Most Common Mistakes When Hiring Remote Employees and How to Avoid Them
Publié le 25 April 2022
Find the right employees to move your business forward by knowing the 5 most common mistakes when hiring remote employees and how to avoid them.
Hiring remote employees has become common business practice in many industries since the COVID-19 pandemic changed our lives.
This new approach to work has perhaps been THE lasting impact of the pandemic, with both hiring practices and how candidates approach job searches changing as a result. Whether this is permanent remains to be seen. The fact is though, many businesses must now adapt to remote working to some degree or risk falling behind their competitors.
Hiring remote employees is still a tricky process largely in its infancy. If you’re a business that’s primarily recruited the old-fashioned way, the idea of interviewing your next manager via video chat can feel daunting. Today, we’ll look at the 5 most common mistakes companies make when hiring remote employees and how to avoid them.
The current state of remote working
The battle lines in the remote working debate have been well established.
On one side you have a division of workers who believe in the mental health, work balance, and productivity benefits of remote working. On the other side, the more traditional view that remote working can’t replicate the results traditional office environments can, where leadership promotes productivity.
To understand the current state of play around remote work, let’s look at what are considered some of the main advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
- Lack of office-based costs: Without the overhead of long-term, expensive contracts for offices, machinery, and supplies, businesses can invest elsewhere.
- Improved work-life balance: The lack of a commute doesn’t just mean an extra hour in bed in the morning, but the possibility of better exercise routines, diets, and personal relationships.
- Flexibility in hiring: With no office to build the business around, companies can go shopping in high-quality national and international markets for their next hires.
Disadvantages:
- Need for digital tool investment: While businesses may be saving on office costs, the overhead of new digital tools can become significant. From communication software subscriptions to learning the difference between SaaS vs PaaS tools, remote working is a significant financial and time investment for companies not typically tech-savvy
- Cyber security risks: Working from home, coffee shops, and hotdesking offices on insecure connections puts business data at risk, especially when employees aren’t clued in on cybersecurity trends
- Lack of company culture: It’s hard to build relationships between employees when they never meet in real life. For businesses with historically great company cultures and collaborative workforces, this can be difficult to stomach
By and large, remote and hybrid working arrangements are hugely popular with the younger workforce who are less accepting of stressful office politics, long commutes, and paying large monthly rents and mortgages to live in more employable locations. Balancing this with smart hires is the key to surviving in this new, remote work culture.
5 Most Common Mistakes When Hiring Remote Employees and How to Avoid Them
The sudden jump to full-scale remote working caught a lot of businesses off-guard, so it’s easy to see why some may still be operating with less-than-perfect remote working policies and hiring systems.
Nobody ever said that remote and hybrid working was easy, but there are plenty of things you can do to streamline your efforts to fill important roles. Let’s take a look at the 5 most common mistakes made when hiring remote employees and how to avoid them.
1. A lack of clear expectations for new starters
Clear expectations make any role easier, but in remote working scenarios where managers and experienced colleagues aren’t as accessible, they become crucial.
Clear expectations help new employees acclimatize to a role. It takes time to learn about a business, its structure, important goals and key stakeholders. This can’t be done between ad hoc requests and grueling workloads.
This is where an induction plan and clear updates through your preferred business communication tool become essential. Resist the urge to give new starts too much to do, particularly throughout their probation. Keep expectations simple, allowing them to grow into the role at their own pace.
Outline KPIs in documents that can be easily accessed by anyone in the business. Make managers available at certain times to answer questions. Success with remote hires is all about preparation and doing your best to make your remote environment comfortable, inviting, and productive.
2. Mistaking freelancers for remote workers
While freelancers are a valuable asset for many businesses, they are not the same as remote employees.
Freelancers are skilled professionals that help meet tight deadlines and provide a unique viewpoint. They are not full-time employees. Thinking you can switch to a model of all freelancers working from home will leave you struggling to meet targets and keep projects profitable. Instead, find up-and-coming talent that can be nurtured and developed throughout this new development in the business.
A similar mistake is downsizing and believing your remote team can make up for the losses. Working remotely should never be an excuse to push overtime or increase workloads on staff. Implementing and developing a positive work-life balance comes from the top down.
3. Providing inefficient training and guidance
A successful remote working team is built on a culture of communication, training, and reporting. If teams aren’t fully up to date on the latest skills and sharing their current workloads as they would in a physical office setting, it’s impossible to replicate the same results.
When hiring remotely, don’t just consider the candidate’s current skill set, but how they’d be able to apply them in a remote setting. Are they comfortable talking through a webcam? Do they lack daily reporting skills? Employees should be encouraged to constantly learn new skills, such as self-service reporting and self performance review, and to refine their existing abilities to improve the remote workflow process.
While full-scale employee monitoring is not advised, it is important new hires are in constant communication with strong managers and team leaders. This will highlight pain points and ensure morale doesn’t drop. It’s easy for remote employees to feel abandoned, ineffective, and underskilled at first, so ensure training and guidance are always available.
4. Not providing the right equipment
Without the tools to do the job, how can anyone be a success in their role, remote or not?
Of course, most people in hiring positions think they know exactly what new starters need when they come into a role. But it’s easy to forget about some of the minor extras you take for granted.
Yes, everyone knows a laptop, keyboard, and mouse are necessary. But what about better webcam lighting for client managers? Could professional recording equipment improve the quality of training seminars (and make them a monetizable product)? What about ergonomic chairs and desks which may not have been common in home offices pre-pandemic?
That’s without considering software that might streamline their acclimatization to the job. Time-tracking tools can help new hires manage their own productivity, while in-built breaks can help avoid employee burnout. That may sound like micromanagement of your employees, but it’s the kind of consideration that can make them immediately feel more comfortable in your remote working environment.
5. Not being really ready to go fully remote
If you’re struggling to employ the right remote employees it might not be a case of bad requirement techniques, but the fact your business simply isn’t suited to remote working.
Many businesses simply lack the technical knowledge and essentials to go fully remote. There are some stuffy enterprises out there that don’t even know how to manage a Twitter page or how to make a custom email domain. Walk before you run, experiment with remote working (perhaps with a partially remote staff) and test how well your team acclimatizes to it.
Exclusively hiring remote workers can be a great way to expand your business and reach new exciting candidates, but it can also limit your ability to grow naturally as a business. For some enterprises, a traditional structure harboring all internal knowledge is beneficial.
How to attract remote employees
With the 5 most common mistakes made when hiring remote employees and how to avoid them in mind, let’s take a look at some ways businesses can attract the top remote candidates:
- Improve online branding: Use intelligent promotion of your company values, vision, and ethical standards (along with an enthusiasm towards remote working) to sell your workplace as an option for candidates from across the world.
- Make remote interviews fun: Combine standard interview questions and unexpected questions with accessible, exciting, and enlightening tasks and processes that treat candidates like the experienced professionals they are during the job interview.
- Fair employment packages: Good pay, additional utilities coverage, and health benefits that help to make up for a lack of work environment can convince someone to go with a remote business over a different alternative.
- Try to retain some level of workplace culture: Virtual socials, coffee breaks, and company getaways help to build the digital office morale needed to make your workplace enticing and efficient.
Conclusion
Conducting remote interviews is hard enough, making sure you get the right staff out of those interviews? That’s another issue.
By understanding the 5 most common mistakes when hiring remote employees and how to avoid them you’ll ensure the hires you do make are the right choices who can quickly grow into the job and successfully build your new remote work culture.
