Hiring & Recruiting

How to hire the right people and feel good about it

Key Takeaways for Hiring & Recruiting

When recruiting across time-zones, consider the impacts of your team’s availability.

Build a well-defined recruiting process with a point person on your team for each candidate. Use mock interviews to train your team for remote recruiting

Transparently establish company values you’re looking for as you assess candidates for culture fit

Compensation can differ across geographies - use calculators from GilLab and ERI so you have a consistent formula!

Hiring Globally Can be a Double-Edged Sword

While recruiting across global locations can be outsourced or assisted, the impact on how your team works together and the way products are delivered is something that is yours alone to bear.

In order to work best as a distributed team, you will need to be comfortable with asynchronous communication. Be honest with yourself about how asynchronous you’re willing to be. Is a three-hour lag in response OK? What about twelve-hours?

Another important consideration is thinking through how a global team can impact your product shipping goals. One one-hand, asynchronous communication handled improperly can be a major blocker (it’s expensive to wait hours for a response from collaborating colleagues); on the other hand, if managed properly, you could activate your team to be working seamlessly over a 24 hour period without risk of burnout. The key is building a hand-off process, which we’ll touch on in the

Managing Your Team⁠

section.

A Defined Process is Essential

A purposeful recruiting & interview process is essential for your company when you are in-office; the same is true — and amplified — when building your distributed team. It’s tougher to course-correct on hiring when working remotely, so it’s critical to measure twice and cut once.

First, establish who will be the point person for engaging a particular candidate. Think of this person as the candidate’s sherpa throughout the process - they are essential in helping to tease out nuances, prepare the candidate each step of the way, and ultimately play a major role (if not leading) the closing process.

Anticipate and solve for potential choke-points, such as scheduling across time-zones, or how you’ll handle handing off candidates from one colleague to the next. Will you have separate video chats? Or is there a specific video chat account dedicated to interviews? The best way to do this is to put someone on your team through a mock process. Consider all the psychological subtleties of the candidate experience, and remember ALWAYS BE SELLING.

🧠 Pro tip: Don’t schedule day-long interviews because you think you need to. Your process should be designed to get you the information you need in order to make the right (informed) decision. Try to keep your processes tight and don’t waste time!

Transparency wins the day

Have you thought about "brand” in the context of a recruiting process? Have you considered how you’re communicating those values to would-be employees via all channels? If not, now is the time to outline it, communicate it, and own it.

You won’t be able to meet a candidate in person to hire them so the heuristics you rely on to build trust need to be re-calibrated. Your values should guide you and your interviewing team here, and should be expressed openly in order for candidates to get a genuine sense of who you are and what you stand for. Ensure that candidates have seen this information prior to your interview and try to include questions that will allow you to assess whether or not a candidate will espouse those values with you.

Be clear and consistent on your compensation

Growing a distributed team may be an opportunity to reduce your cash burn — be methodical in how you approach this.

Gitlab, the world’s largest fully-distributed company, has

a handy calculator⁠

that they use for adjusting salaries based on geography. Additionally, the

Economic Research Institute⁠

can help you determine the median income for given positions in different places. No matter what tool you use, be consistent and communicate it. Employees will take note of the way that cost of living impacts each other and candidates should be clear about how they will be impacted before they sign-on with your team.

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🧐 Consider: even though your compensation benchmarks tend to determine the type of candidates you attract, value and vision for what you’re trying to accomplish still play a HUGE factor in the decision making process. Don’t by myopic on comp and always remember - the best candidates will join you for your values & vision, not for the immediate payday.

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