Remote working has been around long before COVID-19, meaning that tapping into a global workforce is not just a trend; it’s a source of sustained competitive advantage. In fact, remote working is win-win; not only is it cost effective for organizations, it also creates happier and more productive employees. It’s no surprise then that people want to work from home. Cultivated Culture’s "The State of Remote Work: 2025 Edition" report highlights that 87% of job seekers are prioritizing remote work in their search.
If remote work is here to stay, then organizations need to adapt their hiring practices and operating models to remain competitive and attract and retain top talent. If your organization operates in a global setting, is looking to expand its workforce, or is planning to shift to remote teams for other reasons, this guide will take you through everything you need to know about hiring remote employees.
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Common remote hiring challenges
It’s challenging to hire a remote team. Managers and recruiters need to navigate a host of cultural and legislative hurdles. Here are some of the most pressing issues to consider.
- Application overload: Remote jobs attract a high volume of candidates, making screening difficult. There might also be a wealth of underqualified candidates, so without effective screening mechanisms, recruiters might waste time evaluating candidates who are fundamentally not right for the role.
- Communication and engagement barriers: Remote environments stifle spontaneous interaction and non-verbal communication. This can make it hard to assess interpersonal skills and build rapport.
- Compliance considerations: Employing remote workers in different countries involves navigating disparate labor laws, tax codes, data protection regulations and employee rights. Undertaking this effectively might involve legal counsel or third-party services such as an Employer of Record (EOR).
- Cultural misalignment: Remote hiring means your organization can benefit from global talent, but this brings together various cultures and working styles. If not managed effectively, this can cause friction and disengagement.
- Payroll and benefits administration: Handling compensation and benefits across different countries can be hugely challenging and an administrative burden. Ensuring employees are fairly compensated wherever they work is also an important consideration.
- Time zone disparities: Coordinating hiring processes in different time zones can be challenging and can also lead to complications and hiring delays.
- Tool overload: Managing recruitment processes for remote teams will require a lot of technology, such as scheduling apps, video interviewing systems, and assessments. Tool overload can lead to inconsistent use, with users feeling tired and frustrated.
- Verification issues: It’s harder to verify information when interviewing remote workers. This can include checking credentials, assessing skills, or spotting red flags using intuition, especially without being able to rely on in-person cues and communication.
Best practices for remote hiring
Although remote hiring can be challenging, there are plenty of ways to circumvent these hurdles and come up with processes and output that lead to the creation of exceptionally effective remote teams. Here are some useful and easy-to-implement practices for effective remote hiring.
1. Assess cultural fit
Look beyond experience and qualifications to understand if the candidate aligns with your organization’s culture, values, purpose, and ways of working. Factoring this into hiring decisions is vital when building trust and teamwork across geographically distributed teams.
2. Use consistent screening frameworks
Implementing stringent and clear screening parameters will ensure that all remote candidates are assessed in the same way, to speed up sifting and reduce bias. Screening frameworks can include application forms, work samples, or assessments.
3. Define a clear candidate profile
Taking time to create a clear candidate profile and job description will ensure that your recruitment processes are focused on the right candidates from the get go. Set out expectations in terms of culture fit, experience, qualifications, preferred time zones, communication style, and remote work readiness including availability for asynchronous tasks.
4. Prioritize asynchronous skills
Strong async communicators can manage delays, time zone issues, and take ownership, and generally thrive in a remote workplace. During the recruitment process, look for evidence of these skills, which include written communication ability, self-discipline, self-motivation, and the ability to record or document one’s own tasks.
5. Set communication expectations
Set out standards for how your team communicates, such as frequency of communication, meeting styles, how important decisions are made and when voice memos or videos are preferred, versus emails or chats. Discuss these with candidates to test their comfort levels.
6. Structure recruitment channels
Avoid casting your net too wide when it comes to advertising roles. Instead, set up defined projects and parameters if you’re recruiting through networking websites like LinkedIn. Better yet, use platforms that specialize in remote talent or ones with niche job boards. It's also recommended to use applicant tracking systems (ATS) as this will make your recruitment processes more efficient.
7. Use task-based interviews
Consider replacing conventional interviews with asynchronous methods that simulate the actual work process. Set out clear assessment guidelines with this interview format and ensure every candidate gets the same experience. This approach will give you valuable insight into a candidate’s problem-solving ability, communication skills, reliability, and other skillsets.
How Remote.com can help you solve global hiring challenges
Hiring globally for incredible remote talent can bring major benefits to your organization, but it can come with significant complexity as well, especially if it’s your first time. This can include legislative and compliance hurdles, achieving cultural fit, and ensuring the people who are adept at remote working are aligned to organizational goals. Achieving all these requires the right tools and support, and this is where Remote.com steps in.
Remote.com is a leading global employment platform that streamlines every stage of the global employment journey. Their platform enables organizations to legally hire employees or contractors in over 180 different countries, all without the need to establish local legal entities. It can also handle global, end-to-end payroll, tax, and benefits needs. The platform is bundled into an intuitive interface which supports organizations by streamlining processes for onboarding, absence management, HR management, and invoicing.
By using Remote.com, organizations will benefit from:
- An all-in-one platform: With end-to-end global employee support, you can manage any and all people-related processes through Remote.com.
- Automated internal payroll: Remote.com can pay your employees, wherever they are based, and handle tax and invoicing needs without any hassle.
- Dedicated support: Your organization will benefit from a dedicated customer success manager and global legal experts.
- Localized benefits: Offer benefit schemes tailored to employees based on the country they work in.
- No hidden fees: just one simple monthly price per employee, making your budgeting process super easy.
- Simplified global compliance: Remote.com will manage all statutory and compliance-related needs, without the need to set up local entities.
Jessie de Groot, Head of People and Culture for Weaviate, an AI company, relied on Remote.com to manage global people processes in a company that doubled in size in 2022 alone: “Remote was, and is, perfect for us. We don’t need to have an entity in every country, or even have knowledge of every country’s law to be able to employ people there.”
Sastrify replaced a complex system of two EORs with Remote.com, bringing all people functions into one tool and offering its remote employees the same great experience as its clients.
Frieda Möcker, Head of People & Culture, said, “We started out with two EOR providers: there were a lot of instances where we were super unhappy… With Remote, you really have someone on the other end who is an extension of your team. It's instant magic happening."
Hiring remote talent can give your organization an edge. You can take advantage of this global workforce without any of the hassle by using Remote.com to manage all the important details, leaving you more focused on your people and your business.
Take your virtual team to the next level with Remote.com →
Steps to hire remote employees
Even if you have experience interviewing and hiring people in person, there are certain things you must pay attention to when hiring remotely. Here are 10 tips that can improve your processes and set your organization up for success.
1. Determine the type of remote situation you’re hiring for
Take some time to draft a strategy outlining the remote situation you are hiring for, and the work patterns needed. Will your team be fully remote, working from the comfort of their homes on a permanent basis? Or will they have a flexible work-from-home schedule and have to visit the office a couple of days a week?
Understanding the company’s goals here will help you filter out candidates who don’t fit the job requirements. For example, if employees need to visit the office regularly, even if it’s just to meet clients, then you’ll want to search for talent locally. After all, it will be unreasonable to expect employees who live abroad to fly back and forth every few days, not to mention the inevitable cost and burden on logistics this will cause.
2. Create digital interview and pre-work guides
Meeting someone in person is vastly different from meeting them virtually. This largely relies on online interactions, such as webcams and software, all of which require a robust internet connection to minimize barriers.
Although video calls and phone calls can be a little more personal than emails and instant messages, a lot of your communication with candidates and new hires is bound to be done in writing. Although there’s nothing wrong with this, writing is a medium with more likelihood for miscommunications because of the absence of tone and body language.
It’s for these reasons that it’s imperative to give extra emphasis to the resources you’ll provide jobseekers and new hires with. In an office setting, if a new employee has a question, they’ll simply turn to the person next to them and ask. When someone works from home, however, and their new team members and manager takes on the form of icons and avatars on a screen, it can create a sense of disconnection and isolation, resulting in added confusion and disengagement.
3. Consider potential time zone differences
The beauty of remote employee hiring is that you can access a wider pool of talent, which is particularly useful if there’s a local skills shortage. However, this does present a bit of a problem since applicants will usually operate in disparate time zones.
If you hire someone in the same time zone your company is based in, it will make cross-team collaboration easier, whether it’s arranging a video call, sharing work documents, using your in-house communication software or sending an email that requires an urgent response. Things become more complex, however, when your remote workforce is spread across different time zones around the country, or beyond.
If this isn’t an issue, though, and if employees will be given a more flexible or asynchronous work schedule and won’t need to be online at the same time, then hiring across different time zones will be more of a blessing than a curse. Not only will your company benefit from a global talent pool, but there will also be a steadier output of work.
4. Create a candidate profile
The next step is figuring out the specific characteristics and skills you need your remote employees to possess, and then creating a candidate profile (essentially a list of must-haves and good-to-haves), which will come in handy when writing the job description (more on that next).
Keep in mind that you’re not just looking for someone to do the job; you’re looking for someone who can do the job remotely. This means they need an additional skill set that proves they’ll succeed in a virtual setup.
Some ideal things to look out for include:
- A keen sense of organization
- Asynchronous working ability (being self-motivated, and not too reliant on in-person communication)
- Excellent communication skills
- Good teamwork skills
- Reliable time management skills
- Previous remote work experience
- Tech-savviness
- The ability to work autonomously
5. Write an effective job description
Now that you have a clear picture of what the ideal candidate should look like, it’s time to put pen to paper (or, rather, hand to keyboard) and craft a job description that will get noticed by the right candidates.
A good place to start is to look at job descriptions for similar remote positions at other companies and figure out what differentiates your company from the competition, as well as the language and vibe you want to convey. With this at the back of your mind, you’ll be able to put together a description that not only stands out from the crowd but also integrates the company’s vision, brand messaging, and tone of voice.
The job description should provide a clear outline of the position’s responsibilities and a list of requirements so that applicants know exactly what to expect. You can also incorporate your ideal candidate profile into the job description. It’s a good idea to involve the people who are directly related or closer to the job (like the manager that the new employee will be reporting to) in preparing the job description, as they will be able to provide a more specific description of the position you’re hiring for.
6. Post your ad in all the right places
You naturally want your ad seen by the right people. This is especially important when recruiting for remote jobs as these tend to be hugely popular and you'll likely also get candidates that are not even qualified. The best way to achieve this is by posting your vacancy in all the right places, specifically, job boards dedicated to remote job opportunities.
Some of the best websites to advertise your remote job opening include:
- FlexJobs
- Himalayas
- JustRemote
- Remote OK
- Remotive
- We Work Remotely
- Working Nomads
You could also post your ad on job boards dedicated to remote working in specific niches. This ensures only candidates with the right skills, experience and qualifications apply for the job, saving you valuable time.
Here are a few niche remote job boards to try out:
- Dribbble (for designers)
- ProBlogger Jobs (for content writers and editors)
- Stack Overflow (for developers)
- Toptal (for highly skilled freelancers in development, design, and finance)
7. Be as communicative and transparent as possible
When the human factor is removed from work-related interactions, it can contribute to candidates and new hires feeling a little confused about their next steps or what is expected of them. That’s why frequent and clear communication is essential in making a positive impression during the hiring process and providing a smooth onboarding experience for successful candidates.
Transparency about your hiring timelines and salary ranges for different roles will also help attract the right candidates, ensuring that neither you nor the person on the other end begin the process with mismatched expectations. Communicating clearly and being transparent right from the outset will do wonders for your employer brand, giving you sustained competitive advantage in talent markets.
8. Invite the best candidates to a video interview
With the help of a good ATS software, your applicant pool will be narrowed down to the top candidates, so all that’s left to do is invite the shortlisted candidates to a video interview, whether it’s on Skype, Zoom, or whatever video conferencing software you prefer.
That said, don’t discount in-person interviews entirely. If, at all possible, you should still try to arrange a face-to-face meeting with local candidates.
Meanwhile, make sure you ask candidates the right questions, whether you conduct an in-person or a video interview. Out of the thousands of interview questions you could ask potential hires, there are a few that you may want to add to your repertoire when interviewing remote candidates, including:
- “Describe to me your experiences working remotely?”
- “How do you work alone?”
- “Give me an example of how you stay motivated without an in-person supervisor?”
- “How do you manage your time and stay organized?”
- “What’s the key to making sure a project is successful when working remotely?”
9. Administer a test
You want to make sure you’re hiring the right people, whether it’s for a remote or an on-site position. A bad hire, after all, can be expensive. In fact, a bad hire can be 10x more expensive than the initial cost.
A great way to avoid wasting resources is to ask candidates to complete a test. This will help you assess their ability to not only do the job but also how they’ll handle working remotely, so ultimately you can make a more informed hiring decision.
The test you give potential employees can be done before or after an interview, or even during the interview (just make sure to inform candidates beforehand). For example, if you’re hiring a coder, you could use screen-sharing software to test applicants, giving you the unique opportunity to gauge their coding skills and probe their thought process in real time. After all, current ability is one of the best indicators of future performance.
10. Obtain references
Before making a job offer, you want to be certain that candidates tick all the right boxes, beyond an impressive résumé and a successful interview. A gleaming testimonial from managers, colleagues, and even clients vouching for the candidate’s skills and work ethic can go a long way when you’re tasked with making a hiring decision.
That said, don’t solely rely on written references. Although they do offer insights into a candidate’s suitability for the role and fitness within the company’s culture, as well as act as a written record, they’re usually generic and quite easy for jobseekers to fabricate.
As such, always make it a point to personally call the references that candidates provide you; it’s one thing to read about how fantastic a candidate is, and quite another to actually hear it. When checking references, be sure to ask remote work-specific questions, as this will help you determine how well a candidate will perform on the job. If the candidate doesn’t have any remote experience, though, it’s a good idea to probe their soft skills, like communication and collaboration, which are essential for any remote job.
Obtaining references is still one of the best and most reliable ways to verify a candidate’s ability. Keep in mind that the legislative ability for past employers to give references might vary from country to country.
Ready to hire?
Hiring remote employees is a wonderful way for a globally-operating business to tap into large talent markets with unlimited potential. Yes, there are pitfalls and risks, but these can be mitigated if you adopt a clear and consistent strategy. Successful recruitment of remote employees begins with a well-planned talent strategy and by adapting recruitment practices to attract remote workers. Screen them effectively and ensure they are assessed according to the needs of the work environment.
Tapping into global expertise doesn't have to be hindered by cultural and legislative considerations. An employer of record is a worthwhile investment to ensure remote employees are managed fairly and in line with local laws.
If you’re looking for end-to-end EOR support, from hiring and onboarding remote workers to managing and developing them, Remote.com is a one-stop shop to ensuring your remote workforce is engaged, productive, and unified.
This article is a partial update of an earlier version originally published in 2020, and contains contributions by Chris Leitch & Electra Michaelidou.