Hiring remote employees is a great way to acquire talent and skills that are scarce in your own location. The hiring of remote employees not only benefits an organisation but also benefits the employees by allowing them to do their jobs without relocating to a new location.

But this is not that simple as it seems to be. Attracting and hiring remote employees with good skills and efficiency is a challenging task to perform. Let’s review some tips and suggestions that will help you attract and hire good talent for your organisation.

Attracting Remote Employees

 

When you are searching for employees for your organisation at a different location, you need to attract people to apply for job positions in your company. Let’s list out some ideas which will help you do this.

• • Build Strong Online Branding
  • Give Description of your Work Culture
  • Share Employee Experiences
  • Present Company Vision & Values
  • Do Effective Visual Representation

 

Let us review how you can attract more remote employees through these tips:

1. Build Strong Online Branding

 

The employees staying around your location may know about your company, but in order to attract remote employees, you need to build your brand online. For this, you should work more on the digital presence of your company.

For this purpose, you should create informative digital web pages and social media accounts. You should portray yourself to be a trustworthy and employee-friendly organisation so that people feel good to work with you.

2. Give Description of your Work Culture

 

You should describe your work culture and explain to the potential candidates what your work schedules are. Remote employees usually work as per their own schedules but you should inform them clearly of the level of flexibility you maintain in your organisation.

3. Share Employee Experiences

 

When people think to start working with a company, they try to know the experiences of the employees already working there. The same is the case with remote employees. In fact, remote employees are keener to know about the organisation they want to work with.

The good experiences of the employees already working for your organisation helps greatly to boost your number of applicants. You can ask your existing remote employees to share their experiences by sharing videos and testimonials etc. through your websites and social networking pages.

4. Present Company Vision & Values

 

Present your company’s vision and values in an effective way so that the potential candidates can know about it. Explain to them clearly on your websites how your vision and values are not only beneficial to you, but to all your employees and the society as well.

5. Do Effective Visual Representation

 

Visual representation has a great impact on those who are planning to be remotely associated with a good company. Whenever you have the company’s all-hands meetings or events, you can capture some good visuals in the form of photographs and videos.

You can put them on your official websites and social media pages. This acts as a very good method to attract remote employees across different locations.

Advertise your Remote jobs through different channels

 

Advertisement is an important means to let people know about your organisation and the fact that you are looking for skilled remote employees. For this purpose, you can use job portals and social networks.

There are many job boards serving this purpose for many organisations at different levels. If you want to hire people from a specific location, you should use the local job boards of that location. Whereas if you want to increase your horizon, you can also go for national and international job boards.

Hiring Remote Employees

 

For hiring remote employees, you can also take interviews remotely. Let’s list out some ways for this.

• Interviewing through Synchronous Means 
• Interviewing through Asynchronous Means
• Evaluating Candidates through Online tools
• Asking for and using referrals
• Seeking Information Using Online Surveys

Let’s review how you can do this through these ways:

1. Interviewing through Synchronous Means

 

You can interview your employees through synchronous means like chatting, audio and video conference calls. These are effective means to facilitate live interaction with your candidates at a distant location.

2. Interviewing through Asynchronous Means

 

You can also use asynchronous means like audio and video recordings which you can view or listen afterwards. You can provide some basic questions to the candidates like “Tell us something about yourself” and ask them to send video recordings.

The biggest advantage of asynchronous means is that the candidates can record the videos without disturbing their schedules and you can take your own time to watch those videos and evaluate the candidates.

3. Evaluating Candidates through Online Tools

 

You can also take preliminary tests to check the suitability of the candidates for a job with the help of online tools. When you are hiring and recruiting remote employees for a job position in your company, these pre-employment assessments can be administered.

With the help of these tools, you can learn more about your candidates’ personalities, strengths and weaknesses and their suitability for the job.

4. Asking for and Using Referrals

 

You can also ask your existing employees to refer their friends for a vacant job position. You can use referrals provided by them to find appropriate persons for a job. Offering your existing employees incentives for this purpose like a referral bonus will also help.

5. Seeking Information using Online Surveys

 

An online survey is a great way to seek information about deserving candidates across the globe. There is Online Survey Software available nowadays that helps you to create beautiful customized surveys and send globally through emails, SMS or embed in your website.

You can create surveys through these software and survey apps and send them surveys to various job seekers and qualified professionals at different locations to know if they are interested to work remotely.

Retaining Remote Employees

 

Merely hiring remote employees is not enough to run an organisation smoothly. Retaining efficient employees is equally important for a company for its smooth running operations. Let’s list out some tips to retain good remote employees.

• Create Attractive Compensation Packages
• Design Fair Packages
• Offer Other Useful Benefits
• Also, Focus on Professional Development
• Seeking NPS and Feedback from Employees

Let’s explain how you can work on these tips to facilitate the retention of remote employees:

1. Creating Attractive Compensation Packages

 

Compensation packages are the basic reason for any employee to work with you. When you are hiring a remote employee, a good salary is a preliminary requirement but a compensation package has a broader horizon.

You should create attractive compensation packages which along with a good salary, includes other incentives as well as stock options, mobile plans, etc. These incentives motivate people to stay associated with you for a longer period of time.

2. Design Fair Packages

 

Remote employees are hired from different locations which may vary from a different city, state or even a different country. While designing a package, you should consider the fact that different locations have a different cost of living, and design the compensation package accordingly.

Does that mean you give a much higher salary for the same work for a person working from a location having a higher cost of living? Certainly not! You just need to consider the cost of living as one aspect and create a balance with all the other aspects as well as the qualification, knowledge, and experience of the employees.

3. Offer Other Useful Benefits

 

Everybody loves extras. And when it’s about an organisation giving useful additional benefits, it has a very good impact on the employees. You should provide your remote employees with some useful benefits like health and life insurance or a vacation plan.

You can also provide free beneficial membership at different outlets like a food outlet, an apparel store or a retail store through which they can get good discounts. These extras add to the list of advantages to a remote employee for being associated with you and help in their retention.

4. Also Focus on Professional Development

 

Everybody wants to grow more and develop professionally. People do change jobs for professional development. If you facilitate this to your remote employees, it will have a very good impact.

You can provide them with free online training so that they can learn more things and achieve a good position in your company. This will benefit not only the remote employees but also your organisation as you will be having more skilled employees to work for your company.

5. Seeking NPS and Satisfaction Feedback from Employees

 

Employee Feedback is an effective way to know how employees feel working with you. Taking employee feedback from time to time will not only let you measure Employee Satisfaction but also make them feel valued.

With the help of good Employee Feedback Software, you can create effective surveys easily and send them to your employees to capture their feedback. With the help of an employee survey software, you can also measure metrics like Employee Satisfaction and Employee Net Promoter Score(eNPS).

This enables you to get a clear picture of how your remote employees feel being associated with you. After getting the feedback, you consider their suggestions and try to work on them. This will definitely lead to reduced employee turnover and better employee retention.

In the end, I would suggest that the remote employees are also the same as your office-based employees and they deserve the same respect and adequate resources to bring their productivity to the next level and be successful. So, build a culture that provides all that to all employees whether they are in your office or overseas.