Tips for Hiring Remote Employees | Best Practices for Hiring remote employees

All right, so if you've decided that you're going to hire remote employees, that's awesome. It opens up a whole new talent pool for you to grow your small business. Now the challenge is that talent pool can be very deep. For example, we recently posted a payroll specialist role both remote and in town. We got over 200 applicants for the remote posting and only 10 applicants for the in-town posting. So that results in a lot more work trying to filter through the applicants and identify who a great fit is, all while we're still trying to proactively recruit. This video, I'm going to walk you through some of the best practices you can use to identify top talent in a remote environment and some ways that you can even recruit proactively to make sure that you find the best person for your team. Let's go ahead and dive in. So in this episode, I'm going to share some of the ways that you can hire, find remote teammates. It's going to include how you define what you're looking for, where to find the people, how to actively recruit them instead of just posting and waiting for responses, and how to be efficient with all of this. As a small business owner, it can be very cumbersome to hire, but it's one of our most important jobs. And so I'm going to take the approach, as I am a small business owner, of how to be efficient, effective with this process, what to delegate, what to handle yourself, and how to streamline it so that going forward you can wash, rinse, and repeat, and identify top talent all around the country to help you grow your small business. So we're going to discuss in this episode everything leading up to interviews. This is part of a multi-part series where we're talking about— in the last episode we talked about should you hire remote workers. And obviously if you're watching this, you've already identified that hiring remote people is probably the right path for you. But now going forward, we're going to talk about that. How do I find the right teammates for my company? And then moving forward, we'll look into some of those things of improving your interview process, improving your onboarding process, how to engage, retain, and grow these people once they join your team in a remote environment. And this is an ever-evolving process for us and for our clients. As an HR services company, obviously we help consult with a lot of companies on how to improve their remote and in-person hiring process, and we've been doing it for decades. But in today's episode, I'm going to share more about you recruiting remote teammates right now for your small business. So I think the first thing when we talk about the sourcing phase, one of the biggest mistakes I see small business owners make is they're just recruiting to a job description. So it's not very clear on what the ideal candidate looks for, looks like. Same challenge we all have in marketing. Where we don't have clear buyer personas, we're marketing to a very broad audience, and then it makes it hard for our potential, uh, possible clients to identify themselves into one of the buckets as a possible, uh, util— utilizer of our solutions. In the employment scenario, it's the same thing. If you don't have a clearly defined employee persona, it's gonna make it harder to recruit. It's gonna make it harder to identify the right person when they come along. But more importantly, you're gonna vacillate between multiple candidates and, and not really understand who's best if you don't have that already drawn up diagram of, hey, what do we need this person to do? What do we need their background, their skills, their behaviors to be like? So when we're creating an employee persona, first and foremost, if you search employee persona, uh, on our page or on YouTube, you'll find, uh, a video where we break down creating an employee persona. Highly recommend going through it. The whole process can be done in 30 to 60 minutes. It will save you a ton of time in the recruiting process. An employee persona should include the background of the individual. What type of experience does the ideal candidate have? What industries have they worked in? Maybe even some of the competitors that you're trying to poach talent from. What characteristics do they have? What type of personality do they have? What are their interests? What are their mannerisms? What are their motivations? What motivates them as an individual? What are their career goals? Where are they hoping to go in their career? All this stuff is important because if you're, if you're recruiting somebody who has aspirations to be a senior-level leader within your organization, but this is a role that does not transfer to that, then you need to make sure you understand those motivations. And they're, they're obvious when you're having the conversations with the individual as well. So you can both be on the same page. And finally, who are some similar personas on your team that you can look to? How would you describe this person? So if you don't have the individual on your team, I always like to say, you know, and once again, going back to that buyer personas, if you've owned a small business for a period of time, you've inevitably gotten into creating buyer personas for your marketing efforts. It's the same thing. You look at one of your existing clients and you try to replicate that. And so in this environment, we're looking at either a past employee, a past teammate, a current teammate, that's in the same role that we're trying to replicate. Now, does that mean that we don't want diversity? Does that mean that we don't want diversity of thought? No, absolutely not. None of these things have to do with anybody's race, skin color, etc. They have to do with the skills that they need to perform the job. And in some roles, this can be more open, right? Maybe in an entry-level position, we're not necessarily as, as well-defined in our persona. We're talking about attitude and aptitude. But when we start to hire mid to senior level roles, then we're looking for specific backgrounds and experiences that are going to be indicators of success, especially in a small business environment. We don't have the budget and opportunity to hire and pray for the best and train for 2 years and then hope that they excel after those 2 years. We need somebody who can come in and hit the ground running. So creating a buyer persona— employee persona, excuse me— will help us to identify some of those characteristics that will lead to success in our organization. And almost every time I go through this process with one of our clients, we find that what they used to think was the ideal persona for the role is not at all. When they started looking back, they're like, oh, the people that we've hired that match this persona that we had in our mind actually always leave after about a year or two. Uh, they're just at a stage in their career where this is a stepping stone role. However, we're looking for somebody to be here for the long term. So what are some characteristics of people that this might be a long-term long-term opportunity for them versus somebody that's just viewing this as a stepping stone, short-term path to get onto the next stage of their career. So that's where we also want to develop a little bit of what's called a negative persona. So negative personas are characteristics of people who have not worked out in the past. So if you don't have that track record, you know, you can start to look at, once again, prior stages of your career, other times in your life, or, or prior teammates in other companies that have not worked out. What were some of the reasons why? And then we can flag some of those things as possible red flags. When we look for the right candidate for the role. Why didn't these people perform well? Why didn't they fit? What was it that made it why this was a bad hire? And so we can just be conscious of those things. All right, so now we've got a target, which is critical because if you don't have a target, you'll hit it every single time. So we want to have a great target of what we're looking for as far as our new teammate. So we've identified the role, we've identified what the right person is, you know, what their background looks like, what their demographic looks like. As far as, you know, industries they're coming out of, etc. Now we can start to look at some of the actual traits that would make them successful to work in a remote environment. These are important too. Remote is not for everyone. A lot of people think remote is for them, and a lot of people are even working remote and doing a terrible job at it, or they're just milking the clock or they're out. You know, we've all seen the dude wandering around the neighborhood all day when we were working from home during COVID that was doing nothing. But you knew He was on the clock at that time. He was supposed to be getting work done. It was the middle of the day. And so, you know, it's not saying people can't go outside and take a break, but the guy who's out there fixing his fence for 6 hours and then going back in and taking a Zoom meeting afterwards, we're trying to avoid that cat, right? So we want to look for people, first of all, that are resourceful and proactive. They have a, a history of success working independently, but as part of a team. And for us, those are things that we're looking for is that resourcefulness. How do we gauge and measure, like, have they worked in environments where they didn't just have the full playbook, right? Sometimes in big corporations, when you're a member of the cog, you know, you're a cog in the machine, you get the playbook, you get everything you need to do, you're strapped to a desk, you've got metrics, like you're monitored nonstop. Have they been in environments where they weren't monitored, they weren't micromanaged, but they still achieved high results? And that means that they're able to prioritize, which is the next key indicator. We need people that have great prioritization skills. If your small business is anything like ours, there's constant inbound flux of work, client requests, new things happening, new initiatives, just a nonstop flurry of things. We need people that can see the forest through the trees and understand what needs to be at the top of that list. We call it swallowing the frog. We prioritize every day. What are the most critical things you need to do to be successful today? Mark Twain once said, "If you need to swallow a frog for the day, make sure you swallow the biggest, ugliest frog first." It means get those hard-to-do things done first thing in the morning. We need those people who can prioritize. You also want people, and this is where hiring remote makes this very easy, they need to be a good writer. I know that sounds kind of silly, but in reality, most of their communication is going to be over email. Chat, sometimes text message, you know, tickets inside your support system, whatever it might be, it's gonna be a lot of writing. So if they struggle to be professional in writing, they struggle to gain clarity on their ideas, they write a wall of text instead of breaking things up, you can parse that out pretty early on. And that's a very nice thing about just requesting a, you know, a 3-sentence cover letter if you're seeking applicants on why they would be a great fit for the role, then you can get a quick taste of their writing right from the jump. Trustworthy, a little bit harder to measure when we're looking at the, the initial recruiting process, but definitely something we want to keep in mind. We want to see a proven track record of success. Obviously, people have gaps in their resumes. They have times where they only spent a small period of time at a certain company, but we're looking for histories of, you know, if it's 6 months here, 12 months there, 18 months there, 6 months and it's always the company, always something with the company, you know, this happened, that happened. You know, that just frays trust for me pretty quick. It's kind of like if there's always something wrong with everybody else, you have to take a look in the mirror at some point. And so that's something that, you know, I'm looking for with applicants is do they have a proven track record of success over a period of time? And I also would like to see experience working remotely. I think that it's a unique way to work And so it's hard for people to do it for the first time. I don't really want them learning, if I can help it, for the first time on my dime. I'd rather see some proven success. I'd rather see some, some opportunities where I can look to and go, okay, great. They've already worked in a remote environment. I can talk to others in that environment and identify what kind of success they had. These are some of my personal preferences. You can apply them as you see fit, but those are a few things when we look at the persona. We look at what makes up for some of the traits of a great remote worker. Those are some of them, people that are resourceful, proactive, able to prioritize, good writers, trustworthy, and they have experience working remote. All right, so how do I find these people? And this is where, you know, there's, there's kind of two sides of this fence. There's posting a job and waiting for applicants, then there's going out and proactively recruiting. We're gonna talk about recruiting because that actually involves both. But more often than not, small business owners are not recruiting. They're posting jobs, filtering through applicants, hiring the best of those that apply. Let's face it, not all the top players, not all the A-players you're looking for are applying to your job on LinkedIn and Indeed. You're going to need to go and find them. And we'll talk here in just a couple minutes about proactively recruiting on LinkedIn. I think it's one of best tools for this, and it's a great way to actually find profiles online for free or cheap that will allow you to actively recruit instead of just passively waiting for folks to apply to your, uh, your positions. So when you do post a job and post, there's nothing wrong with posting a job. I mean, we've have had, we have made a lot of our hires directly off of job postings. Nothing wrong with that, but make sure you don't create some generic posting. Put some— everybody wants to have the roles and responsibilities and all that stuff. But like, you know, one of the— one of our recent postings, I was, I was using some bullets from an old posting and I noticed that it had bachelor's degree required. And I was like, we don't need a bachelor's degree for this position. Be great if they have it, whatever. I don't really care if they have a bachelor's degree. Took me a long time to get my bachelor's degree, and I don't really care if the other people here doing this role particularly have one. I don't think there's any direct correlation to success there. So filtering out some of those bullets that make sense and don't make sense, don't just put generic nonsense in there. Put what's actually gonna happen in the role, put what you're actually looking for, and put in a solid lead at the beginning. So there's a great story about, uh, writing a lead for a story, and I'm probably gonna butcher this, but I'm gonna attempt to, to do it anyway. It, it goes like this. They talk about there's a journalism class, and we've all had some version of this in our journalism classes over the years, but they say, all right, class, we need you to write the lead for this story. Next week, all of the teachers and administrators are going to be out for training and they're going to be gone at XYZ location for the full day on Thursday. And they're going to be learning about ABC topic to help make the school run better. Write the headline, tell us what the lead is. And everybody's taking that information and they're parsing it up and they're saying, oh, all school administrators are gone next Thursday and learning more about XYZ and they're writing at just different variations of what they heard. Whereas in reality, the professor, after giving them 10 minutes to write the lead, wrote on the chalkboard, school's canceled next Thursday. That's the lead. The lead wasn't that, hey, everybody's gonna, you know, and this is how most of us write job descriptions, right? It's like, hey, we're looking for high-energy, fast-paced people that can keep up with our great, awesome company. No, write something more interesting. Are you looking for the next phase in your career where you can work remotely and take it to the next level? Like, start with these bullets. When you go back to that persona, you can speak directly to the individual if you know what motivates them. If you know that once again, if you're trying to poach somebody from a big company, so often for us, we're trying to poach people away from a Fortune 500. So we need to say, hey, look, are you tired of working for a Fortune 500 company where you feel like you have zero impact? On the direction of the organization, come and get in at the ground level of a small business where your work will be appreciated and where you can actually make an impact. Start there. Speak directly to their heart, to their emotions. Don't start talking about how you're, you know, you're so great, company's so great. Talk about this in just a couple minutes. I guess I'll, I'll get into it right now, but don't wee-wee all over yourselves in the job postings. And this goes for everything marketing, copywriting related. Too often when you go to somebody's website, you read about We are this, we are so great, we have been in business 50 years, we have X number of clients, we respond this quickly. Nobody gives a crap about you. I hate to tell it to you that way, but they just don't. You have to you phrase it. You can take the next step in your career. You want to grow. You want the flexibility of working remotely. They don't care about you as a company. What's in it for them? So Writing a job post, very important that you don't be so bland. Make it represent your culture. You know, we use the silly words in there. We make it more interesting and dynamic. And you can also make a, one of the things that we haven't done yet that I'm gonna do after kind of preparing my notes here and realize it was a little bit of a gap, is also a quick culture video. So you can use something like Loom, L-O-O-M, you can, oh, excuse me, L-O-O-M. You can record videos just like I'm doing right here for this video and just make a quick culture video. Why do people like to work here? Ask your employees. It doesn't have to be well-produced. It doesn't have to be spectacular. Just something that you can point them to that says, hey, you can even go through and do a job description verbally. Hey, here are the expect— expectations for this role. Here's where it fits in the overall organization. Engage people in a unique way. It doesn't need to be well-produced. It doesn't need to be awesome. Like, as far as production value, you can just articulate the message in a way that's way more human over video than just in a post text. So, all right. So beyond posting jobs, where else can— and we'll talk about some of the places to post here in just a second. But the most important thing is referrals, asking for referrals. Ask your employees, make sure they know what you're hiring for, what the role is, type of person you're looking for. You talked about the persona piece. You should post it online on your social channels. Hey, here's the role we're looking for. Do you know anybody? Here's the type of individual we're looking for. Be direct about it. Once, if it's kind of like going back to a lot of folks we work with, we work with a ton of CPA firms and they always say, I'll ask them, who is your target customer? What's your buyer persona? Oh, everybody. We work with small businesses, we work with people, we do this. Anybody and everybody with a checkbook is a target for us. That's a terrible target right there. You need to be more direct. So in that example, if I'm going to, if I'm a CPA office and I wanna talk directly to my buyer persona, well, I say, look, we work with a ton of dental practices, single practice owners, you know, they typically have 5 to 10 employees. They've usually been in business 10 years plus, they're in this geography. Like I can get specific, I can drill it down. And if you can give a couple of those bullets for the type of person you're looking for, hey, they come from this background, they probably work for a Fortune 500 company, Probably tired of going into the office. They've been having to go into the office since, uh, they got called back in and now they're looking for something different. They're trying to take a next step. Maybe they're at a little bit of a dead end in their current role. Whatever those bullets are that you determined during the persona process, share them. So share that verbally, share it with your network on LinkedIn, share it with your network on LinkedIn direct messages. Hey, I'm looking for this person. Same with email. Email your people, ask for referrals first and foremost. Referrals still account for 60+ percent of hires made in the United States. So you want to make sure that you're tapping into referrals. Obviously, they also come from trusted sources as well when you're looking at your network. So a great place to, to find people, especially when you've knocked down the barriers of having to have somebody come into your office. You start going back to your prior careers, you start going back to people you knew if you lived in another region before where you live now. You've got a ton of opportunities to get referrals. So obviously you should still post on the major job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn, um, because Indeed and LinkedIn both do allow you to post remote now. You can get more specialized for specialized positions. So that's the nice thing about putting that persona together. So if I determine I'm hiring a developer and, you know, I know that I want to post it in Stack Overflow versus maybe just on Indeed. Because I'm going to get a higher level of participation there. So look for those specialized boards for your industry as well. Join online groups and post the job there. So communities are huge right now. So communities, two platforms that are gaining tremendous growth when it relates to communities are Slack and Facebook. So Facebook, actually, you're seeing less of this sort of general online Facebook interaction. Hey, I'm posting about my dog, just, you know, went potty in the living room. I'm posting more inside of groups looking for expertise, looking for mentorship, looking for guidance on a specific problem. You can find Facebook groups related to the types of individuals that you're trying to hire. Same with Slack. You can absolutely find groups on Slack, communities on Slack where you can go and find the talent that you're looking for. So go where the people are. You wouldn't go fishing in the middle of the woods where there's no water. Don't post jobs where the people that you're looking for don't hang out. And then finally, you should actively recruit using LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is, uh, just a tremendous tool that we have at our disposal right now. There are some free components of it. You want to filter by the qualifications that you've laid out above. So if going through the persona, you've identified that people that work at, you know, this company and this company have great training programs, they're going to come to you and You know, the culture there is something that's going to relay over to your culture. And like now you can hyperfocus down to title, keyword, area. You know, maybe you want them only on the East Coast. You're open to remote, but you can't have somebody on the West Coast because they need to be open during your support hours and you're on the East Coast. So you can actively recruit on LinkedIn. And I'm going to talk right now, I'm going to dig into that a little bit. But so just call— bringing all that together, where to post, how to find people. You want to post the jobs on the major job boards if you've got the time and bandwidth. So that's the thing too, you want to make sure if you're the business owner, you have somebody that you can delegate. Uh, you know, what I like to do is just, I'll go in and I'll filter through the first 5 or 10 resumes and I'll, I'll record it on a Loom video and I'll pass it along to the person that needs to go through the rest of the resume. So they see what I'm looking for. I say, oh, I'm disqualifying this person because of this component of their background. On. Oh, I love this about this candidate. They're a great fit, possibly because of that reason. So I'll just give them all my thoughts and what I'm looking for as I'm screening through those, through those resumes so that they can just pick it up from there and they can mark them either maybe or yes based on the criteria that I've laid out. And they've actively seen me and then heard me go through what I'm looking for when searching through the resumes. All right, let's wrap it up. Let's talk about actual recruiting on LinkedIn. LinkedIn best practices. So first of all, before you go recruiting on LinkedIn, make sure that your personal and company profiles are optimized before you get started. The worst thing you'd like to do or want to do is go recruit somebody about what a great company you are and what a great leader you are, and then they click on your profile and it's, it's vacant. They click on the company profile, there's no followers. So if you're not active on LinkedIn, maybe not the best place to go recruit because you won't be putting your best foot forward. But probably a good opportunity for you to go in and clean up your LinkedIn stuff anyway, if you haven't. On LinkedIn, you can also join groups there. LinkedIn groups not as active anymore, but still an area to go in, look at who is involved in the groups, look at the members of the groups, and then see if they fit into the target criteria that you've set out. Message your relevant connections like I talked about earlier. You can direct message, copy and paste a message, alter it slightly, But the most important thing you can do on LinkedIn is the search functionality. So I have a sales, I don't remember what it's called, Sales Plus membership or something, but I can do a lot of different filters. I think most of these are available on the free plan, but you just have to, you just get a certain amount of search per month, I think is the deal. So when I'm searching, I'm gonna pull up an actual search we did recently. So I'm gonna do, you know, inside of the actual search box, First and foremost, you wanna make sure you're looking for people. I'll do a Boolean search inside of the search box. So like I'm doing one live right now. So sales and, let's just say I'm searching for a salesperson and I want them to have some payroll experience. So I'm gonna put sales and payroll, put that inside of parentheses, and then I'm going to filter by first and second connections. And then I'm gonna change location to United States, or maybe I want to change it to a couple of states. Like, for me, this search right now, it's bringing up 76,000 people, so that's too many people. So I want to maybe go to all filters, and then I can choose a couple of the current companies. Maybe there are specific companies I want to recruit from. I can choose their seniority level. I can start to add more keywords. I can filter it down by a few more states. So I say, oh well, remote's great, but what if I had them on the East Coast? Let's start with South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia. Uh, you know, to have them in our region would be easier because we do want to get together a couple times a year. So they're remote but they're regional. Uh, so I can do a lot of different filtering there. And I— but once again, I've already created the framework by doing the employee persona exercise that helps me to create that framework. And finally, when you go to reach out to these people, message them, InMail them. There's a couple different ways to do that, messaging and InMail, depending on which model of LinkedIn you're on. Start with a template that has a basis for why you're reaching out, but modify it based on their situation. Be a human about it. Say, I see, you know, that's what's so nice about starting with kind of second and first connections. Say, I see we have these connections in, in common. Here are some things, here's what I'm looking for. You know, are you interested in having a conversation? Lean into the fact that the role is remote, particularly if you know that they are working in an office. Definitely a huge benefit for a lot of folks right now. And then if they decide they're not interested, turn around and ask for a referral. Hey, do you know any folks with the same background as you? There's a reason I reached out to you. Any of your former coworkers or current coworkers that you know that might be actively looking that'd be worth me having a conversation with. So LinkedIn, tremendous asset, but I just wanna summarize it with this. Don't sit back and wait. Be proactive. Reach out to people. Find the people that are the right fit for your organization. By doing the legwork up front will save you a ton of time in the long run. With such a larger talent pool at your disposal, you can spend a lot of time if you're not careful. So if you're enjoying these tips on how to hire and grow a remote team, please make sure you subscribe., and please make sure you rate us 5 stars on your player of choice and hit that like button if you're watching on YouTube. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.