How do you manage the recruiting and onboarding of remote team members...

Sam Bauer
5 replies
...in a remote-only company? How do you find the contributors you are looking for? How do you evaluate them? How do you connect and align (purpose, values, targets, processes)? Which tools do you use? What problems did you face? Which solutions are applicable?

Replies

Rahul Arora
For remote evaluation in tech rounds, you can try out intervue.io (https://www.intervue.io) I was using Google docs before for live collaboration but turns out that intervue.io is better and saves time with very easy to use interface.
Jan Rosa
My favorite topic, where do I start :-) * Recruiting process * We advertise our roles on our job site (toggl.com/jobs), We Work Remotely, Remotive 3.0. We have tried Facebook / Instagram adds, didn't work very well, the conversion between views and applications was very low (<1%, compared to 30-40% on the sites I mentioned). We use our own tool for managing the hiring process- toggl.com/hire. We are a remote first company, and usually have a high volume of applications to jobs we advertise (2000+), and the hiring is done by the team leads. It is not in anybody's capacity to review that many CVs, that's why we initially developed Toggl Hire internally, and it is now a regular product. What it does is that you can add a link to the skills test at the end of your job ad. Each candidate needs to take the test (usually 10 multi-choice questions and 2 open-ended questions within 20-25 minutes). Candidates below a set threshold are rejected automatically, candidates above the threshold are reviewed by the hiring manager and either rejected or shortlisted for the next round. I have been hiring a frontend developer recently. We had over 3000 candidates taking our javascript + react test, with the threshold set to 80% I had to review 240 candidates and their answers to our open-ended questions (one was a code snippet reviewed by our tech lead, the other was a communication related question I was reviewing). Only about 20 candidates made it to the short list for the next stage. The shortlisted candidates have to do a coding homework - they have to write a small React app, an exercise that should not take more than 3-4 hours. We give them 48 hours from revealing the assignment in Toggl Hire, so they can decide when and where they will do it. The product team reviews the homework, and makes the short list for the interview. We did 12 interviews for the frontend developer role. We invite the candidates to do the interview with the team (via Hangouts or Zoom) and have a set of questions we ask every candidate. We start with the intro of the team, a bit about the product, and evaluate how they communicate, their experience with product development and some self awareness questions as well. We also give them a lot of room for their questions, so our interviews are more like a discussion, especially in the second part. This usually takes 30-45 minutes. The shortlisted candidates are invited to do a test week. Test week - we invite candidates to work with us for 3-4 days on real tasks. The tasks are designed to be small, independent, so the candidates can get them done in the short space of time they have. They get access to our Slack, infrastructure etc. We want to see their actual work, how they communicate about their progress, what questions they ask, how quickly they can learn new things they haven't seen before. If they can we also ask them to join our standup or a casual Friday meeting we call the Campfire, where we just chat about anything, or play some games etc. This work is of course a paid work, and in majority of cases we push the code to production (after some polishing and further testing). We did have 4 test weekers, made one offer that was rejected, and have 2 candidates now to select from (that we invited to the test week after the first offer was rejected). CEO interview is the final check once the whole product team agrees that we want to hire the candidate who successfully passed the test week assignments. It takes 20-30 minutes, and it is a final sanity check. * Onboarding * We give our new colleagues the access to the company Slack, Notion and all other systems they need. First day is the intro to the team by the buddy that we assign to the new hire, getting access to everywhere, computer setup etc. The buddy is responsible to write up a short onboarding plan for the first 2-3 weeks (what internal documentation to read, who to meet, what tools to set up, initial tasks, meeting invitations in calendar etc). The buddy and the new hire meet often (just a reminder, all of this is happening via Hangours/Zoom as we are a remote-first company with no offices), discuss the progress through the onboarding plan, any questions that arise etc. I'll finish my super long post here, if you have any specific questions, just ask :-)
Xiuqiang Jiang
Hello, GotoHTTP.com is a cross-platform remote control tool, remote work will use it.