Written by: BubbleJobs UK
Lots of hiring managers have started to consider taking on remote workers, especially in the Digital sector. Perhaps, you really don’t have space or you have sourced your perfect candidate but they just happen to live hundreds of miles away. There are lots of different reasons why you would want to hire someone remotely and it has lots of benefits too.
Although it seems a lot less stressful than taking on a full-time employee in your own office, there are a few things you need to consider in order for your business to run smoothly. We have 4 simple tips to help you hire and retain your very own remote workers.
The hiring process
Make sure that your job advertisement clearly states that this position will be remote. The advertisement must state the key skills that you need to look for in a remote worker:
Organisation – The worker must be organised and be able to work with tight deadlines, handing their work over on-time, if not early. Good Communicator – As you are communicating from afar, you need to be sure that the employee keeps you up to date with how they are getting on and their written skills are of a high standard. Highly Reliable – You need to be sure that if you need to contact them, you can with ease. An Independent worker – Although you will want them to keep you in the loop about how they are getting on with the work, you still want to be able to get on with your own work and feel confident leaving it to them.
Get to know them beforehand
You may not be working side-by-side every day but it’s still important to make sure you get along with each other. We’d recommend scheduling a skype interview, this will allow you to have a good discussion about the role and to introduce yourselves to each other. You can use this time to discuss payment methods, wage requirements and forms of communicating. It’s important to make sure that you ask the candidate to show some existing work to see what their standards of work are. If the candidate does not have any work to show, set them a practice project to get a good judgement of their time frames, their work standards and delivery.
Trust is an extremely important factor within this approach to working. You need to be sure that you can trust the person to get on with the work, you won’t need to constantly check up on them and you are confident that they can do the work to the standards that you desire. You can also see from a skype interview whether they have a professional space to work in and whether they appear confident enough to take on the requirements.
Schedule regular appraisals
Although you can’t meet face-to-face, it’s still important to keep regularly catching up with your employees. Provide them with help and guidance for their projects. We’d recommend scheduling a day of the week or a day fortnightly when you can discuss how they got on with the work and whether they have any questions or anything that they need to catch up with you about. It’s good to have a reliable form of contact so that if there are any issues sending work across or if your worker is struggling with something, they can seek assistance.
Use work management software
An effective way of managing your employee’s workload is to use work management systems, websites such as T eamwork , Trello , Google Docs and Dropbox . These websites are great places for you to store work, log hours of work and communicate with colleagues all in one place. As we all know, file sharing via email isn’t always the most reliable source so it’s important to make sure there is somewhere where your remote worker can hand the work over without any trouble. It’s also a great place to get a better judgement of how long your workers have spent on each project, essentially giving you a better idea of how much to pay them.