While hiring top talent is a priority for most companies, why are they failing so badly at it, especially when it comes to remote hiring? Usually, it happens due to a lack of effective strategies to attract exceptional professionals remotely. They often can’t find the right candidates in the vast global talent pool, or they offer a poor candidate experience that turns away the very people they want to hire.
But the best talent is out there—they’re just not hanging around on job boards or freelance marketplaces. These top performers are already employed and delivering great results elsewhere. To bring them on board, you need to proactively reach out and offer them opportunities that align with their goals.
Not sure where to begin?
No worries—we’re here to help. With over a decade of experience assisting U.S. companies in finding and recruiting the technical talent they deserve, we’re sharing some of our most effective tips on how to hire remotely.
What is Top Talent?
Top talent refers to exceptionally skilled and hardworking professionals who excel in their field and consistently deliver outstanding results. These individuals possess deep expertise, bring fresh ideas, and make significant contributions that drive progress and growth
How to Recruit Remote Talent?
To hire remote talent, it’s essential to adopt a remote-first mindset, expand your reach beyond traditional recruitment methods, and create a welcoming virtual environment that fosters connection from day one.
1. Embrace a Remote-First Mindset
To successfully hire remote talent and build a thriving global workforce, it’s crucial to adopt a remote-first mindset. This isn’t just about letting employees work from home; it’s a fundamental shift in how your organization operates and communicates.
Transitioning from a traditional office setup to a remote or hybrid model requires careful planning. It’s not just changing locations—it’s transforming your entire company culture. Start by evaluating your current systems and processes: tech infrastructure, employee adaptability, management practices, and any existing remote work policies.
Develop a detailed roadmap for the transition with clear goals, timelines, and resource allocation. A structured approach ensures every part of your business aligns with the remote-first philosophy.
Educating Leadership on Remote Work Benefits
Getting leadership on board is crucial. Some may worry about productivity or team cohesion, but studies show remote work can increase productivity and employee satisfaction. For instance, a Stanford study found remote workers were 13% more productive than their office counterparts.
Highlight how remote work expands your talent pool, allowing you to hire the best candidates regardless of location. This leads to a more diverse and skilled workforce, boosting innovation and overall performance.
Adapting Company Policies for Remote Teams
Update your company policies to support remote work. Set clear expectations for remote employees—define performance metrics, availability guidelines, and communication protocols. Invest in the right technology for communication and collaboration, and ensure your team is trained to use it effectively.
Foster connection among remote team members with regular virtual team-building activities and recognition programs. Address challenges like isolation or work-life balance by offering support and resources such as flexible hours or access to wellness services.
Remember, shifting to a remote-first mindset is an ongoing process. Stay flexible, seek employee feedback, and be ready to adjust as needed. By doing so, you’ll create a remote work environment that benefits both your employees and your business.
2. Use the Right Source
While remote worker job boards can be a starting point, they often don’t attract the very best candidates. Many top professionals are already employed and not actively browsing job listings—they need to be sought out proactively. Relying solely on job boards might mean missing out on these exceptional individuals.
So, what are the best channels to find top remote talent? Partnering with a specialized recruitment agency like DistantJob can make all the difference.
When choosing a recruitment agency, look for one that specializes in remote work placements and has a deep understanding of cross-cultural communication. This expertise is crucial for finding candidates who not only possess the required skills but also fit well with your company’s values and work culture.
A top-tier remote recruiting agency should have an established network of high-caliber candidates and be adept at passive candidate engagement. This approach allows you to connect with talented professionals who may not be actively seeking new opportunities but are open to exciting prospects.
By using the right channels and expert assistance, you can access a higher caliber of candidates and find the perfect fit for your organization without the usual hassle.
3. Creating a Welcoming Virtual Environment
To make new remote employees feel truly welcome, schedule virtual introductions with team members, managers, and key stakeholders. Use video conferencing tools like Zoom or Skype to facilitate these meetings, allowing for face-to-face interactions that help build rapport and trust.
Send a personalized welcome email to kick off the onboarding process. This message should express enthusiasm about the new hire joining the team and provide an overview of what to expect during their first few weeks. Consider creating a welcome channel on your company’s communication platform, such as Slack, where team members can introduce themselves and share a warm greeting.
4. Provide Necessary Tools and Resources
Equipping your remote talent with the right tools and resources is essential for their success. Conduct comprehensive orientation sessions that cover company policies, procedures, and culture. Use a mix of live video sessions and pre-recorded modules to deliver this information effectively.
Provide access to a centralized digital repository where new hires can find all relevant documents, training materials, and company resources. This could be a shared drive, intranet, or knowledge management system. Ensure that this information is well-organized and easily searchable to promote self-directed learning.
Implement a learning management system (LMS) that allows new hires to complete required training at their own pace. This flexibility is particularly important for remote workers who may be juggling different time zones or personal responsibilities.
5. Facilitate Team Connections
Building strong relationships within a remote team requires intentional effort. Organize virtual team-building activities and social events to help new hires bond with their colleagues. This could include online games, virtual coffee breaks, or informal chat sessions.
Create opportunities for cross-functional collaboration early in the onboarding process. Assign new hires to small group projects or tasks that require them to work with team members from different departments. This approach helps them understand the broader organizational structure and build connections beyond their immediate team.
Encourage open communication by setting up regular check-ins between new hires and their managers. These one-on-one meetings provide a platform for addressing concerns, asking questions, and receiving feedback.
To ensure the effectiveness of your remote onboarding program, regularly seek feedback from new hires about their experience. Use surveys or informal discussions to gather insights on what’s working well and areas for improvement. This continuous feedback loop allows you to refine and enhance your onboarding process over time.
Remember that onboarding is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Extend your support beyond the first few weeks to help remote employees fully integrate into your organization. Consider implementing a 30/60/90-day plan with specific goals and milestones to track progress and provide structured guidance.
Best Practices for Hiring Top Talent
Recruiting and hiring remote employees is an entirely different process than with on-site employees. Building a strong remote recruitment process will enable your company to identify and recruit talent that adapts to your processes and understand your culture. These are the best recruitment practices to find and hire top remote talent:
1. Separate Your Needs From Your Wants
Or, in other words: Define (realistically) your ideal candidate. There’s nothing wrong with tracing all the abilities, skills, personality traits, experience, you want candidates to have. However, the problem becomes when all these become part of the ‘’must-have’’ category
Quality recruiting focuses on finding and hiring candidates that go beyond expectations. However, companies that manage to hire top talent are aware that there are no perfect candidates. Otherwise, it would be impossible to hire. So, your first step is to separate the must-have qualities from the nice-to-have ones.
Here’s a cheat sheet with questions that can help you differentiate both concepts:
| Must-have qualities and skills | Nice-to-have qualities and skills |
| What will the candidate’s tasks be? What skills do they need for that tasks? | What skills are not necessary for the role but would add value? |
| Do candidates require experience for this role? What type of experience? | What personality traits would your team value? |
| What characterizes your company culture? What traits are important for candidates to have that relate to your company’s culture? |
2. Write a Job Description
Job descriptions are the first impression candidates have about your company and the position you’re looking for. And according to statistics, 72% of hiring managers say they write clear job descriptions while only 36% consider the same.
Job descriptions should not be a long, boring description of what a company stands for and what type of ‘’superstar’’ or ‘’guru’’ they are looking for. Instead of writing an endless list of skills, add the ones you consider relevant (from the previous step) and all the information that matters to candidates, such as:
- Job title
- Job summary
- Responsibilities and tasks
- Requirements
3. Build Your Talent Pipeline
The third step to hire top talent in your organization consists in building a talent pipeline. The talent pipeline consists in having a list of potential candidates who are qualified and prepared to fill relevant roles within the organization as soon as they fall vacant.
It can include internal employees, or it can also include candidates from external sources like referrals, job boards, recruitment agencies, social media platforms, etc.
While job boards can easily enable you to publish your job ad and wait for candidates to apply, we’ve discovered with our years of experience that headhunting is one of the most effective ways to hire top talent. Recruitment doesn’t necessarily begin looking for people who want a job. In most cases, talented candidates are already working for another company, the key is to know what to offer them to attract them based on their preferences.
A LinkedIn survey found out of 20,000 talent professionals 86% said their recruiting organizations focused mostly on passive candidates. And it is likely that percentage continues to grow.
Headhunting, or looking for candidates passively, mostly happens through social media platforms such as LinkedIn. Most of the time it means approaching the candidate with an attractive offer – in our case, we’ve seen that many IT professionals besides benefits and a good salary, want to work remotely.
Here are some platforms that can help you build your talent pipeline:
| Job Boards | Freelance Platforms | Social Media Platforms | Remote recruitment Agencies |
| CareerBuilder | Toptal | DistantJob (Remote tech professionals) | |
| Monster | Upwork | Robert Half | |
| Simply Hired | People Per Hour |
4. Screen Candidates
Candidates are much more than a CV, that’s for sure. However, taking every CV into consideration makes no sense. Especially in bigger organizations, one of the best ways to hire top talent is by having a system that screens candidates automatically. Or, in other words, having an ATS (Applicant tracking system).
Sometimes candidates apply for a job without even fully reading the job description. They quickly scan the job ad, look for the salary or certain skills, and apply without hesitation. Dovetail revealed that out of 225 applications per role, 90% of the candidates don’t read the job description entirely, and 85% don’t have the core skills for the job.
Instead of going through all the applications or taking the time to interview them, the first step is to screen candidates. And an ATS is the best tool to do that. The main advantage, as we mentioned, is that it reduces time spent with administrative tasks, and secondly, you get more qualified candidates. The system ensures that recruiters only engage with the best candidates that move along with the skills and requirements in the applicant pool.
5. Conduct Interviews and Evaluate
Now that you’ve selected the candidates you think are more suitable for the role, it’s time to interview and evaluate them. Interviews are one of the most important aspects to ensure finding the talent your team needs. It’s not only about having a candidate that gives perfect answers but to get to know them more deeply, understand the way they react in certain situations, more about their personality, and so on.
Keep in mind that each interview will always depend on the type of role you want to hire. If you need a candidate to fill a leadership role, then you’ll certainly ask questions that move in that direction. Same thing with different areas; you can’t evaluate designers the same way you evaluate remote developers. For each role, you need to define the skills and how you are going to evaluate them.
In a remote setting, this might seem trickier because obviously, you’re not in the same physical environment. This is why you need to have the right tools that will help you interview and evaluate remote candidates successfully. And not only the basic tools we all know, such as Zoom or google Teams, but also those that will help you, depending on the role, see if candidates are capable of doing what they say they can do.
Tools that can help you evaluate skills remotely:
- HackerRank (tech)
- Codility (tech)
- The English Quiz (Evaluate a candidate’s fluency and written competency in the English language)
- HireSelect (personality tests)
- Sales Assessment by OMG (Sales)
- Predictive Index (personality and workplace behavior)
- Pymetrics (cognitive and emotional traits)
6. Focus on Providing a Positive Candidate Experience
Recruiting top talent is not only about ensuring candidates have what it takes. It’s also about convincing them that your offer is too good to refuse – whether they are actively looking for a job or not. Convincing them besides the offers and possibilities, it’s also about providing them with a positive candidate experience – even before they are actual candidates.
Nowadays, companies need to work and strengthen their digital presence to obtain clients and attract possible talent. Before applying for a role, candidates research and inform their opinion of your company by looking at Glassdoor reviews, word of mouth, the application process, etc.
Once they become candidates, you need to establish the right process to approach them, answer them in a timely manner, and understand how the process works. Making them feel welcome, and conducting your interviews professionally, are all aspects that help them have a positive experience.
7. Final Evaluation
After all the rounds of interviews and evaluations, it’s time to make the final decision. As a hiring manager, you’ll face several difficulties when choosing among different candidates. During this step, you’ll need to review your interview notes and analyze which candidate you think will make a better fit for your team.
One of the things you’ll probably need to fight against is unconscious biases. Hiring managers often reject candidates not because they don’t have the skills but because of the first impression you had about the candidate or something they said you didn’t like. Before building false assumptions when evaluating, ask yourself: Do I have a job-related/professional reason to reject them? Why do I feel they are not suitable for the role?
Additionally, for evaluations, we always recommend reviewing the interview notes and building scorecards that might quantify the candidate’s answer and help you compare different candidates based on the scores.
8. Hire!
Congratulations! You found the talent you were looking for. Now, it’s time to make sure you have the right onboarding process, remote communication guidelines, and policies.
Keep in mind that hiring top talent remotely requires different tools and paperwork than onsite. So, during this step, before welcoming the new employee abroad, have all the documentation and the tools you’ll need to work with them successfully.
9. Measure the Hiring Process
It’s impossible to know if your recruitment and hiring process is working if you don’t track the outcomes. The last step is to turn to data and analytics to understand what worked and what didn’t during the hiring process. This will help you improve and optimize your resources.
Some metrics to consider are:
- Conversion fuel: How many candidates accept your offers? Those who refuse, what is their main reason?
- Time to hire: Time is money so understanding how much it takes you to hire a candidate and why will help you see if certain steps are taking longer than they really should.
- Hire ratio: It will help you see how many candidates you need to fill the position required.
- Source of hire: What are the best sources to hire quality candidates?
Hire Top Talent with DistantJob
Hiring top talent remotely is challenging, especially when you have no idea where to start. If paperwork, documentation, contracts, and the legal aspects are all too much to handle, leave it in our hands.
At DistantJob we will help you hire without borders 60% faster than the average industry. Our team of specialized IT recruiters can help you find and hire talented remote developers that will adapt to your company’s process. All this while taking care of the paperwork, as our global legal & HR team handles everything. Have more questions? Contact us!
