The Keys to Remote Career Development with Mercedes Rodriguez Sanday | DistantJob - Remote Recruitment Agency

The Keys to Remote Career Development with Mercedes Rodriguez Sanday

Gabriela Molina

Mercedes Rodriguez Sanday is DistantJob’s account executive. With a strong marketing and client relations background, Mercedes is the stage manager of this show – she double and triple-checks that candidates are the right fit before sending them on stage. Thanks to her, DistantJob’s recruitment process is seamless, on time, and on the mark.  She’s also running point with clients and hired staff and will stop at nothing to maintain top satisfaction for both parties – she lives and breathes retention.

Mercedes Rodriguez

Read the transcript

Luis:

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the DistantJob Podcast. I am your host, Luis, in this, that podcast about building and leading awesome remote teams. Today I am joined by a friend and a colleague, Mercedes Rodriguez-Sanday. She is part of the team at DistantJob. She’s our account executive, which is a fancy way of saying that she is our client-facing person. She leads team who handles all our clients. So she is literally at the core of the business. Welcome, Mercedes.

Mercedes:

Thanks, Luis. It’s good to be here.

Luis:

Did I get your name right? I always have trouble with these things.

Mercedes:

Yeah. I’ve been called all sorts of things, but yeah, you got it right.

Luis:

Okay, cool. Obviously, because we work at the same place, it would be a bit awkward and weird if I followed the usual structure of the program, that’s basically, “Hey, you’re great. How great are you?” But I want to, and I also usually ask people what’s their relationship with remote work, what got them there, et cetera. But the cross is that I ask it for myself and not as a show, for the listeners.

Luis:

I mean, I know what DistantJob is about and the listeners know it too because they’ve been following the program. Instead, let me jump right onto the situation about the building and the managing a team. You started with DistantJob when DistantJob was a tiny company. You were the first employee. When you arrived at DistantJob, we didn’t have an account management, a client facing department. The owner of DistantJob did that and you were his assistant. You signed on originally as assistant to the company president.

Luis:

Now you have your own department that handles the core part of the business. Why don’t you tell me a bit about that trajectory and how that was created over a fully remote situation? Because a lot of people don’t believe that career progression is possible, or at least easy, in a remote job. And in your case, not only did your career progress, you created an entire division within the company.

Mercedes:

Yes. Absolutely true. I think that what most people fear is that they’ll be out of sight, out of mind. It’s a common fear that I’ve seen in other podcasts, in articles. People think that they’ll be overlooked because they’re not in the office. So their manager can’t just walk by and see what they’re doing. They’re afraid that they won’t be able to stand out. I think sometimes it’s even worse for people who are more of an introvert.

Mercedes:

But I guess in my case, it was a natural progression. You’re right. We didn’t have a department. As our company started growing, we started, I guess, improving the services that we offered. We just started honing in on what we wanted to offer and it gave us more and more work. Well, me, because I was the only one.

Luis:

The marketing department started like that as well, by the way.

Mercedes:

Yeah. You start having all these ideas, “I’d love to do this. I want to do this. I want to do that.” And then you realize that eight hours are just not enough to do everything you want to get done in one day. And so, yeah, so at one point we just said, “Okay, we need to bring more people on to help here.” I guess that was the tipping point, and that’s when we started growing. This is my first remote experience. It’s been huge for me because I… Well, first of all, I proved a lot of people wrong. A lot of people told me, “Don’t take that job because it’s remote,” and they thought it wasn’t serious.

Luis:

Really?

Mercedes:

Yes.

Luis:

What were their arguments?

Mercedes:

Well, the arguments were it’s not a local company. It’s not safe. It might not be a long-term thing. What happens if maybe within a month you’ll be out of a job? People just thought, “Oh, you’re going to be sitting in your underwear with your computer working from home.” They didn’t think that was serious.

Luis:

Isn’t that what Twitch models do. Right? It’s a well-paying job.

Mercedes:

Absolutely. But this was before COVID, obviously. So people weren’t… Well, at least, my friends and family weren’t familiar with the concept of remote work. When they thought of remote work, they just thought of freelancers, so just people on freelance websites doing odd projects. I was very happy because I got to prove them wrong because not only am I still here, but I was able to grow.

Mercedes:

For me, I guess, you didn’t specifically ask this, but I did want to mention it, that for me, finding a remote job was it had such an impact on my life because I’ve always felt like a misfit, I guess. I didn’t fully fit in anywhere I went. When I came here, I just found this crazy bunch of misfits, just like me. There is this incredible thing that comes with remote work and it’s the fact that you can find, I guess, your place in the right company.

Mercedes:

When you’re limited to your city or you’re limited to the options you have within, I don’t know, whatever commute time you’re comfortable with, like an hour long drive from your home, it’s very hard to find the perfect company, corporate culture for you. When you go remote, you just suddenly have all these options and you get to meet these amazing people from all over the world. It was a very meaningful experience for me, and I’m incredibly grateful that I got the call saying, “You are hired at DistantJob.”

Luis:

I know that feeling. My situation was a bit different because I was a dental surgeon. What happened for me is that I had the vision of dental practices that was a bit like mom and pop shops, that a dentist has their little clinic. Sometimes, the clinic is on the fourth floor and they live on the second floor, et cetera. They have an assistant who usually is their wife or sister. It’s kind of a family business. That was how I was used to the field.

Luis:

In fact, especially for someone starting up, and after going to med school, it was anything but. It was a very corporate environment. It was a very organized business. They were very organized businesses, and as much as I enjoyed doing the actual work with the patients, that was just a part of an overall experience, that I didn’t enjoy so much. It was more business than it was medicine, so to say. So I wasn’t really comfortable in that business setting either.

Luis:

I had the chance to either change careers or build my own clinic according to my own values. But at the time, we were going to a rough economic period in Portugal. Although I investigated for many, many months, the possibility of opening my own practice, it didn’t really feel like the wise financial choice, especially because I would have other people depending on me for their livelihood. It’s one thing to risk your money in opening a business in a bad financial environment, but it’s another thing to employ people in that business.

Luis:

And then, you could do well if you fail, but what about the people working for you? That’s a different situation. But I can definitely get your point about not being comfortable in the traditional business sense. Tell me a bit about how was hiring. I mean, we’re spoiled with hiring because we work for a recruitment company. But actually, our specialty, the specialty, DistantJob specialty, is developers. So we often have to be a bit more creative when hiring for positions that are in development, which was my case with marketing, and specifically content marketing people.

Luis:

Certainly was your case, hiring for your department. We got a ton of support and the lovely people at recruitment did the heavy lifting. But no doubt our experience was atypical because of the nature of the people that we were looking for. What was that like? How was the building your remote team look like?

Mercedes:

I just went into this blindly. I think our first hire happened by chance. We weren’t very sure what skills we needed to look for, what kind of experience. We did know that we needed just a solid English level. But we saw a whole bunch of very different profiles. I think I only spoke to three different candidates until I landed on the one I like. I feel it was by chance, but what I decided to do is ask very non-traditional questions because we were hiring for a junior position.

Mercedes:

What was most important for me was that the person could get along with me with the rest of our DistantJob team and with developers. So I needed it to be someone with a love for nerdy culture and nerdy things, someone who could easily learn the tech lingo. I could tell on the candidates’ faces that they weren’t expecting to be asked these sort of questions, but we were asking things like, what is your Hogwarts house? What is your proudest nerd moment? What movie did you recently watch and absolutely hate and why?

Mercedes:

That actually gave us a great insight into how friendly that person was going to be with our company culture and with, I guess, the nerd culture that we have with everyone who’s staffed through DistantJob.

Luis:

That was probably a super fun process, by the way. I’m sorry I wasn’t part of those interviews. I mean, but it makes a lot of sense if you think about it, because, again, it’s a client-facing position. With marketing, it’s completely different. I almost never asked those kind of questions because I look for people. My main criteria is that I find people that are in love with their craft, either copywriting, or writing, or graphic design, or et cetera.

Luis:

Now, obviously I also check for culture. I want people that look like they will fit the team. But ultimately, what’s important to me is that they really are in love with what they produce, the work that they produce, yet with love with the concept of getting better at it, which is completely different from someone whose main job is to help other people solve their problems and maintain good relationships with them. Right?

Mercedes:

Yes.

Luis:

So it makes sense that your questions would be much more centered around, are you a cool person to hang out with?

Mercedes:

Yes. And not only that, but we were also looking for a very good listener. We were asking things that were supposed to catch candidates off guard, so asking things like, “Hey, has anyone ever disclosed something so personal that it made you extremely uncomfortable? And how did you react?” Most people are not expecting to get that question on an interview. So they reply very honestly and openly.

Mercedes:

We were looking for a people person. That’s why we were asking these types of questions. It was fun. I guess now I can confidently say that it was the right way to do it because the first person we hired is still with us and she’s doing an amazing job.

Luis:

I didn’t think about it as a perfectly valid question. After all, you were starting that from scratch. So it would be impossible for you to think about everything. But did you at any point try to and find a strategy to figure out if this person would work well in a remote setting? How did you try to differentiate, if at all, between people who looked like good professionals, who looked like fits, but you didn’t believe they could work well remotely and people who did?

Mercedes:

One of the qualities that we were looking for was discipline, because I think that especially if you’re a junior, you really need to be very disciplined when you’re working at home, because you need to be ready to sit down and not get distracted. A lot of people talk about office environment distractions. But at home you have a lot of distractions, especially if you don’t-

Luis:

It’s the mother load of distractions. You have wife, dog, cat PlayStation.

Mercedes:

As I was going to say, I’m not sure if it’s worse if you live by yourself or if you live with other people. But I think with sheer will, anyone is capable of doing a good job working remotely. But the problem is that it has to be someone who can work without a lot of oversight, someone who doesn’t need to be micromanaged, because I didn’t want to be worrying about, will this person need me to be checking up on them every hour? Because there’s a stereotype in most people’s heads. And I think it even happens to the best of the remote managers.

Mercedes:

It’s the question of, is the person actually working or are they, I don’t know, just wasting time on social media? So we were looking for discipline. Just to be clear, I don’t mind, I mean, as long as… My ideology is that as long as you get the work done and you’re available during your working hours to talk on zoom, to reply on Slack. I don’t mind if you’re going through your social media. But, again, discipline was one of the main skills that we were looking for and we did find it.

Mercedes:

I think that’s also why our first hire was such a success because if it’s your first remote job, it can be a little daunting, because your onboarding process is installing a ton of different apps and getting used to new software, and for some people it’s a problem. We were also asking, “How tech savvy are you?” to most candidates in trying to figure out if they were using their computer for something other than just an Excel sheet and email, for example. But I guess that’s also part of being a nerd, because most people who are nerds are tech savvy. So yeah. That’s what we were looking for.

Luis:

Well, that makes a lot of sense. People tend to forget that just because people who are entrepreneurs and building their business on the internet tend to be very tech savvy, and then developers tend to as well. I mean, if you’re a developer, you know how to work around computers. But businesses take all kinds of people. Between the developer and the entrepreneur, there’s all these sorts of people that have experience with computers and have different degrees of proficiency with computers.

Luis:

I mean, a person might be a really great salesperson, or a really great assistant, and don’t really know much about computers beyond the basics of email and word processing. So that’s definitely a possibility. When you’re trying to assemble a fully remote team for a fully remote company, you need to understand that some people will apply for the job without… They don’t even imagine that they don’t really have what’s needed, the kind of knowledge and the ease with technology that’s needed to work in a remote company because they think it’s just going to be the same as when they work with a regular company, right?

Mercedes:

Yes. Yes, exactly. That’s why one of the things that you have to look for is that you need to make sure that the person is capable and willing to learn the tools of the trade. So, yes. I think, obviously, it’s much easier for the younger generations because they’ve grown up with video games and they’ve had their first computer when they were incredibly young, their first smartphone. So, for the younger generations, it does seem like it’s easier. But yeah.

Mercedes:

I’d say now after COVID, I’m seeing that most people have had a remote work experience. A lot of people have been forced to work from home no matter what their position was. By now, I think everyone has been exposed to it in one way or another.

Luis:

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That definitely true. Tell me a bit about your transition, your career transition, because I see this a lot, that people do find out their job, at the remote job… And in your case, you were doing very well first as the assistant to the president. And then in taking over his responsibility and being the person who faced clients, as the executive account manager.

Luis:

Then suddenly you started having to manage people… Well, person. At first, it was just person. Eventually, it became people. But it’s still a big shift. How was that shift for you? How did you manage that? I know that I, when I had that shift in my own career, I managed it poorly, to say the least.

Mercedes:

It was a challenge. It was a challenge because it was hard for me to think that I could make it or break it for someone else, because I kept thinking someone else’s experience with DistantJob relies on me. I can make their work life a living hell, or I can make it be a very enjoyable experience without, I mean, making a living hell not on purpose, obviously. So I was very worried about how I would interact with this person and what kind of management style I should adopt.

Mercedes:

But I relied very heavily on all of my colleagues and everyone who was already in a management position. Everyone gave me incredible tips. I discovered that it’s been a matter of finding my own style and what I’m comfortable with and adapting to what the person is comfortable with. It’s been somewhat of a journey because at first I thought, This is my management style and I think it’s good. So I’m sure everyone will feel comfortable working with me this way.”

Mercedes:

Then I ran into a situation where I realized that the people that you manage, they’re not all the same. For me, my biggest discovery was that part of being a manager sometimes means that you have to change your own management style to fit the needs of your team. I guess, the old schools you before used to be, “This is my way of doing business. Deal with it. And if you don’t like it, you can leave.”

Mercedes:

But the way I see it now is that sometimes you just need to adapt to what each team member needs until you shape them into the team member that you need them to be until they grow in their own skillset and their style. But it was a challenge. It was a challenge because, I’ll be honest, I was afraid. I was afraid of having a negative impact on the company, of having a negative impact on other people’s lives. But it all worked out. Again, I relied very heavily on my coworkers and their guidance. So it’s been good. It’s been a good journey. I’m still learning. We’re still growing. So it’s an ongoing journey.

Luis:

Yeah. I like to say that, at least as a manager, that I have strong beliefs loosely held. Meaning that I’m I wouldn’t say forceful, but I’m very committed to a certain kind of leadership and management, but I’m very open to doing an 180 and changing if I get interesting data. I have no problem with changing if I see that there’s a way that’s more productive, more pleasant, more balanced for the team.

Mercedes:

Yeah. Yes. I agree. Absolutely.

Luis:

Fast forwarding to date, tell me what a typical day or a typical week looks like as you manage that team.

Mercedes:

At the beginning, I used to try and make it a very structured process, daily stand-ups, setting weekly goals. But then I realized that since we’re in the people business, and sometimes it’s very hard to foresee what’s going to happen in this very afternoon. So we’re very flexible. I guess a typical day relies very heavily on constant and very open communication.

Mercedes:

Well, obviously, as you know, we use Slack. With my team, we rely very heavily on Slack, on zoom, on Basecamp, and just setting goals as a team for the week. Then we do have a monthly routine that we try to stick to. But again, I guess, most days I wake up and I’m not entirely sure what the day has in stock for me. Again, since we’re in the people business, sometimes you don’t know if a candidate is going to accept the job or not. You don’t know if they’re going to show up to the interview or not.

Luis:

Yeah. You’d expect people to actually want the job and show up to the interview. So that still surprises me, but it happens.

Mercedes:

It happens. It happens. I mean, I like to think that if you were going to an interview in person, you wouldn’t skip out. But talking with other people, I found out that, yes, with in-person interviews, people also don’t show up. So yeah, we do everything we can to make sure that we don’t waste other people’s time. A work day can vary a lot. Sometimes we’re very organized, sometimes we’re scrambling. But I have so much trust in my team and we just have this feeling of, “We got each other.”

Mercedes:

Yeah. With the level of trust we have, it’s very easy to get through the work day because we always know that whatever happens, there’s someone else to lend a hand and to help. So that’s fantastic. I’m very glad that I’m not the only one anymore.

Luis:

Well, that sounds interesting. I mean, so you explained how you came to that, but we did a slight detour. Because remote work, people tend to be overwhelmed with remote work. That’s a big problem. It happens to me as well as… I think we’re all still learning. But part of what we’ve figured out is that you need to have a cadence, a rhythm. You need to have your week organized in a certain way, albeit with some flexibility. What do you do like that for your team? How do you tend to organize that structure?

Mercedes:

The structure was laid out at the very beginning, and I worked on it with one of my team members. We just set a monthly routine and the monthly routine includes weekly routines as well. It’s like a playbook that we stick to, and on the side, we take care of all the unexpected things. We rely very heavily on Basecamp to stick to our routine. And then, I guess, you could say we just use Slack for everything else. But Basecamp is our main guide.

Mercedes:

We have our tasks. We have our goals. Every single day we’re posting and measuring how successful we’ve been. So I guess that’s what you could say. Our routine is it’s like the skeleton of the operation just laid out there, like, “This is what you have to do every week. This is what you have to do every two weeks. This is what you need to get done by the end of the month.” Then we have a lot of time during the rest of the day to deal with all the unexpected things that come our way.

Luis:

Yeah. Inevitably, that’s a lot. That’s why you try to build some slack in, so that that thing works properly when unexpected things come. All right. Let’s move to some rapid fire questions because I want to be respectful of your time. The questions are rapid fire, but the answers don’t need to be. Feel free to expand as much as you like. All right. When you arrive at your computer in the morning, you open your browser, what are the tabs that are open? What does your morning virtual office look like?

Mercedes:

Okay. I use Toby, so I have a whole bunch of tabs to choose from. The very first thing that I open every single morning is Toby. One of the tabs inside Toby, it says essentials. The essentials obviously include my inbox, and Basecamp, and my calendar. Those are the first three things that I open every morning, apart from Slack, obviously. That’s how I get my day started and make sure I’m logged into zoom, make sure I’m on the right Wi-Fi channel, and that my webcam is working properly.

Luis:

All right. So you use zoom in the actual app, not in the internet.

Mercedes:

Oh, right. You asked specifically about tabs. Yes. I use zoom in the app, not in the tabs.

Luis:

Okay. I’ve gone back and forth. There are things that I like more in one than in the other. So still trying to make my decision there. But yeah. Okay. Next question. If you had 100 US dollars to use to buy anything for each person on your team, what would you give them? The rules are you can’t just give them the money, you need to buy in bulk. You can’t ask each individual person what they need, and you can’t give gift cards, of course, because those are just like money.

Mercedes:

Oh, that’s a very tough question. It has to be in bulk, so it can’t be this… I mean, it has to be the same thing for every person.

Luis:

Yeah. Same thing for every person. Now, it could be a tool, app, experience, physical, digital, whatever.

Mercedes:

That’s very tough. I am immediately thinking of some nerdy merchandise, but the problem is that on my team, there’s different tastes. But that’s what I would probably go for, something nerdy that I know that they’d enjoy. For example, something related to Harry Potter. I know that it would be something that would spark joy. So yes, I would obviously also consider an experience, but during COVID, and since we’re spread out across different countries, in some countries, you have a little bit more freedom than in others at this moment, so an experience would be a little bit harder.

Luis:

For sure. For sure. Experiences tend to be harder these days. All right. What about yourself? What purchase has made the biggest impact in your work, work-life balance, whatever in the last year or so?

Mercedes:

It has to be my monitor. I got one of those super wide monitors and it absolutely changed my remote working experience because I just used to work on my notebook and it just has the usual 15-inch screen. With the super wide monitor, I get to have… I’m so excited when I say this, but I get to have Slack, Zoom, my browser, and something else, everything, side by side, and it makes my work so much easier and I’m so incredibly happy with it. So I think that has been my most meaningful purchase in this past year.

Luis:

Incredible. Yeah. I feel the same, though I don’t get a super wide monitor. I like a dual screen setup. It’s definitely a game changer, and it sounds ridiculous when we say it like that. One of the people that I try to get advice from, Trevor, he used to be the CMO of [inaudible 00:31:08]. He worked in a lot of other high profile companies as the chief marketing officer. He kept pushing me to get a second monitor and I was like, “It can’t be that much better, can it? It’s just a second monitor. Why can’t I just-

Mercedes:

Wait, but what were you working on before that?

Luis:

I was working just on my laptop screen.

Mercedes:

Okay.

Luis:

I was like, “I can just create virtual desktops on my… It’s easy to switch. I just need to all tab between full screen apps. It shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s like I have infinite screens in my laptop screen. How would have an extra one outside of it make such a big difference? But it does. It really honestly does.

Mercedes:

It really does. I thought of the dual monitors, but I didn’t want to be moving my head around like a tennis match switching between one screen and the other. So-

Luis:

Realistically, if you get a wide enough monitor, it effectively works as two. The reality is that if it’s a wide one, you can just tile two windows and it’s like two monitors side by side.

Mercedes:

Yes. I never remember the difference between the ultra wide and the super wide. There are some monitors that I think are a bit too wide, because, again, when you have to move your head around from one corner to the other, I think that’s too much. But getting a wide monitor is a game changer.

Luis:

All right. Let’s talk about books. Do you gift books? Are you a book gifter?

Mercedes:

Books? I’m not a book gifter, actually. I used to be a book lender until I got my Kindle and that got a little bit difficult.

Luis:

Well, being a book lender is essentially the same as being a book gifter. They never give you back the books you lend. Right?

Mercedes:

That’s true. That’s true. I used to keep a written tab of who had my books, and I lost that. So you’re right. Yeah. There are a lot of books that you never know where they are.

Luis:

What books have you pushed on people the most?

Mercedes:

Oh, let me see. I think one of those books has probably been Lord of the Rings, and I’m pretty sure that everyone who I pushed it on has probably hated me in the beginning because it’s a pretty long book.

Luis:

I mean, it’s three books, right?

Mercedes:

Yes. I guess, you could say it was pushed on me and I ended up loving it. There is a couple people who ended up reading it and were very grateful. I enjoy fiction, so yeah, I think that would be the book that I’ve peddled the most.

Luis:

All right. What lessons would you take from Lord of the Rings to apply to remote work? I guess that’s the question. That’s the hard question.

Mercedes:

Actually, I don’t really think it’s a hard question. In Lord of the Rings, I always liked the fact that how… This is very mainstream already, but how someone so small can have such a big impact and someone who just goes by pretty much unnoticed can have such a large impact on other people’s lives. Well, in that case, saving everyone’s lives. But I think in remote work, it’s the same concept, that you might feel little, just sitting in your office or in your living room or wherever you have your remote desktop set up.

Mercedes:

But you can have a really big impact on… It can be software. It can be a company, an organization, other people’s lives. You get to reach out to so many different people, and such a large number of people, that you can really make a change if you want to. I can think of a lot of developers who are just… I guess, you could call them just random Joes sitting around in their house and they’ve had a big impact on many things, many people. So I guess that’s where I would draw a connection between Frodo and remote work.

Luis:

If you think about it, really, Sauron, was the original remote boss because he commanded the entire takeover of Middle-earth, stuck from on the top of a tower in Mordor.

Mercedes:

He was the remote boss and I’d say a big micromanager. I mean, the palantir and always looking in on what you’re doing and-

Luis:

Exactly. I didn’t say he was a great remote boss, but he did make it work. Right.

Mercedes:

Yeah.

Luis:

So, yeah. Yeah, and the palantir was the original zoom, I guess.

Mercedes:

It was. It was. It was even worse, I guess, because it was always on.

Luis:

Yeah. But never had any connection issues, which was great for the time. Turns out the Middle-earth has the best internet, magical internet.

Mercedes:

Oh, connection issues on zoom. Yeah. Let’s not even go there.

Luis:

Exactly. Exactly. All right. We need to wrap it up, but of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t do the final question, which is, assuming that it’s fine to have dinner together and you are organizing a dinner where in attendance will be the top tech companies from all over the world. In the dinner, there’s going to be a round table about remote work and the future of work.

Luis:

Of course, the twist is that, as the host, you are hosting it in a Chinese restaurant and you get to pick the message that goes inside the fortune cookie. All of these important people, they are decision makers on some of the top companies in the planet. They’re going to get a fortune cookie message from you. What is that message?

Mercedes:

A fortune cookie message from me. That’s very interesting. Assuming they would be opening this fortune cookie right there on the table, because most people do. I would probably put in a message saying something like, “Turn to the person to your right and tell them the most valuable life lesson you have ever had.” So I’d obviously try to strategically sit myself beside a very interesting person to my left. I think that would be fun. You caught me really off guard with this question.

Luis:

It usually catches people off guard. So yeah. yeah.

Mercedes:

You caught me really off guard with this question. But yeah. Yeah. I’d like the idea of all these great minds just sharing a little wisdom.

Luis:

All right. That’s fair. That’s a fair fortune cookie question, Mercedes. It was a pleasure having you on the show, and obviously, people know DistantJob. But just to do this as you usually do it, how can people find you, continue the conversation with you, learn more about what you’re up to? Where can they follow you? Et cetera.

Mercedes:

I guess the easiest spot is LinkedIn. So anyone can feel free to reach out, send me a message, send a connection request. Yep.

Luis:

We’ll add the link in the show notes.

Mercedes:

Yes, absolutely. I’ll be happy to connect and happy to continue the conversation.

Luis:

All right. It was wonderful having you, Mercedes. It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for making the time. Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, this was the DistantJob Podcast, your podcast about building and leading awesome remote teams. See you next week.

Luis:

And so, we close another episode of the DistantJob Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please you can help us out by sharing it on social media. That would be great. It’s how we reach more listeners. And the more listeners we have, the more awesome guests I can get in touch and convince to participate in these conversations that are a joy to have for me and I hope they’re a joy for you to listen to as well.

Luis:

You can also help a lot leaving reviews on iTunes or your podcast syndication service of choice. Reviews are surprisingly helpful in helping the podcast get to more listeners. Now, another thing that you might want to do is go to distantjob.com/blog/podcast. Click on your favorite episode, any episode really, and subscribe. By subscribing, you will get a notification whenever a new episode is up and whenever we get the transcripts of the episode up, so you can actually peruse the conversations in text form.

Luis:

Of course, if you need to find a great employee for your team, a great remote employee, you should take the whole world into consideration and not just look to hire locally, not just look to hire in your country. Look around the whole world because that’s the talent pool that contains the best talent. To help you with that, again, distantjob.com is the perfect place to start.

Luis:

You will tell us who we need and we will make sure that you get the best possible candidate, 40% faster than the industry standard. With that, I bid you adieu. See you next week on the next episode.

 

One of the most common myths regarding remote work is that career development is almost impossible. People tend to think that remote jobs aren’t that serious or that you’re stuck doing the same thing for years.

During this podcast episode, Mercedes debunks that myth sharing how she started working at DistantJob as an assistant to later become the company’s account executive, building her own team and learning how to manage it successfully. She’s the living proof of remote career development! She also shared her insights into becoming a remote manager, the keys, and the challenges to overcome.

Highlights:

  • Building a remote team from scratch for her department
  • Main keys about remote career progression
  • Insights about working remotely for the first time
  • Why hiring for culture fit is essential
  • Tips for finding your management style

 

Book Recommendations:

 

Don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE so you won’t miss all of the other interesting episodes that we have coming up in the next few weeks!

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