Since our beginnings in October 2011, Zapier has grown from three founders cramped in a small apartment to a team of over 300 folks around the world. Along the way, we've picked up a few tricks (and things to avoid) to make building a remote team easier.
This chapter covers:
Not everyone is cut out for remote work, so before you begin hiring people for a remote position, you'll need to consider the skills it takes to be successful in this type of environment.
Great remote workers have a few traits that make them successful:
Joel Gascoigne and the team at Buffer have found that people with these traits often come from freelance, contracting, or startup backgrounds. We've certainly found that to be true, too. 10 of our first 13 hires at Zapier had startup or freelance work in their background—and several staff members started out freelancing for Zapier before joining us full-time.
In order to evaluate if candidates you’re considering possess the necessary traits to succeed in a remote work environment, you can use behavioral interviewing, which helps to uncover how people have behaved in previous situations. Here are some examples of questions you might ask.
Propensity towards action
Ability to prioritize
Proficient writing
Trustworthiness
Before you start sourcing candidates, you want to make sure to do a good job at defining the position. Often, companies throw up a generic job opening for a marketer or developer, which doesn't really help the candidate decide if they want to work for your company or not. Since remote companies don't have a local reputation, it's up to you to sell your company just as much as the role.
When it comes to defining the position, the best way to do this is to take the time to understand the work the role is responsible for performing. There are two great approaches you can take to inform yourself.
This is a trick that Basecamp uses when hiring for a new role. Jason Fried, the company's co-founder, explained this practice in a Reddit AMA.
When it comes to an all-new position at the company, we like to try to do it first with the people we have so we really understand the work. If you don't understand the work, it's really hard to evaluate someone's abilities. Before we hired our first customer service person, I did just about all the customer service for two years. Before we hired an office manager, David and I mostly split the duties. That really helped us know who would be good when we started talking to people about the job.
If doing the work isn’t feasible, you can still gather detailed information about a position. Recruiters at Zapier conduct thorough search kick-off meetings with hiring managers, in order to educate themselves about a position they’re hiring for. Recruiters take a deep dive into the following topics during this conversation:
By taking either of these approaches, you'll be able to write a more compelling job description because you will have the necessary information to define how the role relates to the company and its success.
As a result, your job posting will be a detailed listing that explains the ins-and-outs of what you do as a company. This might turn some people away, but those people wouldn't have been a good fit anyway. Instead, you'll get applicants that are much more invested in being a part of your company.
For all our job postings, we want to convey our company culture. So we also post our commitment to applicants, which includes our promise to respond to every candidate, our culture and values, how we have been working on hiring for diversity and inclusivity, and the Zapier code of conduct, which boils down to everyone treating each other professionally and with respect. Putting these out in the open has helped candidates feel more comfortable taking that leap of faith when applying for a job.
One last thing: our Director of Recruiting, JT Haskell, recommends redeveloping your jobs page for SEO related to remote jobs. Most job pages are location-based, and you want to be sure you're attracting remote employees as well. Google provides guidance for how to do this.
It's impossible to hire if you don't have candidates for the role, of course, so the first thing to consider is how people will find out about your open position. Here's where we've had the best luck.
Sourcing candidates is often a harder task for remote teams than you'd think. Since you don't have global connections, you're a small brand, and local ties can be hard to come by, it can be hard to get the word out about your company and your positions. Take advantage of every channel you can find to get the word out and keep track of where the good candidates come from. Then make sure to utilize those in the future.
If you've done everything up to this point, then you should start to see applicants roll in. This is where the real challenge starts—it's time to make the hire. First, you'll need to sort through dozens, hundreds, and maybe thousands of applicants to find the person you want. (Fun fact: at Zapier, we average over 1,000 applicants a week for our open roles. We've been lucky to have a great talent pool to choose from.)
Hiring is time-consuming, but it might be the most important thing you do to make sure your team succeeds.
Also, in the job posting, ask them to apply in a unique way—don't just ask for resumes. (In fact, at Zapier, we don't ask for resumes at all. Instead, design a value-add application process that educates candidates about the position while simultaneously educating the interviewing team about the candidate.
For instance, when hiring for our business development position, we included application questions to provide insight about the role's partner duties; the answer to these questions also helped us to understand how candidates would approach key responsibilities. We used the following questions:
And rather than asking for a cover letter upfront, we asked them to write a sample pitch email to a partner.
People excited about your company are willing to complete these extra tasks, often with enjoyment. Those who aren't a good fit just skip your post or forget to do it, turning the unique application process into a filter.
We use the hiring management tool TalentWall, so we can hire collaboratively, maintain transparency throughout the duration of a search, and ensure that candidates are receiving timely check-ins.
We make a commitment to applicants that we will touch base with them at least once per week while they are going through the hiring process; TalentWall makes it easy for a recruiter to see how long it’s been since they last connected with a candidate, which helps us to maintain our commitment.
As a remote team, communication is often asynchronous, so it’s important to create one spot where everyone can easily get on the same page about the health and status of a recruitment process. Using a tool like TalentWall, hiring managers can easily see which candidates are moving along in the interview process, and recruiters and hiring managers can use insights from the tool to identify opportunities to tweak the overall interview process. Talentwall also tracks what happened or will happen with candidate pipelines. This frees up valuable meeting time with hiring teams to focus ahead on challenges and strategy, rather than recapping the past.
You'll also want to use an applicant tracking system (ATS). We use Greenhouse as our ATS, which helps us to create purposeful hiring plans including:
-Interview stages: We establish the interview process before opening up a search. This approach helps us determine what candidates should expect while interviewing with us.
-Interview questions: We identify interview questions that’ll help our interviewers determine whether or not candidates are qualified for a position.
-Interview scorecards: We determine how to evaluate whether or not a candidate interviews successfully at each stage of the interview process.
We’ve found that creating a thorough interview plan, transparency for hiring teams, and maintaining consistent communication with candidates leads to meaningful interactions, a reduction in bias due to consistent evaluation, and keeps a search moving forward.
The recruiter, hiring manager, and other teammates reviewing applications select candidates for the next step: a recruiter interview. If the candidates pass that interview, we ask them to the job fit interview, where we use a rubric to score them. For example, when hiring for a Customer Champion, we evaluate candidates using a 1-3 scale for: persistence, knowledge, empathy, attention to detail, and Zapier usage.
In the job fit interview, we get to know the candidate a bit better and ask questions to see if they would succeed in a remote environment. These are best done synchronously, so make the most of your time, and schedule these back-to-back. Doing so helps you more easily compare candidates as well.
Pay special attention to how well the applicant communicates during this part of the process. Effective communication is so key in a remote position that the little things are a sign of a person who might or might not be a great fit. Potential warning signs are individuals who are poor at following up via email, forget when the interview was scheduled, or aren't flexible with an interview time in regards to time zones.
After these video call interviews, a few candidates have likely emerged as the strongest applicants. At this point, we like to put them to the test. Depending on the role, we'll devise a task that is of moderate difficulty and indicative of the types of activities they'll do on a day-to-day basis.
For engineers, that might be using the Zapier Developer Platform to add a new service. For marketing, that may be writing a blog post in collaboration with someone on the team.
If it's obvious that this isn't necessary, we might skip this step, though it's often a good way to get a feel for working together even for great candidates.
More often than not, the task requires the candidate to interact with folks on the team—maybe even more than a couple of times. That way, you'll get a sense of how they communicate and collaborate.
The test should take only a few hours. We want to be cognizant of everyone's time.
Before making an offer, we send out an anonymous survey for a reference check using SkillSurvey. That helps get honest feedback on candidates from their references.
Previously, we had candidates meet the team with a short lightning talk on a topic of their choice. Unfortunately, with our now-rapid hiring pace and such a large team, this weekly intro isn't feasible.
New teammates, however, do introduce themselves in their first weekly hangout with the team, sharing where they're from, a bit about their background, and anything fun they want to mention.
One thing you'll note is that we never meet the individual in person during the hiring process. For our first five hires, we did meet candidates in person. We found this was helpful but ultimately wasn't critical. What it did add was cost, coordination headache, and time. If you wanted to interview three people face-to-face, that could take up to two weeks to manage. The first person in the interview process would then be waiting two or three weeks before knowing if they got the job or not. So now we do everything via Zoom and email. This works swimmingly.
If you're interested in how others hire in remote teams, here are how companies we admire do this:
Now that you know how to build a remote team, we'll look at how to build culture in a remote team.
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