This week’s episode is a replay of our recent webinar Recruiting and Remote Work in a Post-COVID World.
We invited remote work thought leaders to talk about how the recruiting landscape will shift in the “post-COVID” world, how remote work will play a huge role in employer branding, building the infrastructure for your remote team, and more.
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Topics also covered in this episode:
- How recruiting teams can adapt to shifts in the talent market
- Creating a job description that attracts the right candidate
- Purposefully building infrastructure so your remote team can be sustainable and succeed
- The importance of culture when bringing new hires together in remote teams
- Practices or processes that might continue even after the pandemic is over
- Soft skills recruiters should be screening for when evaluating remote candidates
Mentioned resources:
Full transcript:
Mike: All right. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. Just to start off, we have about an hour here, so first things first, let’s go ahead and introduce our panelists today. First, we have Laurel Farrer, she’s the CEO and founder of Distribute Consulting. Laurel is a global thought leader in remote work. She starts, strengthens, and leverages virtual workforces to solve corporate and socio-economic concerns. She’s also a regular contributor to “Forbes” writing about all aspects of remote work.
Next, we have Mathew Caldwell, he’s the CEO and founder at RocketPower. Mathew is a Strategic People Ops Leader with over 20 years of experience. Before founding RocketPower, he was VP of People at Instacart and also the Director of Talent Acquisition at Mozilla. His core belief is people, power, business, and this has kind of driven him to empower the most efficient, effective, and professional talent ops teams in the industry.
And last but not least, we have Greg Russell, who is Head of Talent at Snapdocs. Greg is a Strategic Talent Leader as well, he’s been helping fast-growing tech companies hire for over 20 years. As Head of People and Talent at Snapdocs, he’s helped the company scale 5x in the last two years.
So those are our panelists for today. And you might wonder who I am. My name is Mike Fossi, I’m the VP of Sales here at Arc.dev. Arc is a remote developer hiring platform. So we make it easy for fast-growing companies to hire great developers who just happen to live outside of your typical zip codes.
So jumping in getting started with the first question…actually, before we do that, I just wanna encourage everybody we’ll have some time in the end for a general Q&A. But if any questions come up during the conversation, definitely feel free to just post that in the chat. I’ll try and do my best to address those as they come along. Any that I miss we’ll definitely address at the end.
But general question for all the panelists to kick things off. Let’s talk about the current market we’re in right now. So we’ve seen a lot of mass layoffs and you know, a lot of bad news. But do you think the impacts are different to certain skill sets more than others? Like, example, design, marketing, engineering, that and then how can recruiting teams adapt to the shifts in the talent market?
Mathew: The one industry that’s been hit the worst is recruiting. I think the most recent stats I heard is recruiters are…there’s 40% unemployment in recruiting. And I think that’s because yes, a lot of other things are getting hit engineering…I don’t really think engineering and design are getting laid off, I think they’re probably just not hiring as fast.
I think marketing is going through a very interesting time right now, because consumer behavior changing with COVID, and it’s maybe a temporary change, may be a long term change, we don’t know about that. But I do think that for sure, companies are pausing their hiring and that definitely impacts HR and recruiting. Sometimes HR is in more demand during this time. But definitely recruiting is not in demand as much right now because they’re just not as the volume of hiring being made.
Laurel: I agree. And from our perspective in the remote work industry, obviously, it’s a high time for us in our industry.
However, what we’re seeing is that it is less to do with industry and more to do with flexibility of the company. Are they willing to adapt? Are they willing to update and upskill? And if so, they’re able to float and enjoy business continuity in a better and more resilient way than their competitors even within the same industry. So that resiliency and business continuity is having to do a lot with culture than industry.
Mike: So Laurel, the next question is for you, you know, what do you think the new channels organizations can leverage to source talent are? Like especially, you know, when it comes to remote work, like, what kind of channels are the options that they’re looking at here?
Laurel: Well, just about any channel is going to have people that are looking for remote jobs. About 86% of the United States workforce wants a remote job and that has only increased in the past three months.
So you can really feel confident in using your existing channels and accessing good virtual talent. What needs to be updated instead of the channels is the funnel, you really need to focus on your talent acquisition funnel. Because what can happen is once you label a job as remote-friendly, the average increase in application rate is 3,000%.
And that is a massive, massive problem for your TA team if they’re not prepared for that level of volume.
So it really becomes a new conversation about quantity versus quality and how to balance and how to screen for skills and technical ability that is uniquely beneficial to remote work. So instead of focusing on channels for updating, I would focus on the backend instead.
Greg: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think, you know, remote is very channel-agnostic you know, I think. And the rest of that is all true as well I think. I know we’ve seen a huge increase in inbound applications recently but I think that’s really more a product of layoffs and folks being out of work at the moment. We haven’t necessarily kind of, you know, advertised that we’re much more open to remote, although we are obviously right now, and we will be going forward. But I mean, we’ve seen…I’ve got a recruiter who’s got a data scientist role on right now and she’s had 1,000 applicants in something like two weeks I mean, it’s just insane.
And I think Laurel makes another good point, I think just about…kind of, you know, what are the criteria that you’re evaluating, right?
If something is gonna be remote, you know, what are those skills and attributes and capabilities that are gonna set somebody up to better work in that type of environment, you know, rather than being in the office all the time.
Mike: So remote work it’s clearly becoming more mainstream, but how does the shift impact, you know, employer brand, right? So not necessarily, you know what the company does, but why it’s a good opportunity to work here, their interview process, the experience, what do you think is the impact overall there?
Mathew: So one of the things that was interesting when I worked at Mozilla, we were very, very distributed, we had offices, but we had people sitting in their houses all over the world. And one of the things I realized when we were working there is that actually was a competitive advantage. You know, we could compete against the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons, these other big companies that require people to be in the offices. Because you could sit in Canada, you could sit in, you know, your house in Denmark, you could sit anywhere and do the work. And so that was a competitive advantage for the few companies like Mozilla, or Envision, or GitLab up until now.
I think what we’re seeing right now is a huge shift in the reality that companies realize that…because they’ve been forced to actually work remote, companies that might have been hesitant to it in the past, are realizing it’s possible. I was talking with a head of HR for a semiconductor company and because they have manufacturer wafers at labs, they always thought everybody had to work in-person. And now, 93% of the employees are working remote because they have to.
So there’s gonna be a shift in that once every company or majority of companies out there allow for remote work, you can’t just rely on “Hey, we’re remote-friendly,” or “You can work remote.” You have to start focusing on really key important things which are the culture, the vision of the company, the core values of the company, what it stands for, the product that it’s making, you know, where the product is going.
Maybe the uniqueness of the people that are there if you’re an early-stage company, you’ve got some halo employees that might have had successful exits at some point or another. There’s gonna be things you’re gonna have to focus on that are not necessarily about remote anymore because, yeah, everybody is doing at this point.
So I think it’s gonna really require a mind shift for a lot of companies to think about how they brand themselves. They definitely have to be open to remote. I shouldn’t say they have to be, but you’re gonna be putting yourself in a good position if you are open to remote. And then that’s just almost like table stakes now. Now it’s what else is there that you can provide as value to an employee along their journey in their next role.
Greg: Yeah, I agree with that. And I think the important thing is…You know, I’m not sure that being more remote or more kind of remote centric, necessarily means that you change the culture. But I think to Mat’s point
It means that you really need to articulate the culture and you need to articulate everything.
Just so much better, more clearly, and more properly, just more communication, you know, when you have much more, you know, of your workforce remote rather than being in the office where they’re just kind of soaking all that stuff up by osmosis sometimes, right? Like, you could be really, I think, a lot more deliberate about how you communicate and getting that message out more often probably on some of the cultural stuff.
Laurel: I completely agree. I think it’s just critical for every employer to understand that what is happening right now in this, you know, two to three months’ reaction to suddenly implementing shelter in place work from home contingency plans it’s not remote work.
You are allowing people to work in a different workplace but truly optimizing virtual collaboration and integrating that into your operational workflow are very, very different things.
And so this is just…you know, changing the workplace, it’s not remote work. You really need to come into this with intention, with foresight, with proactivity and make the change management process very intentional so that you can make this sustainably. Because anybody can go remote for six weeks to three months, like, that’s easy to do, children can do it, honestly. However, maintaining that and making it sustainable is a different conversation.
I mean, we have the classic cases of IBM and Yahoo that retracted their policies after about a year of remote work, and even they, in the beginning, were saying, “Oh, this is easy, this is great, look at all these benefits that are happening.” It’s the sustainability that’s different. And so yeah, really integrating those changes, like we were talking about with the talent acquisition funnel.
Are you willing to really update the infrastructure of your company and upskill your workforce in order to match this new style of work? That’s what’s gonna make or break the success of a company.
Mike: That’s a good point. I think the last sentence there that you mentioned is definitely key, right. I think it has to come down to kind of commitment and change in the general culture overall, and that will eventually, you know, lead out to things like talent brand and all that. So excellent, good points thanks, everyone. Greg, the next question I’d like you to kick off here you know. I know you have some skills in this but what are some tips for creating job descriptions that help pick the right candidate, you know, especially one that really helps attract the right cultural fit for your organization?
Greg: Yeah, I do. You may know Fossi, I’ve got some strong opinions about job descriptions. So probably my strongest opinion…and I know, this is not something everybody shares, but you know, I really separate, there’s a job description, and then there’s a job ad. A job description is an internal document that we use to describe every little thing we can possibly think of about the role or the person we want. And the job ad is just that, it’s an ad, right and that’s where we really, like, we try and get creative, we try and tell the story of Snapdocs. And we try and really get some of the culture to kind of come across in that document, right?
And I think…to be perfectly honest, I mean, this is, you know, giving away one of my trade secrets, I guess. But just that little difference, instead of…you know, I won’t allow us to just post a bunch of bullet points as a job ad. I think that alone helps kind of get some of the culture across, and it helps really attract folks. It’s probably what is the second most common comment that we get from candidates is, you know, some variation of, “Wow, who wrote that job ad, that was awesome, it really gave me some sense of what Snapdocs would be like, and it made me really want to talk to you guys, right and find out, you know, what it’s really like there.”
So I think for me, that’s really key: it’s storytelling.
Recruiting is storytelling. You gotta tell the story to the candidate, of the company, of the opportunity, of the growth, of all these different things, of the culture.
And sometimes you need to tell that candidate…you know, the recruiter needs to be able to tell that candidate story internally to leadership or management or whatever. So, recruiting is all about storytelling. So I think it starts right from the beginning when you first put, you know, that ad up and you’re trying to attract people, what’s the story, take a little bit of time to craft something, some kind of story even if you’re doing it in bullet points.
Mike: That’s an excellent point. And yeah, being in sales, I’m a big fan of storytelling, just pretty much a lot of similarities with sales and recruiting. So we definitely incorporate you know, storytelling, and understand the impact and everything. Laurel, Mat, do you have anything to add here to Greg’s point here?
Mathew: I think for me, I really saw the power of that when it comes to like attracting the right culture. When I was at Mozilla, we did a lot of studies internally about people that were good performers over time, and what were some of the commonalities amongst a lot of those employees. One of the things we found is a large percentage of the high performers who stayed for a long time, had career progression, they also spent a lot of time outside of their work, doing some sort of volunteer work. They volunteered [inaudible 00:13:44] and campaigns, for food banks, for, you name it, churches, whatever, they just did something where they were giving their time for free to other people.
And we also kind of had this little edge of like fighting the man, like, we were fighting the Googles of the world, we were fighting the whole, you know, control over the Internet. And so there was this couple of aspects of our personality in the organization that we can highlight in job descriptions talking about whether or not you really want to do the right thing for humanity. Whether or not you’re driven by trying to, you know, empower the world as a whole, talking about trying to fight against bigger institutions to do what is right and hard. And we were able to incorporate a lot of that into the job descriptions, which to Greg’s point, highlighted what it’s like to be inside.
And it did a couple of things.
I think it attracted the right people, and I think it also filtered out the people we probably didn’t necessarily want.
So a job ad is meant…like you said, it’s about sales, but it’s also about kind of opening up the window a little bit into what it’s like to be an employee of this company.
Laurel: I love that we’re having this conversation about the importance of the hard conversation, right, the tactical conversation, as well as the emotional-based. Making that connection — that human to human connection — that culture is all about, that recruiting is all about, that storytelling, that emotional connection to the company because that’s foreshadowing of the importance of remote work skills.
More than ever before in history, we are seeing a necessity based on self-management of the worker. And what that requires is a much higher level of emotional intelligence in the worker. They need to have better communication skills, they need to have more intrinsic motivation and proactivity. They need to have more empathy in their communication. Just more than ever, we’re seeing this resurgence of soft skills.
And so I think it’s critical to foreshadow that in the recruiting and right from that job ad from day one saying, “This is a priority in our company, this is a priority in our culture, this is a priority in our operations.” So screening and filtering candidates right from day one, based on that emotional intelligence is critical.
Mike: Oh, yeah, that’s definitely great points all around, appreciate it. I wanted to actually switch gears here, we have a question from the audience. So question here is how do you see distributed or remote companies solving the isolation problem that remote employees can feel? Especially, you know, those that are very disconnected, they might just, you know, be themselves out, you know, middle of America or different country or something. But, you know, sometimes with time zone differences and things like that, how do you kind of address that? Whether it’s now currently when you just shifted to, you know, having to work with remote or whether you’re building this into your strategy. I’m curious to hear everyone’s thoughts as to how you build a culture around that piece?
Mathew: I actually can talk about this a little bit later. But this is something that I…again, back to Mozilla, I really started to appreciate that in Mozilla. We were very early users of Zoom at all things and because we were so distributed, and we had people all over the place and working out of their house I learned there that it really…it happened organically but then it became intentional.
In that, you think about all the…I think it was Greg earlier that said, you know, all the stuff that happens organically in an office, when you’re at the water cooler or when you’re sitting in a cafeteria, or when you’re taking a walk to the coffee shop down the street with a few of your employees. That is all culture staff, that’s all culture, that’s connections, that’s being…like, you’re feeling like you’re a part of a tribe. And it just doesn’t happen organically the same way when you’re remote and we’re all sitting in our houses.
So the company has to be very intentional and that means a lot more intentional structured conversations. For us, RocketPower we are a remote-first company; we have been that way from the beginning.
We have structured meetings every day of the week with different people in different formats, a couple of them are just short stand-ups. And then we have like, our teams will break off in different groups and there’s different types of interaction with the various different leaders and also team members together that don’t have any leaders. We do happy hours, virtual happy hours.
There’s a lot of that stuff that has to happen but then I think really it’s important, when you can, obviously, right now it’s hard. But when you can, to also get people together in-person on a regular basis. Mozilla did a great job of flying people in from around the world they were doing it like every six weeks. I don’t know if that’s feasible for a lot of companies. But having…you know,
At least once a quarter, maybe twice a year everybody together, and having them together for actual working sessions, not just to like hang out, and party, go golfing, or hang out the beach or drink. But to actually work, do some things, work together, understand what it’s like to work together and then also have all the social activities as well.
That will create connections that when you’re now separated, it’s a lot easier to feel like hey, I know this person and when I’m on a Zoom with them or I’m on a Hopin or whatever I’m doing, I have that connection with them that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. So I think there’s a lot to this but those are just a couple of quick things that [inaudible 00:18:54].
Greg: Yeah, just real quick on my two cents and I’d love to hear Laurel on this because I think this is your area, right? But, you know, for us, it’s been really interesting, because we were not a remote-first company at all really. Before the pandemic, we were…you know, our philosophy was very much, you know, everybody is an adult and yeah, you gotta work from home, sometimes you gotta wait for the cable guy or you just gotta be more productive work from home, great. Like, you know, there wasn’t a lot of questions or whatever. But at the same time, the default was the expectation is everybody is in one of our offices, you know, for the most part.
And you know, so this is…we obviously had to kind of rapidly shift away from that. And you know, it’s been a lot of work, like, for the people to even…I mean we’ve put in a lot of work to, you know, try and kind of create that virtual structure, right that virtual infrastructure like Mat was saying. You know, everything from the silly, like the afternoon fun poll to you know, the happy hour, the virtual lunch, like…you know, to more kind of serious, like, communications and get-togethers, that are centered around work or company communications. That’s a ton of work, right?
And I can see, you know, coming out of this, you know, our stance, I am not quite sure what our stance will be, but I know that it will not be what it was before we went in. We’re not gonna expect everybody back in the office all the time.
You know, we’re probably gonna be a lot more open to remote and have folks that will come out a day or two in the office kind of thing. And so, you know, we’ve kind of had to put some of this in place just to make sure that people are connected during this time. But, you know, we need to really think about okay, what of this do we keep? What becomes kind of, you know, infrastructure for more remote [inaudible 00:20:43]?
Mike: Yeah, that’s excellent.
Laurel: So this is a very common question, everybody is worried, are we raising an entire generation of hermits? It’s a valid question. It’s a valid concern. However, I think it’s really important to start with the fact that there two parts to isolation. One is social and that’s typically the one that we think of.
But the more important one that influences more remote worker isolation than social is informational isolation. In an office, people represent a resource so you have someone to ask if you have a question. They are the ones that are facilitating promotions and opportunities and introductions, they are a resource in your job. And so when you are disconnected from the people, you are more disconnected from the opportunities that people provide, than you are the actual people. So you don’t necessarily miss sitting next to somebody, you miss being able to ask somebody a question when it pops into your mind.
So that’s a really important factor of the change management process is you need to focus more heavily on infrastructure. How are you going to keep people connected so that the information stays unified, that the information within the company continues to flow? So that informational infrastructure is absolutely essential.
However, I mean, elephant in the room, of course, social isolation is also a concern we’re alone all day and that’s hard for a lot of people.
However, the common mistake that most employers make is when they say, “Well, you know, we need to be back in the same place so that our culture can exist.” And that’s why I remind employers that connection has nothing to do with proximity. It is absolutely common and plausible to be sitting 5 feet away from somebody else and feel completely isolated.
So that’s where culture…again it comes back to culture and we’re saying how are you truly connecting your people? How are you making sure that individuals feel uniquely recognized and valued and connected to the mission and vision of your company? That is true culture.
And if you have that culture that is not based on, you know, cereal bars in the break room and ping pong tables in the lobby, like, when you have true culture that is more the personality of your company, that is much easier to virtualize.
And then it just becomes a matter of changing the channel. So we’re not going to celebrate your accomplishments in the break room, we’re going to celebrate your accomplishments in a virtual event. And we’re gonna get together in Zoom, and I’ll talk about what a great accomplishment this was for you and for the team.
Mike: Yeah, no, that’s actually…I almost look at it as kind of like…One of the things you mentioned is you can be 5 feet away from somebody and still will be completely isolated. I think we saw a big shift in the early 2000s where people started to move away from cubicles and do like the open desk concept to kind of solve for that. And I think kind of remote is somewhat of the next step in that and we’ve all kind of had to figure out a way of, you know, how do we build this next area of collaboration, whether we’re, you know, sitting right there or, you know, hundreds of miles away. So excellent points there.
We have another question…actually three. Wow, active audience today, great. So, the next question here…and this kind of actually ties into what we were just talking about. So how do you ensure that you maintain the motivation of the staff who maybe are required to be physically in the office while the majority of the employees are working from home? So I guess you can kind of look at this a couple of different ways.
Like maybe there are some people that still need to maintain the office, to maintain something like a server or something like that, right they have to be there no matter what it’s essential. But you know, that can be somewhat isolating in itself or demotivating when you’re kind of sitting there in an empty office that used to be full of employees. But yeah, the question here is, how do you ensure that motivation of the staff who have to stay there and everybody else is working from home and things like that? Any thoughts on that?
Laurel: I’ll start. I don’t wanna talk too much. But I’ll give Mathew and Greg a chance to compile their thoughts. So hybrid teams are incredibly difficult for exactly this reason. GitLab calls it or I’m sorry, GitHub calls it “the pants versus coffee debate,” right. That the people in the office are saying, “Oh, you don’t have to wear pants.” And then people that are out of the office are saying, “Oh, you get a barista on call all the time.” So the grass is always greener on the other side, the dynamics are inevitably going to be difficult and to be tricky.
So in that circumstance, I would really focus on the priority and the ultimate objective of remote work, which is not to say that working from home or co-working space is better than working from the office, that’s the default that most people go to. However, that’s completely hypocritical, because we’re still saying that our productivity is based on a location. I mean, that’s like American politics, right? Is like, “I’m right.” “No, I’m right.” And it’s like, you’re both saying the same thing you’re both saying that you need to be in a specific spot to be productive.
So the real goal here is that we want our productivity to be location irrelevant, that it is completely independent of your location. And therefore you get to choose the location that is best for you and for your tasks.
And so it’s much more of an employee empowerment conversation, that they get to say, “I want to be in the office, I need to be in the office because it’s better for my job.” And somebody else can say, “I need to be in the office today, but I need to be at home tomorrow. And then I need to be at the client’s office on Friday because that’s what’s going to be the best location for each of the tasks that I need to do on those days.” And so it’s really leveraging and capitalizing on location as a resource as opposed to making somebody…you know, trapping somebody in a specific location for a specific reason.
Mike: Excellent points. Greg or Mat, anything…
Mathew: Go ahead Greg, sorry.
Greg: I’m not sure I have much to add there. I mean, I think yeah, for us, it’s gonna…Because I think, Fossi, part of your question was like, you know, for the folks who just must be there because their job just requires it in some way. Like, I think Laurel is making a great point. I think for most people, you know, if all the roles in the company are such that you can do this, that everybody’s got that extreme flexibility and choice to work wherever they wanna work, and wherever they feel like they can be most productive, whether that’s in office or in their home or on a beach in Costa Rica, like, that’s amazing.
I think the reality for some companies is that there will be some functions that just need to be in some physical location. That’s not…we’re gonna be more like the ideal that Laurel described, you know, there may be a team or two that we’ll have in the office a bit more going forward. But yeah, I think it’s…You know, and going back to Laurel’s example, I mean, I’m…for instance, like, I cannot wait to go back to the office.
And this is interesting, too, I think what’s been interesting about the shelter in place, the pandemic is, you know, you’ve got…and I saw this kind of fairly early on, it started to reveal itself, and I lived it, is, you know, you got people who are like, “Oh my god, work from home is amazing. I got no commute now and I got all this time and I’m pickling stuff and I’m like, you know, growing things. I am, like, getting back to the land and stuff and all my free time. I’m binge-watching, I just finished Netflix, you know?” And then you’ve got parents, right, who are going, “Oh my god, this is terrible I’ve got even less time than I had before, how is this possible?”
And so, you know, for some of us, it’s like that…a dream about the office is like the oasis, right of calm [inaudible 00:28:36]. So I think there’s gonna be, you know, a lot of different angles that people will come at this from and yeah. So I’m not even sure I answered the question there but those are some thoughts.
Mathew: Yeah, I mean, that was an interesting question I hadn’t thought about. And I like Laurel’s answer because she’s clearly thought about it more than I have. So like, I also think that there’s…like, I think of a couple of friends of mine who have jobs where they have to go to server rooms, they have to do certain things. And I know that there’s times when they’ve made comments to me, “Well, it must be nice you don’t have to go to the office.” We’re gonna have to navigate through some of this because there are…I mean, Instacart, where I used to work, those shoppers can’t work from home, they gotta do that work. The only way they can work is by going out and driving around and going to different people’s houses and stores.
Some of our other clients, they have certain types of jobs kind of to Laurel’s point that require location. And it’s gonna be an interesting dynamic, this hybrid model, pants versus coffee, I’ve never heard that before and I like it. This is, I think, an important question because we’re gonna space more of it in the future, there’s just gonna be certain jobs that have to be done in-person. I got another friend who does work for Chevron and they throw them on planes to fly to Dubai to work on…He’s gotta go do some crazy exotic welding for things. Welding can’t really be done virtually right now, actually Chevron is [inaudible 00:29:59] stuff around that.
But like, there are certain things are just gonna require people to be in places at times and we have to figure out how to, as Laurel said, empower them, make them feel appreciated, make them understand the value of what they’re doing for the company, and for the culture of the company. And yeah, I think I’m just babbling because it’s just…I’m thinking out loud here but great question.
Mike: Yeah, no, those are all excellent points. I think that it’s easy for someone like myself who’s in sales like yeah, let’s move the team no problem, right. But you bring up a lot of different roles out there and it becomes much more challenging, like, even if we stay in tech, right, you mentioned like welding and things. But if we’re staying in the tech industry, there are people that have to manage servers and you know, be there physically. There is infrastructure for a lot of these like, larger-sized companies that needs to be maintained, a lot of it comes down to security and stuff. So I think you know, even if 90 to 95% of the team moves remote, it’s still important to make sure that those people in the office are still feeling you know, recognized, and appreciated to everyone’s points. So, excellent points.
Another question from the audience here very active today. So this is a good one I like this. So teams that were co-located before this time, right…I’m guessing this time means COVID. So they’ve already established ways of work, and they likely feel connections with their employees. So how are new teams or even new hires or cross-functional teams or new initiatives being brought together? In what ways are firms addressing the connections to bring productivity? It’s a long question so let me know if you need me to repeat that.
Greg: I’ll jump in. I think this goes back to something…maybe it was Laurel said earlier, about the importance of culture, you know. I get the point of the question, like, I think about Snapdocs, you know, we’re 155 today, we were 110 before the shelter in place started. So we have done quite a bit hiring fully remotely, right. So we’ve got almost a third of the company is brand new and has only ever been remote only. And so yeah, you know, I would have thought that would be a big challenge of incorporating those folks, right. And wow, we’ve got all these other people had this shared experience, and that they can kind of…that’s the foundation of their experience at Snapdocs and these new people aren’t gonna have that. And wow, that’s gonna be like…it’s gonna be really hard this divide, right?
I’m gonna knock on wood here, I don’t think we’ve seen that so far, right. And I think that’s mostly a function of the fact that we have a really strong culture. And we’ve taken pains to make sure that we have translated the parts of that culture that were very kind of on-site-based, right office-based. We’ve taken pains to make sure that we translate those things…you know, the things that don’t just kind of obviously translate to a remote that we translated those into more of a remote format. I think that’s a big key bringing any new people into any organization and making sure that they feel welcomed and part of the team. And whether, you know, they’re sitting on top of each other or whether you’re fully remote, I think it’s that culture and that kind of cultural infrastructure, if you will, that foundation I think it’s just so important.
Mathew: Yeah, I would echo that
Times like this reveal weaknesses of culture.
And I think Laurel said this, that culture is not about candy bars and ping pong. I mean, if it is, that’s a problem, that’s a problem anyways, and times like this are going make it abundantly clear that that’s a problem. Culture needs to be about the people, about the motivations, about the intrinsic value that the company has in what it’s doing. It has to be about the focus, it has to be people being aligned towards mission and an objective. And then how you go about doing that, and how you treat each other, and how the community as a company works.
And if you’ve got that in place already and you’ve got solid culture that really focuses more on the things that have nothing to do with the building that you’re sitting in or the place that you happen to be sitting right now to do your work.
And then back to, I think, you know, what Laurel said is that you have to have the infrastructure in place, you gotta have the communication channels the Slack, the…not just Slack, but lots of different, like groups within Slack to allow people to communicate. You have to have you know, regularly scheduled and structured formal communication where you have Monday meetings, and Tuesday stand ups, and Wednesday this breakout team, and your afternoon breakout team with this team.
Like, you gotta have all of that and that will ensure productivity stays as long as you’ve got that culture. And I think that’s…we keep going back to culture, culture eats strategy for breakfast. I mean, if you have a strong culture, it will be able to survive this two, three month period of kind of a little bit of chaos and interruption in the way things are done. And could actually thrive right now, to the point where Greg’s company is a third the size bigger than it was before and it’s just all they know. So I think it does come down a lot to the culture and then obviously the mechanical infrastructure behind it.
Laurel: I think an easy way to think of this is that you are literally moving workplaces, every company that is going from physical to virtual, that is what you’re doing. And just like if you were moving from one office to another, the process that you would go through is, you know, packing the boxes, you get the pile of papers and file folders, and you go through them and you say, “Which ones do I need? Which ones do I not need? Is this essential in the new office.” And you get rid of those that you don’t, the ones that are essentially put in the box and you take it to the new office and you find a space for it.
And that’s exactly what we’re doing as teams right now is identifying what is essential, what is good to keep. Not just what do we have and moving it all to the new office, but what is really essential and critical to our culture, and how do we experience that.
And keeping that and making sure that there’s a space for that in this new virtual workplace and then getting rid of everything that we don’t. And we can see this in meetings, we can see this in onboarding, we can see this in every single element of our operations. And so those things that are worth preserving and worth keeping that we really value and are very critical, all we need to do is just shift that into a new channel.
So you know, was that tour of the office really, really fun and exciting during the onboarding phase? Then, how do you do that? Maybe we can create a virtual tour of our office and give somebody a screen share of the handbook and introduce them to different team members, and pop in on meetings, and give them introductions, or whatever. Like, it’s a time of opportunity and innovation if people can expand their mindset to not feeling so stuck and forced into it.
Mike: That’s a good point I like that. I think it’s a good idea about like, kind of recreating the experience, where you’re moving workplaces, I like that. Well, cool so I wanna shift gears here. We’ve got about 20 minutes left and kind of take the conversation from culture to actually recruiting, right. So first question directed at Laurel, but everybody feel free to jump in here. What are some of the hard and soft skills recruiters should be screening for when actually looking for remote workers? And how do you design your recruiting process to evaluate those skills?
Laurel: Yeah, well, Mathew and Greg have much more boots on the ground experience than I do. So I’ll really lean into them to answer this with much more experience. My answer is research-based and based on my limited experience as a COO of a fully distributed company. But that is…again, I’ll focus more on the emotional intelligence side. So there was a really great academic study conducted by Roberta Sawatzky at Okanagan College of Business in Canada, and she and I became great friends because I had this list through my time of screening candidates that I said, I feel like these are really essential soft skills to be looking for. And then when I heard about her study a couple of years ago, it turns out it was exactly the same skills.
And so we can follow that up in show notes or something.
But essentially, it’s these points of intrinsic motivation and proactivity, communication, empathy, trust. Skills like that are absolutely critical in remote workers, because, again, they’re self-managers. And so you need to be able to depend on them in a higher level, they need to be able to think critically and problem-solve independently. There’s just a higher level of awareness and responsibility that is required for remote workers. So it’s essential that you be screening for those soft skills.
But Mathew and Greg, I turn the floor to you.
Greg: I don’t have much to add. I mean, I was just thinking about the things that popped into my head then Laurel said them basically. So communications, I mean, I think being able to communicate well and effectively is gotta be number one in my book. EQ, absolutely the empathy and EQ is super, super important. And then the autonomy and the drive. Like I think, you know, if you’re not in the office every day and you know, you’re not walking around and seeing your people doing their stuff, right like, you have to be confident that they’re over there in their house or wherever it is doing their stuff, right. And so, you know, I think screening extra hard for that autonomy gene that proactivity can be really important.
Mathew: I co-authored a blog post about this with my COO back in early March, ironically, about remote interviewing and interviewing people remotely and some of the challenges that are there and some of the misconceptions about it. A couple of things that are interesting is “Science Daily” did a study on video interviewing, particularly and they talked about the fact that video interviewing it enables you to actually focus on the right things in interviews.
Historically, I’ve done it, I know a lot of people have also done this, like, when you’re a candidate you walk in to sit in a room and interview with someone, there’s a lot of this whole, like, I’m trying to connect with them as a person. I’m trying to understand who they are and find a way to, like, mirror them. And it’s all this gut, like, non-actual structured stuff that has anything to do with whether you can do the job, it’s about whether or not I can figure out a way to make this person like me as a human.
Whereas when you’re interviewing people who are gonna work remote, and you are interviewing them remotely, that entire process actually allows you to be much more structured, much less biased, and really focus on the key things.
But in order to be successful at that focusing on the hard skills and the soft skills, you have to really, ahead of time, like, you have to identify what those are. It has to be structured, each person that walks in that interview has to know what they’re gonna be focusing on from a hard skill and a soft skill perspective.
They need to know how they’re gonna ask those questions. What a good answer is and what not a good answer is, how to redirect, how to dig into certain areas. They really have to be able to do that very, very well, especially when you’re talking about remote employees and the remote interview process. It has to be a structured process that everybody is very well prepared for and they have all of the lexicon down, they have all of the understanding of what’s necessary down. And they’re aligned really, with what the goal of the interview is, is to find this person that does the specific job well.
And if they do that well, and they focus on all those skills the right way you actually have…The data shows that you get better outcomes in those interviews with people that actually could do the job.
The soft skills is extremely important I think when you talk about specifically, people are gonna be remote forever because they have to be able to communicate. I mean, both Laurel and Greg have said this. They have to be able to be…someone who is proactively gonna communicate because it’s not gonna just be something where their boss is gonna walk over and tap them on the shoulder and say, “Hey, what’s going on?” Or their colleague can see what they look like, they’re frustrated and say, “Hey, what’s going on?” They have to be able to communicate, but that’s things you can put in that interview format that allow for you to be able to figure that out.
Greg: I would argue those things that you were saying there, Mat, about kind of having your focus area and really understanding what questions to ask to get at that stuff, that’s just super important for interviewing, even if you’re in-person, right. Like, that’s super important. I do agree with you though like, I think interviewing remotely, there’s less false positives for that reason. Like you said, you know, sitting in front of somebody, and you kind of…there’s this, like, active trying to connect, which is important, right? And I think we do that over video as well but it’s just different. And I think it’s because you’re not in the room and there’s a slight barrier there.
I think you’re right, there’s like…it kind of keeps some of the false positives out of it. And it’s much more about like, you’re able to better kind of really hear and evaluate what somebody’s saying about those specific things that you’re asking about.
Laurel: And you just need to see them in their context too. Like, if they’re gonna be working remotely, you need to know what it’s like to work with them remotely.
Like this is why working interviews are so much more common in remote work and why virtual interviews need to be, like not want to be, need to be part of the funnel. Because you just need to see, like, is it awkward to have a video call with them, because you’re gonna be having a lot of them.
Mathew: A 100%. A quick little tag on to that my CEO that helped co-author that blog with me, one of the things he said is early on he was hiring for Accenture, all these inside salespeople who all they would do all day long is make phone calls.
And you realize all we’re doing is interviewing these people in-person, like, we [inaudible 00:43:43] on the phone and see the context of how they’re actually gonna do their work and interview them on the phone. Because that’s how they’re gonna perform. And I think that’s another thing you just [inaudible 00:43:51] Laurel is that potentially, this is gonna be their reality so how do they act on Zoom? How do they interview when they’re in their home? Do they have professional background or not a professional background but [inaudible 00:44:06]? Do they represent your company? Are you gonna be comfortable having them sit on Zoom in company meetings? I mean, I think that’s a good point
Mike: Thank you. Those are all great points. So I wanna…we’re gonna open up for questions and we probably got time for one more question. So I’ll just ask everybody in the group here…you know, we all know what happened during the pandemic, right it’s still going on, but there’s been massive shifts in working from home, regardless of, you know, whether this was part of your organization before or not. But it’s not really equal to I would say, normal remote work, right? What do you think some of the new practices or processes are that you think will continue even after this pandemic is over and we go back to the “normal?”
Anything that you’ve, you know, maybe said, “Hey, this is a great way we can do this,” or any sort of new processes in place that have actually been helpful that you might wanna keep or you see in other businesses doing might necessarily be you but?
Laurel: I’ll emphatically raise my hand to that and say what we’re experiencing right now and what we did experience especially in March and April, was not remote working. Even the veterans that have been working remotely for over a decade, like myself, we were all connecting with each other and just saying, “How is this so hard? Like, we’re good at this, we teach other people how to do this and we’re completely overwhelmed.”
Like, that was not working remotely, that was trying to maintain business continuity during a global emergency, period.
So yes, it will get much, much easier over time as things continue to stabilize and as our companies understand what the next normal is going to be.
So in terms of things that I think are going to be continuous regardless of if we go back to the office or not, we will never go back to that phase of our business world in which the question of remote work was if. If it’s a possibility, if it’s a viability, we’ll never go back there. Now it’s been proven internationally at scale, that remote work is possible. So now it’s a question about how. How are we going to collaborate as virtual teams, regardless if people are in the office or at home? How do we enhance mobility and resiliency in our companies?
And so that I think is more…again, not based on workplace and location, but based on the elements that make remote work different and more resilient. And so that’s things like asynchronous communication, results-based tracking. And again, not to be repetitive but emotional intelligence and soft skills. So I think that that’s what I hope to see more of in the future.
Greg: Yeah, I’m not sure kind of what will carry forward. I agree with everything Laurel was saying there. I think one thing that I’ve seen is with being remote, I think during this period, we’ve kind of optimized for a lot of meetings in a sense because I think everybody is coming yearning for the connection and feeling like, you know, they wanna get together with their colleagues. So there’s something where maybe normally you’d kind of look at it and go, “Is that a meeting or should I just fire off an email or get on Slack with people or whatever?” And I think we’re kind of leaning towards yeah, let’s just meet, right? We wanna connect.
I think that will, hopefully, kind of change a bit because I think…in some ways, I think what this has shown is that we don’t need to be, you know, physically together, we don’t need to be meeting. And so I think there’s probably is a lot more that we can get done asynchronously. But then making sure okay, well, so what is the replacement for that kind of, you know, face-to-face that in-person connection, right? And so maybe that’s just more social stuff over Zoom or whatever that is.
And then the other comment is you know, this is definitely showing us that, you know, interviewing fully remote, virtual interviewing, hiring and onboarding, is not a problem. We, flipped over and we’ve hired, you know, at a much faster pace over the last two or three months than we were beforehand for various reasons, you know, intrinsic to our business. But we haven’t missed a step I mean, we’ve hired and onboarded 50-ish people since this thing started, you know, and everything’s been, you know, the process has been just as good. Everything has been just as good so far, so that’s great.
Mathew: And I think I agree with what both Greg and Laurel said. I think one of the things I’ll say is a little different is the focus around the recruiting side of it. This is gonna be very, very interesting for society in general, you know, people…it’s gonna open up opportunities for people that never could work for Facebook or Google, or Amazon, or you name the cool company that’s in one of the tech hubs because they don’t live on the tech hubs. So it’s going to open up opportunities for humans to do cool work that they never had open to them yet, or never had open to them before. So I think that’s awesome from a candidate perspective.
I think from the mechanics of actually, during recruiting, it’s gonna be interesting. I’m sure Greg can appreciate this when we would have a manager say, “I don’t care where they live, I’ll hire them from anywhere.” That made recruiting really hard actually because our way…the mechanics of recruiting was done is I would put in like a zip code. And I would then put in all the requirements for the skills that are necessary and all the other things that we’re looking for. And then I’d have a pool of like 1,000 people that I try and whittle down like a couple hundred and then go and reach out to them. Well, now if they can work anywhere, that pool is now like 100,000.
And then how do I think about I got a call like Johnson who is helping support this, it’s like 1.00 in the morning his time right now, how do I call that person? Do I [inaudible 00:49:56] 1.00 in the morning to call that person? You know, how do I actually go out and do this attraction of quality candidates that literally can sit anywhere, and then manage that.
And so the recruiting top of the funnel mechanics of how you get great talent, not even just about the branding, but the actual work of doing it is gonna have to change. I think it’s gonna have to focus a lot more on actually branding and become more of a marketing ploy and trying to really attract people to apply because that will help people apply at 1.00 in the morning when I’m sleeping. And instead of me having to go out and source somebody at 1.00 in the morning.
But then it’s also gonna require even companies to think about their recruiting and interviewing teams and make sure that they’re set up in a way where they can accommodate people that are on opposite sides of the clock so that they can really enable those people
[inaudible 00:50:46].
Overall, I think it’s gonna be a really amazing thing for lots of reasons, but it’s gonna create some challenges. But I’ve always said challenges are a good thing, they cause you to grow, and they force you to get better. And I think this is gonna cause the tech world, the employment world, in general, to grow and get better. I think it’s gonna cause a lot of opportunity for humanity, people can do some cool stuff that they never had options before.
Laurel: Yeah, I’ll piggyback onto that and say that when we see that pendulum swing…just like we were talking about in the beginning of this event. When people just say, “Well, we can hire from anywhere” and they just literally open it to anywhere, it’s really going to cause massive problems for your talent acquisition funnel. So instead, again, think of location as a resource to be leveraged and not to say, “Well, okay, like, we’ll just default to the United States.”
But think about, okay, certain states have certain licensure expenses, how can we save costs and cut costs by recruiting in these states instead of these states? Or there are a few universities in specific locations throughout the world that have really strong programs for our industry can we target those zip codes? And then combining all of those factors and saying okay, which candidates have easy access to the airport because we know that we’re gonna have on-sites at least once a quarter.
Like so many factors like that, that can help you whittle down and really identify unique and valuable opportunities zones for your company individually. So that’s something that we do at Distribute Consulting and have seen immense success with.
Greg: Just one more thing to add on top of all that, right, I think we’re gonna see a huge shift, because right now, like, we were saying, you know, everywhere I mean, the economy is a wreck, but the tech world, there’s massive layoffs, massive unemployment. We’re getting thousands of inbound applicants now as we move to this more remote, more flexible posture. But that won’t be the case, you know, forever. In a year when things kind of are back on track, hopefully sooner, then we’re back to, you know, needing to go and source every engineer. Because you got…you know, you put up an ad and you get three responses, right? When we’re more back to those days, then that’s gonna be completely different again, right.
So you know, just that difference between sorting through 1,000 resumes from all over the country and then needing to be really targeted about, okay, I’m gonna go hunt for some people and I’m gonna go hunt in these different locations you know.
Laurel: And diversity, the ripple effects of this on diversity cannot be ignored.
Mike: Yeah, that’ll bring us up to our last question actually it came up, you know, how do you mitigate bias in recruiting when you’re interviewing for no particular set of focus on soft skills and things like that, especially when it comes to remote? Any thoughts there?
Mathew: Lots of thoughts. I don’t know if I can even say mine in two minutes but. I mean, I think it goes back to you have to have a structured interview. Comes in when you don’t have a structured interview when you don’t have the entire team agreed upon. Soft skills are important, communication skills are important. A lot of other soft skills are gonna be important and you have to make sure that the person that’s doing the interview, understands what they’re interviewing for, understands the question they need to ask, and how to measure the responses. Because if you just let somebody walk into an interview unprepared, then it’s just gonna be biased. It really just comes down to…you are going to, “I think I can hang out at the park on Saturday with this person so that’s why I wanna hire them,” and that’s a recipe for all sorts of disaster on biased.
So it’s like, any type of interviewing whether it’s in-person or remote, structured interviews where everybody that’s involved in the organization, that’s involved in the interview, has bought in and really built out that rubric to identify all the skills not just the soft skills, but all the skills. And measure them and weigh them and report them back accordingly and appropriately. Quite as quickly as I can say.
Greg: Hundred percent agree that was gonna be my answer was structure.
Laurel: Me too.
Mike: Perfect because that’ll bring us right to the end here. So you know, to the audience, if anybody has any other questions, we’ll be sending out follow-ups. And if you have any other questions we can definitely redirect those to the audience. We’ll also include everyone’s Twitter handles and things like that so you can stay connected after the event. But I wanna say thank you to Mat and Greg and Laurel thanks for taking the time. I think this is a really good conversation and definitely a lot of good points were highlighted here. So thank you all for coming here and joining us.
And thanks to the audience, you know, getting a lot of good responses here about how insightful and helpful this was already. So, again, we’ll be sending out some follow-ups and include everyone’s Twitter handles or preferred method of follow up. And yeah, I wanna say, you know, to everyone out there to stay safe and enjoy the rest of your week. And you know, thanks for joining us today.
Laurel: Thanks.
Mathew: Thanks, everybody.
Greg: Thank you.
Mathew: Really appreciate it.
Greg: Thank you.
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