Talent acquisition tactics to grow remote teams

Remote working was pretty much unheard of until the early 2000s.

But now, UK workers are only going to the office 1.5 days a week on average, which means that most of the time, Brits are working from home. That's according to a survey by Advanced Workplace Associates.

Remote working, or at the very least hybrid working, is here to stay, and it’s working for both businesses and their employees.

Employees enjoy a better work-life balance, companies can save money on expensive leased office spaces and recruit top talent from all over the country or even abroad.

So, let's say you've decided how you're going to build your team and the roles you need. The next stage is finding and hiring those people, remotely.

The recruitment process isn't drastically different, seeing as almost everything is online nowadays anyway. But today's job market favours the candidate, so your company could be competing for talent against some real heavyweights. 

In this article, we'll share a few talent acquisition tips to help you find and hire the best talent for your remote team.

How to find and hire remote workers

Building a remote team might be new to both your business and your employees, so spend some time aligning your goals with your hiring strategy. Working out who you need for what job or project will take a while.

Once the time is right to hire team members, consider the following:

1. Cut through the noise with a competitive compensation package

The labour market is more competitive than ever, with job vacancies in the UK rising to new records in 2022. As a result, it’s getting harder for businesses to attract anyone, let alone the best people for the job.

Offering competitive packages is not optional. To cut through the noise, businesses need to offer more than a competitive salary and extra benefits.

Benefits that employees actually want include: 

• Wellbeing package (including physical and mental health support)
• Flexible working
• Unlimited holiday (or the option to buy more)
• Training and development
• Private healthcare/dental
• Employee share scheme

Wellbeing covers a whole range of things from fitness to coaching, counselling and beyond. But there are also employee experience platforms like Perkbox that offer a range of deals, discounts and other rewards.

Work with remote workers to find a package that suits them and their location, even if that’s in a different country.

As for training and development, provide employees with paid leave to attend training sessions or encourage them to block out time in their working day to dedicate to learning.

Startups like Lokalise provide employees with an allowance that enables them to choose what they opt into.

Another option is to offer equity in the form of an employee share scheme. The best talent will be looking for a slice of your business’s success. A pie of the pie also acts as an incentive that helps glue teams together. 

Equity is not only a powerful tool to help fuel long-term growth but also lower employee churn. In fact, 95% of Vestd customers said that their share scheme actively helped them improve employee loyalty.

Book a free consultation today to find out more.

Ultimately, putting together a winning package perks interest and markets the business.

It also provides businesses with an opportunity to advertise their company culture from the outset, which will help attract employees who are a good cultural fit. 

2. Reach out to candidates

As remote working has become the norm, demand for remote work and flexible work has also rocketed.

FlexJobs found that some 58% of respondents wanted to be full-time remote employees, while 39% desired a hybrid work environment. Altogether, 97% of employees want remote work, creating massive demand.

Consequently, simply posting jobs on Indeed, Reed, Monster, LinkedIn, etc, and tagging them with “remote role” is likely to leave businesses inundated with applications. Startups are often already tight on time without having to sift through 1,000 applications for each of their vacancies.

Instead, go out and find potential employees using candidate outreach. In other words, scope candidates, build a shortlist and approach individuals suitable for the role.

According to Statista, email is the most popular candidate outreach channel, followed by LinkedIn. Contact people directly and introduce them to your business, role and/or project.

Again, this is a great opportunity to show your company culture, values and goals, so be sure to craft an effective opening message.

3. Use freelance websites to find talent

The pandemic led to a surge in freelancing, which benefitted freelance work platforms like Upwork and PeoplePerHour.

According to Upwork, some 28% of the Fortune 500 used Upwork to find candidates from 2017 to 2018, citing reduced time, lower costs and enhanced access to talent and skills as some of the benefits.

Freelance websites require users to prove their skills to rise through the ranks, which are publicly accessible through their profiles. Freelance workers are also generally experienced in remote work, which is a massive bonus for employers looking to scale remote teams quickly.

You can either hire through the platform on a freelance basis or do a little digging to locate the freelancer on LinkedIn or another social platform.

4. Check out startup recruitment boards 

If you’re creating a remote team for a startup, then consider using startup-specific recruitment platforms.

One such provider is Kandidate, which allows companies to locate, screen, and manage applications for specific roles in modern startups.

Their embedded talent model ‘embeds’ a recruitment specialist within a startup, enabling them to understand the startup while locating the skills and talent they need to scale. This offers an agile alternative to hiring an internal recruiter or going through an agency.

Other options include Hired By Startups and Table Crowd Talent, which specialise in locating-demand roles across marketing, sales, data science, operations, design, etc. These specialist recruiters work with both newly founded startups and those that have reached seed and series A funding.

Larger remote work job boards like FlexJobs are another option and are already used by some of the world’s biggest brands. Posting remote roles on LinkedIn is also guaranteed to produce results, but be prepared to handle high volumes of applications from people all over the world.

5. Create a robust screening process

Once you’ve created a shortlist of candidates, it’s time to screen them for the role or project.

If you’re handling this internally, some traditional screening questions worth considering include:

• Do you have remote working experience?
• What platforms or tools do you use to collaborate with others?
• What are your preferred communication channels?
• What is the greatest challenge associated with off-site work?
• What makes you an effective remote or hybrid worker?

Many businesses now use a combination of traditional interviewing and modern psychometric, aptitude, or personality screening. Research shows that some 75% of the Fortune 500 now use psychometric testing in recruitment.

While psychometric testing sounds somewhat dystopian, these types of tests cut through cultural biases to objectively assess a candidate’s skills and are proven to reduce bias and support inclusion.

Innovative candidate screening platforms include:

• Arctic Shores: which uses psychological testing to neutralise cultural biases and discover candidate skills and strengths.
• Saberr: a data-driven platform for employee screening and onboarding.
• AccessGroup: a UK-based pre-hire screening and onboarding platform.

Whatever screening and onboarding strategy you choose, ensure it works for your prospective employees. In one HubSpot survey, 78% of respondents said they believed that candidate experience is an indicator of how a company values its people.

Providing an exceptional candidate experience has a knock-on effect that reverberates through a business and its culture, so it’s definitely worth tweaking and refining.

Vestd started life as an office-based business but transitioned to an all-remote setup once we realised the advantages. 

It required a combination of soft skills, culture and values, useful tools, organisational skills, and project management, among other things. Vestd is proud to be one of many successful 100% remote startups that are out here doing business today.

But remember, finding and hiring remote workers is one thing, retaining them is another. Here's how startups can retain talent and reduce employee turnover.