Every Friday, we’re answering your questions about business, startups, customer success and more.
Happy Friday!
This week’s question comes from Harshal Katre, who asks:
I love this question, because it hones in on an undeniable truth: not every good worker is a good remote worker (yet).
Successfully working from home is a skill, just like programming, designing or writing. It takes time and commitment to develop that skill, and the traditional office culture doesn’t give us any reason to do that.
We had some early hires—very talented people—not work out, only because they had never worked remotely before and we were unsuccessful at helping them develop that skill.
Now, we don’t just look for good startup employees, but we look for good startup employees with experience working remotely.
So, where do we find these people?
We’ve had three great sources of leads:
- WeWorkRemotely.com. I have yet to find a job board online that consistently attracts high-quality candidates. It’s simple and easy to navigate, and we’ve hired two full-time employees there.
- Networking. Building relationships (see my guide here) has a lot of benefits, and access to great talent is one of the biggest ones. Once you’ve put in the work to build a strong relationship, incredibly valuable introductions are often only an email away.
- This blog. We get 50+ emails per week from readers of this blog who want to work with us. That’s how Matt, one of our awesome developers, joined the team.
Everyone on our team has either worked on a distributed team before, or been a freelancer or entrepreneur in the past.
What about you? Where have you had success hiring remote workers, or finding a job as a remote professional? Let us know in the comments!
