Remote Working Is Here to Stay – Can the Same Be Said for Remote Developer Hiring?

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Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV from Pexels

The past year and its unexpected pandemic crisis encouraged companies all around the world to implement remote working practices. It is clear now that the companies in the technology sector adjusted to the shift quite more easily. After all, remote work has become inevitable if organizations want to keep their day-to-day activities. For these companies, an extra handful of challenges appeared because of the fast adoption of remote developer hiring. 

The change that remote work brought has prompted a fast scale-up of technological capacity to make that kind of work possible, and that is rapid digitization. The overall industry digitization bloomed once companies conducted the challenging process in the middle of the crisis.

Remote working productiveness is actually not a recent breakthrough

The studies from 2015 and 2018 claim that remote employees are more productive than office employees. Pandemic crisis substantiated that statement and ‘helped’ to speed up that shift. In fact, it was really sudden; the shift happened in a matter of weeks. However, this new situation made some employees unhappy (i.e., employees who needed their equipment for work), but they started to become more prepared for their new’ work from home’ routine with time. Companies also created urgent response teams to provide the workers with additional equipment.

All things considered, the general opinion is that remote work is here to stay, especially as companies want to keep the level of productivity gained during the crisis.

Taking a particular approach towards remote hiring

Remote working offers a unique way of team distribution through various time zones while making them complete tasks for 24 hours. That also positively affects recruiting teams’ agenda – when hiring, they have a wider selection of talented candidates since the location area is not relevant anymore.

However, things are not so simple once you have completed a remote developer hire. It is also important to conduct the onboarding process in the right way because, especially now, employers have to do a transition smoothly for their hires and integrate recently hired employees with their roles as easily as possible.

Searching for workers with remote experience makes more sense

When you decide to build a remote team, recruiters have to be aware that the remote team requires a slightly different skillset, so it’s not a bad idea to search for people with remote experience. Some traits that might be useful in this situation are: 

– Autonomous work – Remote team workers have to be good at time management and independent decision-making. 

– Colleagues collaboration – Adaptable and intuitive individuals will adjust quickly to the remote environment and make the communication smooth and efficient. 

– Proactive communication – Possibly scattered in completely different locations, remote team members have to communicate with each other a lot, and each member has to understand others really well in order for the virtual meeting to be efficient.  

In a remote work environment, it is extremely important to keep self-motivation on a high level. Taking initiatives on projects and doing tasks without overlooking are qualities highly appreciated in members.

Evaluating candidates for their remote working skills is very important, mostly because it often takes some time to adapt to a new working environment. Remote workers can develop soft skills, but not as quickly as needed, so they should have them already; these traits have to be active from the start. Otherwise, there might be some complications while trying to make everything work.

Pursuing a perfect candidate when hiring a remote team

As already mentioned, there are more candidates and, therefore, skilled professionals at your disposal when hiring people for remote work. Also, workers scattered in various locations can cover more working hours and complete tech projects efficiently. Moreover, having remote employees can bring skills to your company that is usually scarce in this specific location. On the other hand, remote developer hiring enables software developers to find a perfect job more easily since they don’t have to relocate, making the human resource department’s workload much lighter. 

Furthermore, when considering remote working, it’s always clever to focus on the expenditures – that’s how remote working contributes on a higher level by reducing allocated funds for co-working spaces and costs for the office, food, and drinks.

Remote working and hiring insights by industry leaders

Companies are perhaps still struggling to adjust to the remote working shift. However, listening to the advice of industry leaders who have useful experience on how the pandemic crisis affected their business might be helpful.