CEO's Guide: Hire Remotely & Save on Costs

The future of remote work is now. As people realize the benefits of working in the comfort of their homes, the percentage of workers who choose to remain in their remote workplace is expected to increase exponentially in the coming years.

As for businesses, shifting from a physical to a remote workplace is an opportunity to cut down on operational costs without affecting their company’s performance. In fact, 80% of organizations all over the world are already planning to implement completely remote work with international teams.

But what really are the right steps to successfully hire remote teams? To answer this, we created a detailed guide about the new digital workplace and hiring remotely. In this article, we talk about the benefits, the requirements, and how you can simplify the process for your business.

Things you need for a successful remote workplace set-up

You can’t randomly choose people, hire them, put them on a team, and expect great results. There are still some factors that you need to consider and plan out carefully to ensure the success of your team and your business. It includes three things: People, Tools, Process.

Let’s take a look at how you can work on these three factors:

Remote Team

To make your remote hiring successful, the first thing that you should look into is the type of people you want to have as a part of your team for your specific business function. It is extremely necessary as your employees need to work remotely, and collaborating across members will be the key to your remote team’s success.

1. Hire people with initiative.

When finding people to hire, make sure to find those who have the initiative to finish their tasks no matter the circumstances. Of course, you’ll still need to guide them on their work, but they can still make things work and lead your team to success even at the bare minimum.

2. Hire people you can trust.

In business relationships, trust is a vital foundation of collaboration and teamwork. So, make sure to find people that you can entrust to your business functions. Aside from easing your mind from any worry, it can also promote a healthy culture within your workplace.

3. Hire people who can adapt to any working environment.

No matter how great your employees are, if they cannot adapt to the working environment that you want to build, they will just cause problems or even leave your company right away. Thus, it is essential to talk about the working environment right from the interview and see if they are an excellent fit for your business.

4. Hire people who can fit in and understand your company culture.

It is important the people you will hire can perfectly fit in and understand your culture. If not, it will only lead to several work issues and misunderstandings which may affect the quality of their work.

Processes

Aside from people, you should also plan out how the workflows through the team. It is important to consider this in order to build a successful team.  It can include the hierarchy of positions, identifying decision-makers, and setting the culture you want to instill in your employees.

Your employees should have a knowledge base about the process flows and escalation points to maintain a smooth transition of responsibilities within the organization. This will also help your workers to do their job more efficiently and independently.

To highlight any issues that your employees may face, you can set weekly digital hangouts aside from meetings to give them time to just talk comfortably about those things.

Tools for Managing Remote Teams

Because a remote setup means a limited way to communicate and collaborate with the team, it is important to invest in software and tools for your employees. This is to make sure that everyone is on the same page and executing their responsibilities well.

These tools and software should include:

• Performance tracking tools
• Project management tools
• Communication tools

It is important to set these tools before or right after hiring your team for better performance and productivity. It will also help in building trust between the company and your employees.

Steps in hiring competitive remote employees

1. Make the hiring process legal.

When hiring remote employees, it is important to undergo a legal process to avoid any hiring issues and build trust within your remote team. There are three ways to do this: set up a legal entity, hire them as independent contractors, or hire them through an Employer of Record (EOR).

Setting up an entity

If you plan to create a big team of employees in a country and have enough resources and budget, setting up an entity will work for you. This will provide your company with an official and registered entity, although the process may be more complicated and expensive than other methods.

Hiring independent contractors.

If you want an easy and quick method, you can hire independent contractors or freelancers to work for your business. However, there may be more disadvantages to this than advantages. Because the hiring did not go through a legal process, you will have little to no control over what an independent contractor does to any company information, especially without a binding contract. Employees will also not be entitled to any government benefits, making it more challenging to retain them. While it is a quick method, this may put your business at risk.

Hiring through an Employer of Record.

If you are not planning to hire an entire department in one go and would like to outsource employees in a different country legally, engaging with an Employer of Record will work for you. A lot of companies are now switching to hiring employees through an EOR because of the security and convenience. An EOR makes outsourcing remote employees legal and official without having to go through the legal process yourself. This takes off the hiring process from employers while providing employees with labour benefits which can be a significant factor in retaining them.

2. Identify the talents you need and write a job description.

After choosing a method for hiring your remote team, identify the roles and positions you are looking to fill for the company. This will help you determine the skill set, characteristics, and experiences you need to look for in a candidate.

If you are working with outsourcing companies such as Employer of Record, they will help you draft job descriptions for the open positions in your company.

3. Create job posts via hiring and social media platforms.

The next step would be to create your job posts on online hiring platforms. To make the process faster and more efficient, you can also post your job hiring on Facebook pages and groups to see if anyone is interested. This process may sometimes take up to more than a week to find the ideal candidate.

One of the benefits of working with outsourcing companies to help you source is never having to worry about posting a job vacancy or monitoring applicants as they come, as this will be included as part of the service.

4. Pick the best candidates for interviews.

After gathering all the application forms of interested applicants, set up a standard in choosing the best candidate. If you have a lot of applications to sift through, it will be best to create a shortlist of candidates before going through the interview process. Another important note is to make sure that you have a skill test for output-based roles and ample background checking. Then, from the interviews and test results combined, choose the best ones and schedule them a final interview.

As you can imagine, this process takes time and may require multiple back and forth to source the right candidate. Luckily, all of these can be taken care of by remote staffing agencies.

5. Arranging the Hire

Once you have selected the best candidate from your pool of talents interviewed, it’s time to close the hiring process. This is ideally done through an offer call where a verbal agreement is made regarding working hours, pay, working arrangements, and benefits included in the offer. It is then followed by a binding contract that stipulates in writing the terms and arrangements, roles, and remuneration as discussed.

Depending on each candidate, this process may also require some back and forth between parties when undergoing negotiation or worse, when miscommunication on arrangement happens. When you engage with an outsourcing company such as an EOR, this is automatically simplified for you as your EOR provider will be the one to take care of all the needful to closing the hire.

6 .Welcome new employees to the team and set an onboarding meeting.

You already have the best candidates on your team, and everything that’s left is to welcome them on your team and set an onboarding meeting. Walk them through everything they need to know about your company, the history of your foundation, your target market, your mission, vision, and values. They should also be properly informed about the products or services you offer and the tools your team is using for collaboration.

Most importantly, onboard your new team members about your company culture and how you expect them to approach the team, their work, and you.

Speed up the remote hiring process through EOR services

Remote hiring provides a lot of benefits both for the employees and the employers. However, there are still processes a company needs to undergo before legally hiring an employee from a different country.

To make the process more cost-effective and convenient, you can connect with a reliable employer of record like Remotify. Our services can help simplify the complex processes of

• Employee sourcing
• Facilitating contracts
• Interviews and background checks
• Complying with local labor laws
• HR administrative tasks
• Setting up local payroll
• Providing benefits for your employees.

With all of these taken care of, you can focus on more critical business functions of your company while the EOR company is outsourcing your ideal candidate.

Check out Our Services to learn more about what we can do to help simplify outsourcing for you.

About Remotify

Remotify is your next-generation solution to growing your team remotely and cost-effectively in the Philippines.

Through our Employer of Record service, Remotify will employ and payroll your workers in the Philippines and do the heavy lifting for you. We will take care of local HR, compliance, attendance tracking, payroll, and reporting so you can focus on what is most important: growing your business.

This means you can quickly and securely hire employees in the Philippines, attracting top talents and keeping them engaged through the process. At the same time, you avoid the overhead of establishing your entity.

From complex local tax and labor laws to in-country capital requirements and compliant HR management, payroll, and benefits disbursement, getting started in a new country to tap on its low cost and great talents can be a time-consuming endeavor. But with the right partner, it doesn’t have to be. Remotify is here to keep things simple for you.