When you are running a business, the staff you have on your team are key to your ability to create a positive reputation, deliver on your promises, and grow your presence. If you have the capacity to employ people who work remotely, then you have access to a far larger pool of potential hires, and this can help you attract even better people. Of course, it can be difficult hiring people who aren’t local, as you don’t necessarily get a chance to meet them face to face or make the same connections in the professional networks outside of your area.
However, by mastering recruiting people outside of your state, or even overseas, you can build a fantastic team and also have an easy route to expanding into new locations should you want to do this further down the line.
Here are some tips for recruiting out of state:
Advertise On Job Boards
Whether you choose to use a recruitment agency to help find candidates for you or advertise yourself, it is important to have your job ads on job boards people in areas you are interested in recruiting in – whether it’s the whole country or even the whole world – will look. The major job search sites are used the world over, however it is important that you specify in your ad not the location of your HQ, but that the job is remote or ‘anywhere’. If you are recruiting for a new specific site out of state or perhaps want a new sales person in a specific chosen location to expand, then obviously that’s the location you should state in your ads, however being clear about this will make all the difference in terms of whether your job comes up in people’s searches when they are using these sites.
Do At Least the First Rounds of Interviews Online
Depending on how senior the position is, you may want to invite people to travel to your site for final interviews, however as you’ll need to reimburse the costs of even the unsuccessful applicants, and travel can be difficult for some people, you really only want to do this as a final interview stage when you have a very short shortlist. To sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to your applicants, do a round of resume reviews with some other people on your team, and then decide on the ones you would like to do an initial phone or online interview with. If you plan to do any tests or ask for things like writing samples, then you should ask for these to be submitted online ahead of the interviews too.
Over the phone can be fine for a first stage interview, but unless it isn’t important to you at all how someone is presented (for instance you are hiring for a job like programming or copywriting as opposed to sales or marketing where the position may be customer facing), it is best to do a round of interviews by video conference or using your webinar marketing system so you can see the candidates. This can also be a good idea if you plan to have a panel of people interviewing because it can be less confusing for the candidate if they can see who is speaking when there are different people on the call.
Be Clear About Whether the Job Is Entirely Remote
Some roles can be done effectively without the worker ever having to set foot on your site. Others can be done largely remotely, however you would expect the employee to come to the office occasionally for key meetings or even for some annual social events so they can network with their teams better. It is important to be clear which scenario your candidates will be in from the outset. Many people have no problem traveling every so often, but some people have issues with that due to childcare needs or disability being the reason they want to work from home to begin with. To make sure your expectations are the same as the candidate’s specify ‘occasional travel’ or ‘fully remote’ or something along those lines from the outset.
These are just a few helpful things to make recruiting outside of your local area easier.
