Use these interview questions and time when hiring candidates for remote jobs to guarantee you find and place the right person each time.

What to ask candidates for remote jobs?

When interviewing candidates to work remotely, make sure they can perform their role skillfully.

Here are some challenges that distributed teams face:

• Communication: Difficulties increase when remote employees miscommunicate. Things get even more complex when team members are in different time zones.
• No supervision: Team Leaders have to trust that remote workers are efficient. It is also tough to decide if they are engaged in their work.
• Cultural fit: Remote workers may have a tough time integrating into the team’s culture, as they hardly communicate with their colleagues in person.

Handle these difficulties by hiring remote employees who are:

• Organized and self-disciplined
• Problem-solving attitude and motivated
• Strong communication skills

Also, make sure that they have the required equipment to work remotely (like desktop/laptop and high-speed internet).

Interview questions for remote workers

• Do you have a desktop/laptop and high-speed internet connection?
• Do you have any experience working remotely before? What type of challenges did you face? How did you overcome them?
• How do you plan your day?
• What type of distractions do you generally have when working from home? How do you make sure that they don’t affect the quality of your work?
• Do you check emails after your working hours?
• If you have connectivity issues during a call with your client or manager, what would you do?
• Name the task management application you use.
• You are working on a big project with team members who work from the office. How would you collaborate with them to meet the project deadlines?
• How do you stay motivated without any regular supervision?
• How do you ensure confidentiality when working from home?
• If you have an urgent question and the team was offline, what would you do?
• How do you like to stay connected with colleagues and clients?

How to evaluate candidates for remote jobs?

• Cultural fit: Despite geographical boundaries, your employees should have the same values to work in a team. Know about candidates’ style of working to find if they would be a great fit for the position.
• Check critical-thinking skills: Remote workers hardly visit the manager’s office. So, it is best to recruit candidates who can take initiatives and decisions when required. Use hypothetical scenarios to check candidates’ judgmental skills to overcome hurdles.
• Give written assignments: Good remote employees should draft clear emails to reduce back-and-forth communication. This is very important if the teams are working in different time zones. Also, check if candidates can follow instructions and submit projects on time.
• Schedule video interview to check communication skills: Distributed team generally use Hangout or Skype to interact with each other, so candidates should be able to communicate effectively during the interviews. Also, check if candidates can overcome potential problems like poor signal capably.

Red Flags

• Have difficulty balancing work and personal life: Remote workers often follow flexible work schedules. But, candidates who can’t limit their number of working hours might not be an ideal fit.
• Poor knowledge of technology: If a remote worker has to use video calls, cloud apps and messaging tools to collaborate with your distributed team, recruit people who can easily adjust to a virtual work environment.
• Not a team player: Remote workers might work alone, but they have to collaborate with other team members for group projects. Candidates should be able to work autonomously as well as in a team proficiently.
• Poor communication: Remote workers need to communicate clearly to avoid miscommunication. Candidates who have a tough time answering your questions and have poor email writing skills might not be a great fit.