How to Create a Hiring Strategy for Your Remote Company

Need a hiring strategy for your remote company? Follow our simple 5-step plan to create one that helps recruit the top remote candidates in less time now:

If you want to build a high-performing remote team, you have to start with your hiring strategy.

Successful hiring strategies help organizations find and onboard the right employees for their roles and company culture in less time.

Without one, you’re more likely to drown in stacks of unqualified candidates and struggle with high turnover rates. Because, as you’ve probably seen, hiring the wrong candidate very rarely works out.

In fact, research shows the cost of a bad hire is at least 30% of their first-year expected earnings. So if their annual income would have been $50,000, your company could lose a whopping $15,000 if you need to replace them. Yikes!

That’s exactly why you need to create a smart hiring strategy.

This will boost your chances of receiving high-quality candidates who happily accept your job offers. Following one can also lower turnover rates and your recruitment spending in the long term.

So in today’s guide, you’ll learn how to create a hiring strategy that helps your team hire the perfect remote candidates the first time around.

5 Steps to Creating a Hiring Strategy as a Remote Company

The best hiring strategy ensures your remote company attracts top talent before they’re desperately needed. It can also guarantee the right fit for your company culture, increase diversity in your organization, and lower your first-year attrition rate.

So follow this step-by-step action plan to create yours now:

Step 1: Leverage Your Hiring and Recruiting Data

Before you can tackle all the steps in this hiring strategy for remote companies, you need to get clear on a few key details.

As you do your research, think about and take note of:

The Positions You Need To Fill Now and In the Near Future

Waiting to start the hiring process until a vacancy pops up puts your team at risk of failing. If someone leaves or is let go, the time to fill that position and get your new hire up to speed could add stress and pressure to the rest of your crew.

A better approach is to check-in quarterly or at least annually with your departments.

Take a headcount of which employees may be looking to advance in new positions soon. Add these roles to a spreadsheet to prepare to replace them when they do.

Ask your department leaders about their upcoming goals. If your sales team hopes to smash records this year, or your developers are gearing up for a new version of your app, they’ll probably need extra hands on deck.

Check your First-Year Attrition rate. If new hires in certain departments tend to drop off before their first work anniversary, you should have a backup plan in case your retention efforts fail.

Add all this info to a spreadsheet organized by department. This provides an outline for your hiring goals each quarter and for the year.

Your Budget vs. Costs Per Hire (CPH)

When you know how many positions you’re looking to fill this quarter or year, you can spend your budget wisely.

So compare your hiring budget for the year to the number of positions you need to fill and your average cost per hire. This metric refers to all the expenses associated with filling a single position. It typically includes costs such as advertising the opportunity, recruiter fees, subscribing for assessment software, referral bonuses, etc.

This intel will help you determine how much you can realistically spend per candidate.

Your Time To Hire (TTH)

Time to hire is defined as the time between when someone applies for a role at your company to the moment they accept your offer.

If you’re not in a rush to hire, you can hold out for the perfect candidate to come along. Just be mindful of your TTH averages so you don’t wait too long and have to scramble at the last minute.

If you need to hire someone right away, you may have to pay top-dollar to snag the right candidate ASAP. Add a buffer to your budget if this is where your company is at.

Your Diversity Goals

There are a million reasons to prioritize diversity in your remote company, as we dished about in our guide on Hiring For Diversity.

To achieve this goal, take an honest assessment of your team. Does each department have a mix of ages, genders, ethnicities, cognitive and physical capabilities, socioeconomic backgrounds, education, etc.? Or is everyone a clone of each other?

Once you uncover what’s missing, you and your department heads should set diversity hiring benchmarks. These help hold everyone accountable for finding candidates who differ from your current employees.

You can branch out from your typical recruiting methods by learning how to hire remote candidates overseas and expanding your hiring requirements.

Once you have these foundational items knocked out, you’ll have a clearer picture of the candidates you’ll be looking for, how much you can spend to find them, and a timeframe to work within.

Then you can move on to:

Step 2: Make Sure Your Company Branding is On Point

Your company website and social channels are the best ways to recruit top talent for your candidate pipeline. These places are your opportunity to entice people who believe in your mission and resonate with your branding and company values.

So when potential applicants perform a quick Google search of your company, what are they going to find?

Are your values, mission statement, and commitment to DE&I clearly listed on your website?

How about your company culture? Can candidates peek at your social media channels to see what it’s really like to work there?

Take an honest look at these outlets from a candidate’s perspective. If your branding needs a quick dusting off, do this before you start posting job ads.

After all, once job seekers see your ads, they’ll beeline straight to your website and social channels to gauge your company’s vibes. You don’t want to lose any good candidates because these portals are outdated, uninformative, or boring.

Spruce Up Your Careers Page

Even if you’re not hiring, an enticing careers page can encourage top talent to send over their resume anyway.

Then when you have a position available, you can immediately reach out to these candidates who’ve already expressed interest and shown initiative. That certainly speeds up your TTH while slashing your CPH metrics!

So take a cue from two of our favorite remote companies:

Automattic does a fantastic job of outlining how their remote team works and the types of candidates they’re looking for on their Careers page:

They also describe all the best company benefits their remote team gets and how they support mental health in the workplace, two major selling points for candidates in 2022.

Kinsta even gives prospective applicants a bird’s eye view of their hiring process. Keeping candidates informed like this shows the company is transparent, trustworthy, and won’t play games, which makes applicants more eager to apply.

If you’re currently struggling with a lack of quality candidates in your pipeline, updating your website, social, and career page may make a huge difference. Especially when you add these links to your attractive job ads.

Step 3: Learn How To Write Remote Job Listings That Sell

In a candidate-driven job market like we’re currently in, applicants have an almost overwhelming number of choices. So what’s going to make them take notice of your company and decide to apply?

A job ad that sells them on why they’re an ideal fit for the position and your organization.

Once you complete them, you’ll be well on your way to outsmarting your competition and recruiting top-notch candidates.

But that can only happen if you know where to post your remote job ad.

Step 4: Post Your Remote Roles on the Right Job Board

The biggest mistake we see remote companies make is advertising on the wrong job boards, where candidates experienced with remote work are hard to come by.

See, job seekers checking those boards may be interested in remote work but don’t actually have much experience with it. While this isn’t a huge obstacle, it will cost you significantly in time and money.

You’ll get a giant stack of potentially qualified options yet still need to train someone on all the nuances of remote work. Plus, there’s always the chance that someone not used to working remotely may find it’s not the right fit. If they end up leaving, you’ll have to start the recruiting and hiring process all over again.

So take the smarter route here and source top candidates from a remote-specific job board.

Step 5: Act Fast On Your Top Choices

Great candidates don’t stay on the market for long. That’s why every hiring strategy must include solid interview and onboarding plans.

Create an inclusive, standardized virtual interview process that compares candidates fairly. Make sure you always have a diverse team of employees present for these interviews as well.

Give your candidates an estimated timeline of your hiring process, including how long you expect to hold interviews and when you plan to make a decision. Keep candidates in the loop, or you might send red flags that you don’t have your business in order.

Send out candidate experience surveys to hear feedback about your hiring process, uncover potential biases or issues, and improve your future efforts.

Update your virtual onboarding process to ensure it’s effective and motivating. This goes a long way for your retention and first-year attrition rates.

Now you have everything you need to create a remote hiring strategy for your company.

Putting Together All the Pieces Of Your Remote Hiring Strategy

Your remote hiring strategy should encompass how you’ll:

Determine the talent your organization needs
Recruit candidates to meet your goals
Use your website and social to attract candidates for your pipeline
Write remote job listings
Post your available jobs online
Interview top candidates
Onboard your new hires

The steps in today’s guide will help you create a hiring strategy that does all that and takes your business to the next level.