How to Conduct Successful Remote Interviews

Let attendees know what the next steps will be after the remote interview is concluded, such as when and how they should provide input, scheduling additional discussion time, etc. It’s vital to hire collaboratively with your team which is extra challenging when hiring remote.

• Video conferencing technologyenables hiring managers to ascertain more important details by viewing their interviews directly, as opposed to traditional phone interviews.
• But instead of making assumptions based on their answers to interview questions — like “How would your co-workers describe you?
• Check out your intended employer on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, or even social media.
• As you work through the steps above you’ll be continuously evaluating candidates.

We also show them our custom recruiting software tool and have them play around so we can assess their technology skills. We arrange a coffee with the candidate being considered and a few team members so both can ask questions and get a better feel for fit with office culture. We are assessing the candidate’s communications skills at every step along the way. Many standard interview processes rely on outdated behavioral questions like “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses? But more often than not, these types of questions fail to reveal useful information about a candidate’s competencies.

How Effective are Remote Interviews?

Even though people are getting more used to remote processes, it’s never a bad idea to make sure that candidates are aware of why things are done in a certain way. You could also do a technical trial run before the actual interview to get acquainted with your tool and avoid any technical problems from interrupting the interview. And have a plan B ready in case something does go wrong on either side. We look for the same thing in all remote interview process of our hires, but it is especially important for remote workers to be self-motivating, proactive and strong communicators. The test project is a way for us to get to know each other by working together. We believe that too many times interviews do not give us enough of a clear idea of what it’s actually like to collaborate and work with someone. We want to make sure there’s a good long-term match before we jump in to hiring anybody.

After those interviews, the hiring team will huddle up and discuss all the feedback on the candidates and come together to make a decision about who to hire. The final interview is the last step candidates experience before we ask for references and make an offer. This interview could be with someone from the leadership team or a player from another team who will collaborate heavily with this role.

Write the job description

Once the interview process is completed, you can expect either an offer letter or a rejection letter. Typically, these will be sent via email and follow a template that the company uses for these communications. At some point during the interview process, the employer may also ask you for your location—even if your job is entirely remote.