1. Rethink Job Descriptions and Candidate Profiles
When hiring for remote roles, job descriptions need more than just technical skills.
- Clarify whether the role is fully remote, hybrid, or flexible, and adjust expectations accordingly.
- In addition to expertise, remote employees must be self-motivated, disciplined, mature, and trustworthy. Hard skills can often be trained; self-direction cannot.
- For example, teaching an accountant QuickBooks is easier than teaching them personal accountability.
Equally important: ensure your managers are prepared to lead remote teams. Leaders who rely on ego-driven, control-heavy approaches often fail in distributed environments. Instead, look for or train managers with a servant leadership mindset—those who prioritize enabling their teams over protecting their own status.
2. Avoid Slick Tools and Focus on the Basics
Remote hiring will always carry risk. No tool can completely eliminate it. People change, face challenges, or misrepresent themselves, and there’s no perfect safeguard. Rather than chasing trendy AI tools, pre-recorded video interviews, or over-engineered assessments, keep hiring human and live.
Pre-recorded interviews, for example, often reward acting ability rather than job readiness, while AI-driven screening can strip out critical context that matters in remote collaboration. Every interaction should be done live, with a real person, for remote roles. The way the candidate confirms an interview request, their email etiquette, and even their ability to respond promptly to requests are vetting metrics that your human recruitment team should consider to assess their fit for remote work. Sometimes what looks like a basic admin function actually can provide layers of assessment. If you are really trying to eliminate risky hires, you want to use every data point available to you.
Finally, hold hiring managers accountable. Empower them to make decisions, own those decisions, and use simple but consistent processes. A strong focus on rapport-building, clarity, and post-offer verification (background and reference checks) will outperform flashy tools every time.
3. Prioritize Remote-Friendly Collaboration
Collaboration technology should be simple and intuitive. Tools like Slack or Teams can cover most communication needs. Ideally, you should avoid systems that add unnecessary complexity just to send a quick message. Use more advanced project management platforms only where needed, but always keep at least one frictionless channel open.
Just as important: don’t restrict communication to only “official” business. In offices, casual chats, cliques, and storytelling naturally build culture. Remote setups risk losing this. To counteract it, normalize informal interactions like:
- Weekly “catch-up Fridays,”
- Open video coffee breaks
- One-on-one calls without needing a business reason
Try to avoid making these big official social events, and allow your employees the autonomy to interact organically in smaller groups to recreate the natural socialization you would get in the office.
4. Lead with Clarity and Be Available
Remote work thrives on clarity, transparency, and defined outcomes. Managers must set unambiguous expectations and eliminate vague corporate jargon. Phrases like “deep dive into the new product” or “how can our team unlock the power of AI” leave employees confused about deliverables. Instead, specify the format, tools, and timelines.
Meetings
For meetings, use active listening checks to ensure effective communication. After assigning tasks, ask team members to summarize their action items to ensure alignment. Follow up afterwards with any team members who need clarification.
Availability
Equally, managers should be consistently available remotely. Remote employees often hesitate to escalate problems. Create “open office hours” via video calls or phone for at least 2–3 hours weekly, where any team member can drop in with questions, small or large.
This accessibility fosters trust and prevents bottlenecks. It also addresses the intimidation that junior employees feel when bringing requests to senior leadership.
5. Optimize for Outcomes and Let Go of Outdated Measures
As companies scale, they often shift from measuring results to measuring effort. This means tracking hours worked or calls made. Effort-focused measurements are common when new layers of management want visibility or when the layers between work and results get more complex. In these cases, it gets harder to tie an individual’s contribution directly to outcomes. While effort-based KPIs have some value, they can easily distract from actual business outcomes.
Remote work challenges this mindset directly. Employees might take a midday break, but still deliver exceptional work on time. Data suggests remote workers are, in fact, more productive—Stanford research showed a 13% productivity increase among remote employees.
If an employee can produce 40 hours of output in 20, that’s not a problem—it’s a competitive advantage. Rather than chasing visibility into every hour worked, leaders should prioritize outcomes. Use effort-based metrics only as diagnostics for struggling teams, not as the primary measure of performance.
Companies that embrace this shift not only retain high performers but can also attract them away from competitors stuck in outdated thinking. This is especially important now, as larger companies are essentially speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
- On one hand, they publicly downplay remote work.
- On the other hand, they aggressively pursue local talent, driving up salaries and making it harder for local companies to compete.
Small or smarter companies, however, can turn this to their advantage: by offering flexible remote roles to the same talent pool, you increase the likelihood of offers being accepted—often at lower salaries—while leaving the more rigid global players to fight over the leftovers.
Remote Work is Tied to The Future of Tech Hiring
Remote work is a fundamental shift in how companies operate and compete. The organizations that thrive won’t be the ones with the flashiest collaboration tools or the biggest budget for HR slogans. They’ll be the ones that keep things simple: trust your people, make expectations clear, and measure what really matters.
This shift also levels the playing field. Local employers that embrace flexibility can suddenly access global talent and punch far above their weight. But it cuts both ways—ignore the realities of what employees want, and you’ll find yourself bleeding talent to competitors who are willing to adapt.
The companies trying to drag everyone back to cubicles are signalling something, too: not that remote work doesn’t work, but that they’d rather use rigid mandates as a shortcut for deeper leadership problems. And employees know it. The best people will always choose an environment that respects their time, their autonomy, and their contributions.
At the end of the day, making remote work work is about people, not policy. It’s about building a culture where outcomes matter more than hours logged, where trust replaces micromanagement, and where flexibility is seen as a strategic advantage, not a liability. The companies that understand this aren’t just future-proofing their workforce—they’re making themselves the kind of place where the best talent actually wants to stay.
Sarah Doughty, Vice President, Talent Operations at Talentlab. With a specialization in technical recruitment, Sarah brings over 12 years of hands-on experience, excelling in the pursuit of elusive digital talent. Her expertise includes constructing robust high-tech employment brands, guiding recruitment teams, crafting corporate recruitment strategies, and cultivating extensive passive candidate networks in pivotal North American markets.
