Continuing our theme of remote hiring, this week we talked with Wes Winham, CEO of Woven. Woven is a remote team, and Woven’s software empowers companies to hire software engineers and developers, some of them remote, with greater effectiveness than traditional hiring practices.
When asked why we should trust Wes’s advice on remote developer hiring he stated, “I have hired a couple of hundred engineers, about a quarter of those have been US remote, Canada remote and International remote. Woven has also been hired in a dozen different cities for many different engineering roles.”
Although moving to remote hiring is a large change, there are 2 main benefits that Wes discussed in detail. The smaller benefit is the logistical side of interviewing and hiring. “You can do more interviews; it’s easier on the candidate, specifically those that may already be working, and can’t fully rearrange their schedule. In the end, remote interviewing may not be as stressful for both parties. In all, this is a great benefit because it saves a little time, you get access to candidates you wouldn’t usually get access to, and even some candidates who aren’t willing to jump through all the interview hoops.”
With remote hiring, you are able to fish in a much larger candidate pool than if you had to stay within your metro area. “When you only use in-person hiring, you only have access to candidates that are 10 or 15 minutes away within your own city. When using remote hiring you are able to access people who are in the broader metros and surrounding metro areas. What more and more companies are starting to realize is that if we can get people in the office once a week, or once a month, or even only when they are being onboarded into the company, that this actually works for us. We have proven that we can actually have teams that work well over Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, and whatever other tools we may have. For example, if your company is based in Indianapolis, and you are now able to go 2 hours away, your candidate pool can now include people from Cincinnati, Louisville, Columbus, and maybe even St. Louis or Chicago.”
This change has benefits but also challenges. The hiring process relies heavily on the face to face interaction, and changing this can be tricky if you are not intentional about your actions. Wes highlights the changes that need to be made. “A very common practice in hiring, is to have lunch with the candidate, but how do you recreate the lunch remotely? It is very challenging to try and recreate something like that without being in person. We have to try harder to create some of the softer transactions that take place when we are face to face. Additionally, we have to worry more about data fraud which is much more likely to happen when we are hiring remotely. Making sure that you use video on as opposed to just a phone to make sure it is the same candidate speaking through the whole process. You can’t let the small majority that cheats the system try to break the whole system set in place.”
In sum, as Wes stated, the benefits of remote hiring are a wider pool of candidates and saving an immense amount of time that would have spent on in-person logistics. If you want to talk more on the topic of remote hiring for your team, reach out to Wes and Woven.here: https://www.woventeams.com/.