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Truth be told, every single article you're going to read around me about work has been written by teams that have been doing remote work for years. So the self selected individuals that wanted to work remotely in the first place, I'm not saying it's bad advice. I'm just saying it's like a start up reading advice from someone who was already operating at enterprise level.

I am rubbing shows you at your suites and we are sourcing automation software that helps companies hire the best talent at me. And for me, not only do you want to keep an eye on this.

Hi, everybody. So today we're having Rudolf JUTAN from Ruminative D'Addario and it will tell us all there is to know about remote hiring and work. Well, Comodo, can you tell us more about yourself and your background? Yeah, for sure.

Robyn, thanks for having me today. Well, I started my career working at Google and as a graduate, it was absolutely amazing. I got to experience visiting the Mountain View campus. And when I got there, it felt like Disneyland for geeks. I saw people working in huge offices with free cafeteria. You had food on demand, volleyball court. It was absolute paradise. And the more I started exploring the campus, the more I realized that it was paradise.

Indeed. But to get to paradise, you had to shuttle yourself an hour and a half each morning in an hour and a half at night if you wanted to live in San Francisco. So even though I love tech, I started to look at the alternative being, can you have an ambitious and interesting career in tech without going to an office, without spending however many hours per day per week commuting to your job? So I joined a startup name for by Dotcom that does social media.

And for a few years I helped them grow from 15 to 90 employees hiring across 12 different time zones. They did not have any offices and that got me the remote bug, which got me to start remotivated with the website I. Today we are a community board and news site around remote work. So I've been around since twenty fourteen and certainly a lot of things changed in twenty twenty. So I'm very excited to be here and chat about my work today.

Yeah.

I follow you on LinkedIn and you keep on reposting these companies moving to full remote. Can you tell us more about these? Do you see a trend of all these companies moving to exclusively work?

Yeah, so remote used to be a very niche phenomenon. You had automatic the makers of WordPress have been remote before covid. They have about nine hundred employees today valued over a billion dollars. So they used to be the trend setter. And everybody in the industry look at them and said, of course, you guys make a lot of money. You have a good company going, but I'm another company. I cannot possibly do this. And then about March covid here, and it's sort of level the playing field in the sense that everybody had to adapt.

And all of a sudden you've got everyone starts working remotely. So effectively, what we've seen is that the remote work trend has been accelerating immensely. It's like we gain run about three years in a time of three months. And today we've got a lot of question. The virus is still here, but at the end of the day, you've got remote top tech talent. Was wondering what to do next. If were a top engineer working at Facebook and you sort of moved outside of the Bay Area, are you going to go back?

That's a huge question, because for my money, I think that a lot of people are going to be embracing the new lifestyle so we can talk about that at length. But what used to be fringe is not the norm. So remote work is here to stay with the covid stays or not. And I think a lot of tech companies are going to have to embrace it, at least as a hybrid company or to the fullest extent.

And can you tell us a few names about the companies who made that switch recently and who were the less expected to make that switch?

Yeah, so among the usual suspect you had, Stripe was likely to back the job when Strib was growing. They decided to have their fifth engineering HOGGE, not in Dublin, Ireland, not in London, not in Singapore, but remotely so a year ago before they decided to have a remote hub that really focused engineer for all around the world. So that was sort of expected. Some companies were looking at remote work and decided to jump it. Then you have some more unexpected pieces of news.

You had a Facebook, for instance. Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook is going to be one of the leading companies at skill when it comes to remote work. And this started to list a position that is director of remote and surprisingly enough, this position. Is listed in Menlo Park, California, and it's been up for three months now, so I really hope he gets to stuff it with something that actually want to be based in Menlo Park and is director of remote and what trend you expect to see.

Do you expect to see full remote companies? Do you expect to see how remote half of his companies and what works best? And we're in that situation. A lot of companies have a hard time doing half of each. And it might be simple to do only remote, only office work. What do you think?

It's very tricky when you look at the situation starting a you're picking up a legacy situation and you try to iterate from there. What I mean by that is Apple, for instance, they poured billion into this space spaceship and they love to have in-person collaboration. All the startups, I believe, and they say we can innovate better in person. So I figure we're going to get to see a spectrum. I think at the bare minimum, for any startup, remote work is going to be a perk or a possibility that you can entertain for a few days a week.

And on the other end of the spectrum, you're going to have full remote teams that are going to be attracting talent that do not want to commute towards CBDs Center or technology park. So what I feel is going to happen is everybody is going to have to find their footing and they're going to have to find that equilibrium. But what's for sure is that if you're hiring right now as a company, you're going to get the question, what if in six months time I leave San Francisco and I go work someplace else?

Are you going to be letting me go or are we going to work something out? Alternatively is remote OK? Can I work from home every Friday if I have something to take care of? So company is going to have to need an answer to that question. And it could be anything, frankly, that's going to be a contract between a company that's hiring and employee that want to take up the job. What's for sure, though, is you going to have to set up clear guidelines because otherwise it's going to be very tricky for employees to know where they stand.

So a lot of companies had to do this move and no working remotely. What's the main advice you give to these companies? What all the top Tepes, the software you recommend the best practices to implement quickly when you're moving to remote team?

So that's the things that's the opportunity to say. We were working in office and tomorrow we're going to zoom, we're going to slack. We go to productivity software such as Duelist or Trello and we're remote team. The reality is we're creatures of habits. So we really like continuing doing what we already know. And as we transition to covid, we're not so much working remotely. We were forced to work from home and does a slow but important difference between the two forced to work from home means that you don't have a choice.

You are in the you are stressed out due to the outside situation and you have to adapt in a apartment or house that may not be designed for it. You also have the kids running around in the background. And all of this is to say that we're very good at working in offices because all of us something that for the longest time do we not necessarily very good at working remotely right off the bat just because we haven't been properly trained for it.

So while I understand we need software tips and tricks to be quick, I also understand that we need time because anything around people requires change management and anything about change management requires time and a dictation. So they're going to be trials and errors. They're going to be things that you're going to be trying and are not going to work. If you want concrete examples, you get interesting software such as Do not dotcom that helps you pair random team members so they can rebuild certain Deepti and have some interactions between team members.

For instance, what's the name again? Yeah, it's Donut Dutko, like eating donuts. OK, and then you have wonderful question that you can find work for this website so that people can be social with each other through happy hour over resume or just social hour as well. But what I see a lot happening is that companies tend to have more meetings when they go remote where people are already very stressed out and actually concentration time. So it's great to have more tools.

It's so great to question people's talents when it comes to what they have in the plate, knowing that they're stressed out and they want to adapt to the new norm.

OK, so there's no real magic recipe, but rather try on their own and try what's out there and try to build something custom for the team. Right?

Yeah, because truth be told, every single article you're going to read around remote work has been written by teams that have been doing remote work for years. So then self selected individuals that wanted to work remotely in the first place. I'm not saying it's bad advice. I'm just saying it's like a start up reading advice from someone who was already operating at enterprise level. It's not with the state you want to look at. If you are forced to transition to work, you probably think that they're going to be a lot of trials and errors, what you can do for sure and what advise you to do, though, is to keep communication lines open and know that sometimes they're going to be great success and sometimes it's going to be a bit more tricky.

So you've got to keep interacting. Good to be threatening the processes.

And you think all companies can benefit from remote work. And we had the CEO of Netflix saying that remote was mostly detrimental to Netflix culture. Do you think there are such companies that don't benefit from remote? I think that it's great to see Reed Hastings from Netflix making a conscious choice, and he's sending a very strong signal to the industry at large saying, hey, first we don't hire a billion jerks. But he said that many years ago. And second, we're not here to worry remotely.

So as a person in the market for a job or hiring capacity, it's sending a very strong signal that Netflix is not going to be that company. And although I don't agree, I think that most companies can benefit from my work. I appreciate the clarity that is conveyed. If you want the remote work, don't apply to Netflix because you're not going to get it. So I think that's actually better to see a stance rather than some other companies that will be tethering on the line of allowing remote work.

But it'll fully embrace it because they just want the PR. They don't want the long lasting change that comes with embracing remote work.

Yeah. And so obviously we would expect that Netflix would have more trouble hiring people. And then we come to the second part of work. It's the ability to hire people around the world or around the states. What do you think about that? What's your take? What's your advice on this?

I think it's a brilliant opportunity. I think that's ultimately your talent is not connected to your zip code. So you can be talented and live anywhere really within tech hubs flourish in Boulder. We've seen tech hub flourish around the world. It doesn't have to be Silicon Valley centric. You can also have the ability to fly people in if you want people to connect. A lot of teams have been doing retreats or seminars or a company wide get together. So it's not because you're far away few times in a way, a few countries, a few states away that's going to be inexistent.

It's just a different way to relate. And I feel like we're tapping into a huge opportunity when you start to widen your talent range, because first you get to access people you did not consider before. And second, when you see your talents going to consider options, chances are they're going to be willing to move states, live closer to their parents, change lifestyle together, and you want to accompany people in the long term, you're being more flexible and you being more respectful of their live quality at large.

So I think it's going to be great for the industry in recruiting.

And do you think that to hire people working remotely, you need people to have that experience before and then kind of a chicken and egg problem? But what we see is that companies usually hire remote people that own more senior and the junior and young graduates will have to be in the office. Do you see a difference or is it really about the person and about the company's culture?

Yeah, for this one, I think the seniority is different from maturity. What I mean by that is that you can have a junior person was very interesting in a variety of things and that effectively been working remotely through open source sharing, being block chain or software development. And they can have a very advanced and very organized way of approaching work, even though as a junior person on the other end and as an example, you may have someone who was very senior, but they always work in offices and they have no intention of changing their ways and both are acceptable.

I just mean to say that you never can tell before the person actually starts. What you can do, though, is to probe for some signals that gives a good indication of how the person would actually perform. Written communication with someone is clear, concise, can express himself well in written English, even though it's not the primary language. That's a very strong indicator of how someone may put forth. And to the second part of your question, I feel like a lot of people, especially juniors, going to have to think deeply about how they want to progress in the career.

Maybe, just maybe, it's better for them to go and be mentored in person in a huge state campuses or in offices in order to pick up some skills. And later on, when they are senior, they can work remotely because they feel that works for all the people want to do the other way round. But I feel like it's going to be a choice and it's not going to be the norm anymore to just rock up at work and do you nine to five or nine to 11.

You know, I like the part about maturity being different from Saenuri. And you were saying that you can look at communication in English. Do you see a way to properly assess that, say, remote work maturity in hiring process? Is there any special exercise, any case study that could highlight the ability of a person to work remotely? Yeah, that's a good one.

So tyrannically enough, when you start interviewing someone, you have them at their most available and at the Keena stage to make a good impression. So what have you to start the interview process? You already have a flavor of how they're going to interact, what they're taking in consideration, and so on and so forth. What? I really like you about hiring remotely, its potential to set up trial periods, even though they paid or paid projects to try the person's collaboration, because even though someone does a task for you for 15 hours and are paid for it, chances are you get a good flavor how they will interact and how they usually interact.

It's not a hundred percent because hiring is never 100 percent far from it. But you can actually try to work remotely with someone, especially if you have an asynchronous communication culture, which is different from getting everybody to show up and have meeting 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning if you trust them to do a task on their own time. You can have a fair assessment.

That's a good one. So you have a period of time and you're paying them as contractors and see how they work.

And then you can convert that into an actual job and a way to assess what dramatic the makers of WordPress is, what they've been doing to test work for the longest time. And interestingly enough, they even conducted interviews through chat. So they even tried not to go and phone calls just to do written chat interviews, just to flavor of how someone works in a remote setup, which is a bit extreme, granted, but that's that's almost a thousand people employee company.

So it's interesting to see how they went around it.

Did they keep that in the chat interview? I'm not sure I still have it. I think they may have some video element, but I've got to refresh their processes.

OK, so assessment you give them actual task, try them as contractors. You can try to interview chat. That's a good one. And then how do you find those people? Because when you were working remotely, either on your own time zone or in the world, that you get access to 1006, the time pool you had before and it becomes overwhelming. So how do you tap into that? What's your strategy? Yeah, that's a good one.

So we work with literally one hundred a startup that look to hire remotely. And one of the things we often say is your job is only as good as his job description. So if you're looking to hire someone was a very high caliber, whatever trade, you've got to be able to communicate to them what it is you can offer. So you really have to step up your game in terms of job description to be as specific as possible. Of course, you can open the floodgates on my website or other website and get a lot more candidates by going through job boards or specialized websites.

But at the end of the day, if you want to pour gasoline on the fire, you've got to make sure that you've got to create job description ready that truly encapsulate what you're looking for and that is helping you to put your best foot forward as a company. So say exactly what you need in a person. You've got to say whether you want to have a Synchronoss or asynchronous communication method. You've got to say whether you have office hours or required Temse or an overlap.

You've got to say whether someone needs to be a US citizen or work in certain states or if you hire people from other countries as well. So you've got to be even more specific than if you were to be hiring in person.

We had a great episode with a Jameses on how to write a job description, how to build you employ Branning. So that's a good one too. And that's what I think. It gets very hard to do, reach and to build a real Albon strategy when you can hire anywhere in the world.

So you really depend on inbound and on those job descriptions and excepted from so obviously Remotivated IIO, which is a website that you revamped recently, right?

Yeah, we're relaunching product on September twenty twenty and we list over two thousand remote job as of now. So and curation is what we do and that's what our community knows for.

OK, and where is your audience, because I guess you're only as good as the people who come to the website and apply to the job. So do you see different websites for different areas, different agencies? I'd be curious to see the market for remote job boards.

Yeah, that's a great one. So our audience mainly comes from North America or Europe. Since we've been around since twenty fourteen, we've been writing a lot of content and we've been showing up a lot in the US market in Canada especially. And now yeah, we're seeing some website developing specially for up and coming market. So India, some website that are coming up. Europe is starting to ask some things. We implemented a two year restriction filter on our own website, and you also have bigger players that are still present like Anjali's and Stack Overflow.

They do have systems where either stack of info has an interesting price tag. So it's a different thing. And Angels' also gives you the ability to send a signal, but they do draw a larger crowds as well. So that's something to consider.

What do you see people do do see them higher in the US, in the same state, but different cities in the different countries, but on the same time zone in. In Mexico, well, on the utterance that you see and what would you say are the main drawbacks of each?

Yeah, so what I see happening over and over again is that oftentimes a teen is going to start small. They're going to say a US based company. So I'm going to hire someone remotely in the US because that's what I want to do. I don't want to have the trouble of employing someone internationally and they do it. Then it goes great and they say, OK, fine, so that worked. How about I open it up to international players so they go around and start understanding how you pay people internationally?

So we've been writing articles on that topic and as soon as I have it sorted out, they can open it up to, say, Americas or America plus Europe and other places. And I see people progressing through job description and candidates and more and more companies, and they could be very, very happy are hiring from anywhere. So it doesn't matter where you are, if you have an Internet connection, you can get started. But of course, again, a lot of companies want to start hiring within the states or within the US or the company where they registered.

And then there are old timers. That's right. That's a whole different game. Yes, absolutely. So Timezone, do you want someone to be available at all times? If so, you want to hire people close to you or do you want to colford time so that you're not currently in? I see so many job description looking for customer support in Australia, New Zealand timezone, for instance, for US businesses to be able to cover Hawaii, sort of New Zealand timezone as well.

And do you see engineering team, for instance, or engineering team almost get no benefits on working on different time zones, but do you see a lot of engineering team working on different time zones inside the team, inside the squad? I'm not talking about different teams the way straight did it.

Yeah. So I've seen companies organize squads by time zone that something doesn't happen a lot. And other times companies, when they're very, very disciplined about working asynchronously, they can make it happen to be quite far away. But you've got to be super disciplined. It's like playing remote work in hard mode, right? Because already you have to get an understanding and build the social tissue of your company without seeing each other. And then you've got to be interacting and be very careful around things, because if you do a remote right, it can be like a super power because you've got people around different time zone and someone can pick up your work when you clock out or almost.

But if you get some delay or misunderstanding, you can have a project stand still for three days because people's we can do not always overlap. So it is much harder for a squad to work in different times. But then again, like as Andreas Clinger said, he's the former head of Remold at Angels'. He said that oftentimes innovation is better in person and iteration is better remotely. So that's some food for thought as well.

OK, so don't do this except it if you're very good, very disciplined and you're used to remote work.

Yeah, I'll say that, OK. And so you talked about hiring people and how to pay people internationally said that you did a lot of content on this. Again, what's your main advice? Is it as difficult as someone would expect? Is it much easier? What traps?

Yeah. So hiring people internationally, traditionally, it's been a difficult process. Why? Because you've got legal, you've got pay and you've got a variety of things. The good news is you're 20, 20 and forward. There are a lot of new companies are starting to pop up. You've got oyster, you've got papaya, you've got a deal. You've got many companies I've been talking about on my blog and giving the pros and cons of each approach.

But long story short, you've got a lot of companies that got serious funding from Tier one Visy in San Francisco in order to solve the problem of international employment. And what they want to do is to make it as simple as plugging some information in a dashboard for you to request remotely some information from the person you employing. And they become the employer of record for you, meaning they carry the legal responsibility and you fulfil payment. So this process used to be horrendously hard and very, very costly in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to open a single country or location, plus a lot of what signature running around a notary.

And now you can literally get to hire someone in selected countries overnight with a stripe like dashboard interface. So I'm so excited for this space because it's opening the door to a lot of things. I think about paying someone to transfer wise, but in a way that makes your lawyer and corporate counsel very happy because it's extremely compliant as well. So this is what's happening in space in twenty.

Twenty must be a big challenge. So not only serve, but they deal with try to get one of them on the podcast will be for sure. And my question would be so you can hire remotely, it becomes as easy to hire someone as to make a straight payments in the end. And I keep receiving rich messages from dev shops, dev agencies in Europe, in South America. Should we reply to those? And what's the difference between hiring someone remotely?

And was a full time employee working remotely or hiring an agency? And isn't DNC model in this situation better? Because they make sure that everything is the they make sure their own culture is strong and you just have to send them to us in the end, which is better? That's a great question.

It's down to what you want to do with your startup. Do you want to have extra hired guns so mercenaries that can be very, very talented and you can go to that shop and find amazing people. But at the end of the day, those people are often going to be people that are going to be working for you through someone else. Whereas if you go direct, you're going to have someone that can be projecting their self in your company. They can protect themself, getting a promotion, getting to handle a team, working a hard problem.

So it's all down to whether you want to go direct or whether you want to have some extra help for the time being. I say if you want to be long term, if you want to internalize a number of things, I wouldn't really air on the side of hiring people internally that can quarrier team and build a foundation for whatever you want to go for it. Thanks.

I'm eager to see how remote work will change in the next few months you give. And I hope the podcast will help companies while catch up the trend and improve their processes. So it was great having you and thanks so much and we'll keep an eye out for you. Thanks, Rob.

Thanks for listening. Podcast till the end. If you're still with us, it's probably that you enjoy the players. Eight players is brought to you by myself and higher suites. Well, building a sourcing automation software. And we already helped nine other tech companies hire the best science.

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