Welocalize + Lever

5 Steps to Hiring
and Building a
Remote Culture
Introduction
Many companies at one point or another have
had to adapt or make some roles remote. As
this happens more and more, how can talent
teams create a connected workforce built on
communication and inclusivity?

In this guide, you’ll find a five-step approach to

hiring and building a remote culture that thrives.
Featuring expert advice from Welocalize and
Lever, you’ll learn how to create a remote-friendly
workplace that attracts and retains the next
generation of talent!

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IN THIS EBOOK

05
01 Create a Consistent
Hiring Process

08
02 Understand How to Support
Remote Work by Role

10
03 Prioritize Communication

12
04 Build a Global Brand

14
05 Measure and Improve

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Brennan Smith
Senior Director, Talent and Community
Welocalize

Brennan has spent the last 10+ years building and leading
international teams. At Welocalize, he spends much of his
time thinking about Supply Strategy and Talent Acquisition for
services. Prior to Welocalize, he spent nearly 7 years building
Park IP Translations, a Welocalize company.

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5 Steps to Hiring and Building a Remote Culture

01 Create a Consistent
Hiring Process

It sounds obvious, but consistency is critical when going remote.

Brennan Smith, Senior Director of Talent and Community at Welocalize,
recommends a three-pronged approach:

1. Define clear standards

2. Apply the 80% rule

3. Forecast future hiring

Define Clear Standards

Clear standards are necessary to high growth because they help your team
understand the vision of your employer brand and how to execute their
duties at scale. That way, your team can experience turnover or shifts, and
maintain a consistent process across all candidates.

At Welocalize, the hiring team of 50 makes ~450 new hires per month
across different roles and functions, including marketing, quality control,
and sales. They all follow the same process, so they can hire project
managers one day and linguists the next without changing a thing.

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01. Create a Consistent Hiring Process

Three questions to help you set consistent standards across your teams:

1 What is your talent acquisition process and what is the definition of good?

2 Do you want to set a standard that you’re going to use for every
candidate that applies to your company?

3 How do you define that, ensure that with your team, and how do
you get their buy-in?

Use the 80/20 rule

When hiring a high-volume remotely, there are two tensions to look out
for, Smith says: The desire to build everything exactly the same way
(a team with perfect scale) versus the desire to build something completely
bespoke to each and every particular team, hiring manager, role, or
region. Neither works.

High volume recruiting needs a common starting point that is flexible

enough to be slightly adjusted when the situation calls for it.

Your Standard/Custom breakdown should be about 80/20. At least

80% of each fill should follow the same process, regardless of team
member, role, region, or hiring manager, with not more than 20%
“wiggle room” to make one off optimizations for the truly unique bits.

So how can you instill the 80/20 rule at your company? One quick and
easy starting place is to build scripts and templates to help scale your
best practices. And while team members might be resistant at first, great
templates and scripts don’t feel restrictive if they allow you to improve
constantly and get your work done faster.

2. Gartner, Crafting Workspaces that Enhance the Employee Experience

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01. Create a Consistent Hiring Process

Forecast future hiring needs

Being able to plan future hiring needs is a key driver of high-growth
recruiting. But you can’t do it alone! Meeting with your CFO and hiring
managers on the regular ensures you have an idea pipeline, stay on top
of business trends to look for new hires, and can plan for any attrition.

“Meeting regularly with hiring managers to

understand business trends is critical to making
sure that you’re able to deliver on your hiring goals,”
says Smith.

3. Gallup, How Engaged Is Your Remote Workforce?

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5 Steps to Hiring and Building a Remote Culture

02 Understand How to
Support Remote Work
by Role

Not all roles are suitable for remote work. “Sometimes you have a role that
could be successful remote, even with the wrong candidate, or you have
a candidate that could easily be remote in a role that needs to be with the
other teams they’re supporting onsite,” says Smith.

How to tell if a role is suited for remote work:

The role has clear and objective success metrics

You count the amount of output units that the team member is doing

It’s easy to know when the person is available or unavailable

You can measure clearly and objectively whether that person will
be successful

The person is part of an existing team, or one that already has

remote members

The role either does not require high levels of communication, or

if it does, the team supports robust opportunities via conferencing,
internal chat, etc.

Roles that fall outside of these areas may require further support when
working remotely.

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02. Determine Which Roles Can Be Remote

How to tell if a role is unsuited for remote work:

The role influences other teams

It’s brand new or a role you’re building or creating

It requires constant collaboration

Things to look for in remote employees:

Great time management skills

Strong interpersonal skills

Demonstrated ability to separate work from personal time

The best interview question to ask

a remote candidate:
Can you describe a time where you overcame a culture
or communication challenge with a colleague?

“How and if a candidate can answer this question

shows you how they’ll prioritize relationship
building and communication as a remote employee.”

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5 Steps to Hiring and Building a Remote Culture

03 Prioritize Communication

Communication is important throughout every employee’s tenure with

your company, but it’s especially critical to helping remote workers feel
plugged in to your company. Here’s how to make a great impression on
new hires during your onboarding experience and beyond.

Communication tips for onboarding

Did you know? Organizations that standardize onboarding
procedures see 50% greater new hire retention.4 This comes back to
structure, consistency, and a unified process. “Great employee retention
falls back to understanding key items and tying work back to the mission
of an organization,” says Smith.

Four questions to answer for new hires during onboarding:

1 How do things work?

2 How do you assimilate?

3 How can we make sure your first two, three, or four weeks are
full of collaboration?

4 Are there things you can highlight and say that you moved forward
and contributed to early?

4. Harvard Business Review, To Retain New Hires, Spend More Time Onboarding Them

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03. Prioritize Communication

Communication tips for collaboration

It’s important as an employer with a remote workforce to intentionally make
things easier for everyone to collaborate and problem solve. One way you
can help people work things out and thrive when they’re not in the same
office is by using humor, silliness, and getting personal.

For example, Smith and his team use gamification and group chats to build
the remote team’s ability to communicate and collaborate. “We encourage
team members to do things like post pictures of the view from their desk or
window, create memes about their day, or talk about fun and unique things
happening in their country that day. They have lots of fun with it,” says
Smith. “At work, everyone keeps coming back to a game or joke that can
keep everyone focused while building human relationships along the way.”

Four ways to be more intentional about communication:

1 Play games in chats and make sure they happen regularly

2 Use icebreakers to help people get to know each other

Example prompts:

“In three minutes, tell me about your weekend.”

“What is your favorite animal?”

“What is your favorite food that is not from your country?”

3 If anyone is remote, treat everyone like they work remote

When in a meeting, ask everyone if they have something

to contribute to a topic before you move on

4 Take notes and save recordings

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5 Steps to Hiring and Building a Remote Culture

04 Build a Global Brand

According to LinkedIn, 72% of recruiting leaders agree that brand has

a significant impact on hiring.5 But it should be 100%, because brand
is everything — from whether people recognize your company name,
to what your company does, and even how your industry contributes.

A strong brand pays off in multiple ways, helping to reduce things like
turnover, cost-per-hire, and the number of unqualified applicants your
job postings attract. Brand and employer brand go hand-in-hand, so it’s
important to weave your company’s mission into your talent acquisition.

“At Welocalize, we make sure that our focus on

the ability to drive transformation for our clients
also parlays into the ability to transform the
careers of our employees. The ability for a large
organization like ours to speak to every individual
who is considering collaborating with us and
helping us support our clients is really important.”

5. LinkedIn, The Ultimate List of Employer Brand Statistics

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04. Build a Global Brand

Five ways to boost your employer brand for

a remote workforce:
1 Align your hiring page or careers page with your company’s mission

2 Establish and tracks KPIs for quality of hires made and engagement

3 Promote success stories of current employees from diverse

backgrounds and roles

4 Get all managers, from executive level down, on board with the brand

5 Partner with highly engaged employees to run brand ambassador

campaigns

of U.S. workers say they

80% would turn down a job that

didn’t offer flexible working 6

Employees are significantly

more engaged when they
spend 3-4 days working offsite3

6. International Workplace Group, Welcome to Generation Flex

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5 Steps to Hiring and Building a Remote Culture

05 Measure and Improve

Implementing individual and team goals and sharing results as frequently

as possible is a key part of a transparent culture. It’s also super handy for
getting everyone on the same page when you have a remote workforce.
In short, KPIs empower teams to make better business decisions!

So what should you be looking at? That really depends on your talent team
and company. Determine how you want to measure, what makes sense for
your goals, then think about what is important to the business and know
that if you’re measuring it, your team will respond.

KPIs help your remote team:

Prioritize their day by giving them clarity on what’s most

important — if we’re measuring it, it’s important

Unify your definition of what is “good” (eg, 45 days, 98%, etc)

Focus on how they can achieve by eliminating any questions about

what to achieve

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05. Measure and Improve

Tips for how to best utilize KPIs:

Pick only two or three things you’re going to evangelize that

shapes the work your team does, e.g. Time-to-Fill, Quality-of-Hire,
Customer Service Score

Break down the “why” behind tasks to show how things like
time-to-fill impact business

Share results often and consistently

Loudly celebrate achievement

“In April, nobody wants to hear how January and

December were. So it’s important that the key items
that you believe drive your success, the things you
really care about, the things that you’re asking
everybody to contribute to, are communicated over
and over again. Make sure that you let folks know
every month, every week, every day if you can,
how the team is performing to expectations.”

65%
of workers say they’re more
productive in their home office
than traditional workplaces 7

7. FlexJobs, 2018 Annual Survey

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Build your high growth plan for the next
decade of talent
Now that you know how to avoid the pitfalls of a remote
workforce and implement a culture that sustains a
healthy network of remote employees, it’s time to create
your plan for high growth hiring. Get started today with
our guide, 5 Expert Tips to Create a High Growth Plan.

About Lever
Lever’s mission is to help the world hire with more predictability. Lever is
transforming the way companies hire through an approach that allows
talent leaders to attract candidates like a marketing leader, forecast like a
sales leader, and have the insights of a finance leader.

For more information, visit lever.co LeverApp Lever @lever

About Welocalize
Welocalize accelerates the global business journey by enabling brands
and companies to reach, engage, and grow international audiences.
Welocalize delivers multilingual content transformation services in
translation, localization, and adaptation for over 250 languages with a
growing network of over 77,000 in-country linguistic resources.
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