Remote Hiring Process: How To Hire Remote Employees In 2025 

The concept of remote work isn’t pandemic-new.

In 1979, a group of IBM executives came up with a curious idea: What if we let some people telecommute by logging into their work devices remotely? It proved a success. The first telecommuters were more productive and more engaged. By 1983, some 2,000 IBM employees were working remotely. 

Today, personal connectivity has advanced even further. Work can happen anywhere, anytime, and from any device. This is a major advantage for companies as remote hiring delivers better access to talent, enhanced operational agility, and oftentimes higher productivity levels. 

But, even though it’s been around for 45+ years, the remote work trend is just getting started. 

Why we believe remote work is the future 

Today, almost a quarter of the global workforce works remotely, with telecommuting levels rising to 67% in industries like technology. Going forward, we can expect some 90 million roles to become remote. 

It was the best decision for Toggl to go fully remote in 2014. “Being remote gives us an opportunity to hire from the widest possible talent pool and allows us to bring the best of the best to our team,” shares Dajana Berisavljević Đakonović, Head of People at Toggl. 

For Pinterest, a flexible work model also led to a greater diversity of new hires. About 79% of all Black, Indigenous, Latino, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander employees (BILNP) who have joined Pinterest within the past year came from outside of the Bay Area, compared to 60% of non-BILNP workers,” shared Doniel Sutton, the CPO of Pinterest. 

At Dropbox, a virtual-first approach to team management led to 72% higher self-reported productivity and 80% higher effectiveness. 

Many other businesses stand firm behind remote work, believing it creates better employment dynamics. Employees gain greater flexibility and have higher job satisfaction. All the while, employers enjoy improved access to talent, better employee retention, and reduced absenteeism — all leading to higher profitability. 

But, of course, not everyone is sold. Many businesses are shoehorning people back to the office, creating tension (and you can read our 🌶️ thoughts about that here).

1 in 5 employees plans to ignore return-to-office (RTO) mandates by leveraging employment law loopholes or channeling their energy into endless arguments with the management.

This undermines productivity, disrupts morale, and creates a bad rep for the company. Three-quarters of Amazon employees plan to search for a new job following this year’s RTO mandate. 

The truth is…remote work can be equal parts hard and fulfilling for companies to build. 

“Forcing people back to the office won’t fix your communication issues or low engagement rates. It definitely won’t cure your inability to innovate or collaborate”, says Dajana. “A remote work culture has to be built with intention and have people who truly support productive work and a healthy work-life balance.” 

The well-sung benefits of remote work emerge when you establish a fair management process based on trust and results rather than micromanagement and arbitrary performance metrics. In many cases, you also need to remove the pressure of immediacy from communication to provide your people with ‘headspace’ to do deep, thoughtful work. 

Pulling off such cultural and process transformation can be hard. But it’s worth the effort because new generations of talented people have already made their choice: they want to work remotely. 

Fifty-eight percent of workers said they would “absolutely” look for a new job if they cannot continue remote work in their current role.

FlexJobs

Benefits of hiring remote employees 

Working remotely isn’t just about accommodating the demands of the workforce. It’s a strategic shift bringing in a bevy of operational benefits, such as…

🏊 A wider talent pool

If you hire remotely, your talent pool grows from local to global. This means more qualified potential candidates for each position and less competition with other employers.

Remote positions attract 3X more applicants than in-office jobs. At the same time, 67% of US employers have already lost their talent to competitors, offering more flexible work arrangements. 

You also escape local talent shortages for specialized skills. For example, the largest proportion of people with AI skills live in India, the United States, Germany, and Israel. Remote hiring means you don’t need to be in the same Zip code.

💰 Cost savings

The average real estate savings per full-time remote employee is $10,000. No office space also means no utility, cleaning, catering, office equipment, or security costs. 

For larger companies, those translate to massive cost efficiencies. The US Patent Office, where 80% of eligible staff teleworks, avoided over $65.6 million in miscellaneous real estate costs since launching its remote work program after the pandemic. 

🪄 Improved productivity

The jury is still out on whether remote work is always more productive. Over the past three years, companies reported anywhere between 19% decreases to 13% gains. The exact impacts depend largely on pre-existing process efficiencies and success with mastering asynchronous communication and remote collaboration. 

Generally, companies with mature remote work practices have more engaged, happy, and productive teams. This is mostly because their staff doesn’t have to lose energy due to long commutes, noisy office spaces, or ongoing stress. 

🤩 Employee satisfaction

Employee satisfaction increases as much as 20% when given the option to work 100% remotely. Satisfied employees aren’t just less grumpy — they’re more engaged and perform better in their roles. 

As Dr. Camille Preston argued in her book, The Happiness Advantage, “Happiness improves almost every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37%, productivity by 31%, and accuracy on tasks by 19%.” 

Challenges in remote hiring

Despite the above benefits, many teams remain hesitant about going fully remote…and rightfully so. The shift to remote-first often requires major changes in operational processes, corporate culture, and legal setup. Here are the top challenges to overcome.

🔍 Finding qualified remote candidates

Assembling a high-performance global team is no small feat. You’ll have to adapt your recruitment and selection process for remote candidates. Think video calls over on-site meetings, skills tests on top of resume screening, and a structured interview process over casual chit-chat.

You’ll also need to adjust your job descriptions and job promotion strategies, favoring specialized job boards and niche communities over general job aggregators like Indeed or Monster (the next section explores this in more detail). 

🚨 Legal complexities of international hiring

Hiring cross-border requires familiarity with local employment laws and payroll management practices. If you choose to hire international staff as contractors, misclassification can land you in regulatory hot water. 

Granted, specialized remote work services providers streamline the hiring process. Employer-of-record service providers like Deel and Plane help legally hire staff in countries where you don’t have a legal entity and ensure compliance with all applicable regulations — from proper compensation to IP rights protection. 

🏄 Building a remote onboarding process

Limited face time and fractured communication can make it hard for new hires to settle into their roles. They may feel clueless about corporate policies and lack timely feedback or basic tech assistance with setting up their equipment and corporate accounts. 

To integrate new employees remotely, create a structured onboarding plan covering all the legal formalities, general orientation, and role-specific guidance. Good communication is key. 

Communicate everything more than feels necessary. It’s better to sound like a broken record than to have a new team member who feels left out or doesn’t know what is expected from them.

Annika Helendi, Toggl Plan

Ensure the new employee receives access to all important work systems: email, project management software, department-specific tools, HR platform, and corporate knowledge libraries. Develop personalized onboarding paths, which include introduction meetings with key people, must-complete tasks for each day, and check-in sessions with direct supervisors. 

🎉 Managing a remote company culture

Remote work culture is like an invisible cord linking people from different locations, backgrounds, and values into one tight-knit allyship.

“You need to actively work on defining the culture. It is a constant effort and should not be left self-organizing. It’s so important to keep people communicating, making sure they talk about their plans, achievements and also problems. It’s also very important to work on building trust and a safe environment for taking risks,” notes Alari Aho, Founder of Toggl. 

Apart from promoting candid communication, you’ll also need to create new opportunities for bonding remotely. This can be anything from thematic Slack chats (e.g., for new parents or pet owners) to group health challenges or virtual parties.

🤝 Encouraging collaboration and productivity of remote employees

Remote work requires building a virtual workspace where everyone can connect, exchange ideas, air grievances, and find resolutions. Without a strong collaboration process, you’ll either lean into micromanagement (bad!) or employee surveillance (even worse). Or lose efficiencies due to information asymmetry and under-management. 

To strike the right balance, invest in the right type of project management software for your team. A simpler task management app may do for smaller, autonomous units (e.g., a marketing team). Meanwhile, larger departments may need more feature-rich platforms to streamline several different types of workflows (e.g., an HR team may want to have a full-cycle system that integrates recruitment and project management workflows). 

Likewise, find a suitable set of communication platforms — async messengers, video conferencing tools, and a knowledge management system for storing and exchanging text, video, and audio notes. 

How to hire remote employees in 10 simple steps

Toggl has been a remote-first company since 2014 — a bold but right decision for a startup that grew to a global business of 1.5 million users across four different products. 

Without remote work, we would have struggled to scale. After all, Estonia is a country of just 1.36 million amazing people. We would have struggled to scale our product because people from 40+ countries bring at least 40X brighter ideas for growth. 

And our story is hardly unique.

Automattic, the creator of WordPress.com and WooCommerce, thrives with a remote workforce of 1,900+ employees across 96 countries. Buffer reached an annual recurring revenue of $19.44 million, and GitLab successfully IPO-ed in 2021. Not to mention some of our amazing Toggl Hire users who’ve built effective pipelines for hiring remote developers and now get 10X more quality applicants per job posting.   

If you, too, want to build a strong, thriving, and growth-driven remote-first company, here are our best tips. 

1. Confirm the role can be done remotely

At least 35% of all jobs existing today can be done remotely. These include the majority of knowledge work like software development, sales, finance management, marketing, and consulting, among others. 

Generally, a role can be remote if it doesn’t require: 

• Hands-on tinkering with physical equipment
• Non-negotiable in-person customer interactions
• Immediate face-to-face interactions for troubleshooting 
• Regular on-site supply handling 

Next, consider the communication requirements. Can most job responsibilities be achieved effectively with virtual collaboration tools? Will timezone differences affect productivity? Can async communication negatively affect the employee’s performance? 

Lastly, confirm you have (or are willing to invest) in the right remote technology setup. Beyond personal hardware (laptop, headphones, etc.) and digital workplace apps, you should also consider security measures like a corporate VPN and encrypted remote system access for roles with sensitive data.  

2. Ensure salary and benefits are attractive to remote workers

Traditionally, employees had to trade the affordable cost of living for an opportunity to earn more in a major business hub. Remote work changed this trend. Job seekers no longer have to choose the high costs and stress levels of living in a big city for the opportunity to get a great salary. 

Top remote talents also understand how much their skill sets can earn them in different countries (as much of the salary data is public). So you’ll need to offer a competitive package to land the best hires. 

Some companies like Basecamp and Zillow pay the same rate to everyone, regardless of their country of residence. Others add a ‘location index’, adjusting the pay across different markets based on factors like cost of living or payroll overheads (e.g., legally required social benefit payments in the employee’s country of residence). 

The reality is the costs of hiring employees can be vastly different across countries. Christophe Pasquier, founder of Slite, argues, “Remote employees should indeed be paid fairly, but not equally. The same work should be given a similar standard of living level, and give the feeling that it’s appreciated the same way—no matter where people live”. His company decided to pay remote employee salaries indexed on the top percentiles of the capital of the employee’s residency. 

3. Write a great job description

A great job description for a remote open position sets clear expectations regarding responsibilities, skills, and job logistics. Explicitly state if there are any restrictions about hiring locations, time zones, working hours, or required travel for in-house or client meetings. 

Conduct a job task analysis to pin down the preferred work experience, hard skills, professional licenses, and personality traits of ideal candidates. Keep a reasonable list of candidate requirements to avoid wasting time searching for a purple squirrel—an ideal candidate that doesn’t exist on the market. 

Job listings aim to attract a wide pool of applicants, whom you’ll pre-screen and evaluate using different methods, such as skill sets, technical and cultural interviews, or homework assignments. 

Lastly, work on your messaging around the benefits of remote work and state what perks come with the role. Some candidates may have concerns about their work-life boundaries or opportunities for promotion. Here is what that looks like for most Toggl job listings. 👇

4. Expand your pool to include global talent

Remote work enables you to hire from a global talent pool, not just your country. The initial mechanics can seem challenging as you must figure out international payroll and contractor laws. On the pro side, many specialized remote hiring companies now help with the legal aspects. 

Cultural differences also come into play. However, greater cultural diversity usually translates to better business outcomes. Diverse teams are 87% more likely to make better decisions than non-inclusive ones because they’re less prone to biased thinking and more creative in brainstorming.

By bringing an amalgam of perspectives and cultural experiences, such teams can approach problems from different angles and propose truly innovative solutions.

To broaden your reach, distribute job descriptions to global remote job boards. Our favorites are: 

• FlexJobs
• Welcome to the Jungle 
• Remote OK
• WeWorkRemotely
• Remote Working
• WellFound 
• Jobspresso
• Skip The Drive
• RemoteinEurope
• Landing Jobs
• Remotive
• Working Nomads
• NoDesk
• Escape the City

5. Source remote workers

To attract more remote candidates to open positions, try combining several methods. You can also advertise remote job posts through your website and blog to attract candidates interested in your brand. 

Next, promote open positions on LinkedIn and other social media networks. Ask existing employees to get the word out to their network. 

Finally…ask for employee referrals which can reduce time-to-hire and save money on advertising costs and agency fees. 

6. Use a skills test at the start to shortlist candidates

Pre-employment skills testing narrows down the candidate pool by detecting relevant skills and competencies early in the hiring process. 

We recommend including short, multiple-question tests for role-related skills (e.g., accounting best practices, Android app development, or SEO) as the first pre-screening step to eliminate unsuitable candidates. With Toggl Hire, you can create customizable assessments for 100+ hard and soft skills using a database of expert-made questions. Then, automatically send these over to all candidates to vet their qualifications. 

By using skill assessments early in the hiring process, everyone wins. Applicants receive instant feedback (great for candidate experience) on their application status, while your team gets objective data for decision-making (i.e., candidate scores on different types of questions). 

By using pre-assessments, Proxify reached a 93% confidence of the candidate’s fit even before the first call (a major factor for a company processing over 3,000 applicants per month) and increased time-to-hire by 1.5x. At the same time, 4 out of 5 candidates who completed Toggl Hire skills tests love their experience. 

7. Invite the best candidates to a video interview

You’ll want to have face time with the strongest candidates over a video app. This is the opportunity to further evaluate the employees’ skills, personality, and alignment with the company culture. 

Just like a regular interview, basic courtesies apply: Select an appropriate time slot (mind the different time zones), tune in on time, and prepare thoughtful questions. But there are also important differences. 

Instead of looking for someone personable in real-time, you need to find someone who can also communicate well asynchronously. Similarly, for remote work, you don’t always need amazing team players but someone who’s also a self-starter and knows how to figure things out on their own.

During the video interview, focus on assessing the candidates’ communication skills and professional demeanor through the lens of remote work. During a culture interview, try asking the following questions to gauge a fit: 

• What’s your current process for working through the challenges? Your goal is to receive a concrete response, demonstrating the candidate’s self-awareness levels. Then probe them to share a solution to assess their problem-solving skills. Everyone will face difficulties with remote work. Your goal is to find people who can recover from occasional setbacks without waiting for someone to come to their rescue.
• How do you get into productive mode? Again, your goal is to assess the candidate’s self-awareness. Do they know how to best manage their time and energy? Can they do so without constant nags? The best remote work candidates will share their ‘recipe’ for getting into the groove. 
• What did you like about your last employer’s work culture? If the candidate starts talking about the in-office camaraderie, they might not bode well with remote work. On the other hand, if they love the role’s autonomy, it’s a great plus. Broader responses like “a running club” or “inside team jokes” help you understand if the person would fit with the cultural themes you’re cultivating or bring something new to the mix. 

8. Use the final interview correctly

Final interviews play a crucial role in the hiring process because you’re choosing from an exceptional cohort of talented people. By this point, everyone is a strong fit. So the decision boils down to figuring out who has a slight edge over the others in terms of skills, cultural fit, and job performance prospects. 

To make the right call, ask several final interview questions, testing the candidates’ situational judgment, motivation, work process, and first steps in the new role. 

Follow a structured interview process. Ask each candidate the same question and measure their responses using a scorecard with standardized evaluation criteria. To make an informed choice, evaluate answers based on:

• Consistency: Check if the candidates’ answers align with previous responses and their resumes. Do they expand on experiences or repeat the same points? Prioritize candidates who bring in more dimensions. 
• Insight depth: Look for candidates who provide sharp, detailed examples over vague, generalistic responses. It shows they have better communication skills and deeper experience to offer.
• Behavioral cues: Observe their engagement and soft skills — problem-solving, adaptability, and communication — to better gauge their comfort in a remote role.
• Cultural add: Assess how they’ll complement the company’s culture, mission, and values. Hiring for cultural add, rather than fit alone, promotes inclusivity and innovative thinking. 

9. Be transparent about your remote work policy

The success of remote work hinges on trust and mutual accountability. New hires should clearly understand your company’s remote work policies. Namely: 

• Schedules: Expected work hours, including any core hours when employees must be online.  Specify the procedures for requesting time off or scheduling flexibility.
• Performance: Explain how you’ll measure results to evaluate the new hires’ performance and eligibility for bonuses or promotions. Set clear, measurable, and realistic role-specific KPIs to drive engagement and avoid ambiguities during performance reviews. 
• Communication: Outline all means of communication available. Explain where different types of requests and questions should be routed (e.g., perks-related questions should be emailed to HR via Slack. Hardware-related problems should be reported to tech support via a ticketing app). Keep all of these procedures documented in a corporate knowledge base for convenience. 
• Expense reimbursement. Clarify which work-related expenses are eligible for reimbursement, e.g., home office supplies or new software license purchases. Explain how to submit expense claims and when to expect payment. 
• Cybersecurity. Provide guidance on securely accessing corporate software (e.g., installing a VPN or activating two-factor authentication). Explain how to handle sensitive data, what cannot be disclosed, and where to file requests for accessing restricted resources. 

10. Check their remote work setup

Give your new hires everything they need to begin working efficiently. This includes a laptop and software licenses at a minimum, although many companies will add a bit of extra home office setup like:

• One-time cash home office allowance for buying other necessities like a comfy chair or extra desk accessories
• Coworking space membership or an Internet stipend to help cover the bills
• Support with paying for preferred tools or premium digital content the person may need in their role. 

At Toggl, we provide each new hire with a €2,500 laptop budget (renews every 3 years) and a €2,000 budget for home office setup, plus an extra €300 every year after 3 years of tenure. Effectively, these are the savings from not having a physical office that we pass on to our people to help them settle in. 

Tips for conducting remote interviews

The most successful remote companies focus on finding people with a similar ethos — those who’ll thrive in highly autonomous environments, build meaningful relationships without a ton of face time, and get things done right on cue without endless nudges. 

To identify such candidates in the sea of applicants, we use four cornerstone recruitment best practices: 

• Shortlist candidates using skills tests. To avoid wasting anyone’s time, we schedule video interviews only with candidates who scored above a set testing threshold. This way, we know the candidate already has the desired chops, which we can further probe during a structured conversation. 
• Use async video interviews for different time zones. Asynchronous video interviews, a type of pre-recorded submission from an applicant, reduce the hustle of aligning schedules and provide greater room for feedback. Several people, recruiter(s) and hiring manager(s), can review submissions and provide feedback to reduce individual bias. 
• Use homework assignments to gauge remote work skills. Homework assignments provide even more insights into candidates’ aptitude for a remote role. We combine different situational and behavioral-based questions to measure the candidate’s potential to do well in remote settings.
• Ask the right interview questions. Most Togglers have several interview rounds—a pre-screen with a recruiter, a deeper technical interview with a hiring manager, and the final one to gauge culture fit. At each stage, we ask strategic interview questions to gauge the applicant’s personality traits, experience, values, and skills—and measure the responses using interviewing scorecards. 

10 qualities to look for when hiring remote workers

Identifying candidates with the following ten qualities is essential for a successful remote hiring process.

1. Communication skills

Good communication underpins a successful remote team. You can test the communication skills of remote employees by setting up a short standardized assessment and getting more insights during the interview. Ask questions like:  

• What’s your usual process for giving someone complex instructions remotely?
• Tell us about a situation when you had to resolve a conflict remotely. 
• Describe a situation where you were able to influence others on an important issue. What approaches or strategies did you use?

2. Organizational skills

Because remote employees will largely work on their own schedules, they will need to be highly organized. This will require a good ability to prioritize tasks, manage their time, and stay motivated. 

To evaluate the organizational skills of remote candidates, ask which time management strategies they favor: 

• Do you have a favorite time management tool or technique for working around a tight deadline? 
• How is remote work compatible with your current lifestyle? Will you need to make any changes? 
• How do you determine which task to do first when you have multiple priorities? 

3. Technical skills

Remote work requires a high degree of digital literacy — an ease of using and learning new technical tools. If you require knowledge of specific business software, you can test a candidate’s aptitude with a quick skills assessment.

For example, we have customizable Docker assessments for software engineers and tests for Figma, G-suite admin, and Microsoft Excel, among others.   

4. Trustworthiness

Trust is the bedrock of strong remote cultures. But this can be a tricky character trait to assess, and you almost have to trust your candidates are being honest about being honest.

The best you can do is ensure the applicants can do what they say they can.

Use several competency assessment methods — multiple-choice answer tests, take-home assignments with open-ended questions, portfolio evaluations, and structured interviews — to cross-validate candidates’ responses. 

5. Good culture match

A good way of ensuring a strong cultural fit when hiring remote workers is to use a combo of soft skills assessment tests and personality interview questions. This way, you can weed out applicants who won’t fit into your environment. 

During an interview, ask open-ended questions: 

• Describe the management style that will bring forth your best work and efforts.
• Describe the work environment or culture in which you are most productive and happy.
• Do you have a best friend at work? How do you feel about becoming friends with your coworkers? Is this a wise practice?

6. Self-sufficiency 

Remote employees need to be highly self-motivated and autonomous, or else it’ll be a struggle for their manager and everyone else on the team. Hire people who can solve issues on their own (when possible), show initiative, and take responsibility for their decisions. 

Some other good questions to ask are:

• When do you prefer working alone and when as part of a team?
• What initially got you interested in your profession? How has that sentiment changed since you started? 
• If you find yourself working on a boring task, how do you keep yourself going? 

7. Self-discipline

Self-discipline is extremely important for remote staff who need to work harder to minimize distractions, take regular breaks, and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Lack of proper routine can create extra physiological strain on remote workers, leading to emotional exhaustion, disengagement, and burnout. 

Ensure the candidate knows how to self-regulate and build healthy boundaries between work and play. You can get some ideas by asking questions like:

• What’s your ideal workday like? 
• How do you usually cope with stress? 
• How do you deal with productivity slumps? 

8. Flexibility and adaptability

You’ll want to allow remote staff as much autonomy and flexibility as possible, but some structure is necessary to ensure alignment.

This can take the form of weekly 1:1s with your team members or monthly retrospectives, where successes and failures are discussed. This is a great way to organically foster interaction in what can be an isolating environment at times and also create accountability without micromanaging.

At the same time, you’ll also need ‘faster’ channels for escalating emergency issues and shifting the teams to a new direction. To get an idea of a candidate’s adaptability, questions like these could come in handy:

• Your team needs to create a new data security strategy quickly in response to a new regulatory requirement. How would you approach this? 
• You have a critical task dependency, but the responsible teammate is working in a different timezone. How would you navigate this? 
• Have you ever dealt with a prospect with a “this is how we’ve always done it” attitude? What did you persuade them to try a different approach? 

9. Ability to respond to feedback

Constructive and candid feedback is critical for ensuring effective work. But not all people process feedback well, especially in remote settings, when you don’t see the non-verbal cues or hear the exact tone of voice.

10. Remote working experience

This isn’t an essential requirement, but people who previously thrived in hybrid or remote roles come with better ‘cultural baggage.’ They usually have stronger written communication skills, a better sense of tact when it comes to async communication, and mental resilience for doing most of the work solo. So it’s safer to go with someone familiar with the requirements than someone wanting to give it a go who thinks they might be good at it. 

Hire for remote jobs the right way

For employers, remote work enables access to the best talent in the market. For employees, it’s a way to live and work on their terms. While it’s advantageous for both, remote hiring comes with a host of unique challenges. You’ll need to adapt your processes and culture to reinforce multi-time-zone, cross-border collaboration.

When it comes to remote hiring, businesses are often worried about making a poor choice and ending up with ‘ghost workers’ — people who give the illusion of presence but fail to deliver real contributions. 

Skills-first hiring platforms like Toggl Hire bring greater predictability into the hiring process. Our hiring platform integrates the necessary ‘quality gates’ into your hiring process — auto-graded competency assessments, homework assignments, async video interviews, and advanced candidate analytics — to vet prospective candidates.

Built and tested on our remote-first company and now adopted by businesses worldwide, Toggl Hire helps you make smarter hiring decisions faster.