Photo by Surface on Unsplash

70% of people aren’t actively looking for a new role. In such a passive job market, finding the right remote talent can be a burden for HR representatives. But not when you look beyond the classic ways of attracting candidates.

In this context, we’re going over 5 strategies to attract new employees remotely and stand out among the hundreds of other active job descriptions:

Put together a Careers page that will make everyone apply

Your company’s Career page (often called About Us, Our Culture, Our People, Open Roles, We’re Hiring, etc.) is your chance to bring together everything that makes your organizational culture different and convince people that you can provide the perfect workplace/team for them.

Frankly put, some companies are better at highlighting their top assets and can stay away from plain Career pages that say nothing about who you are. I’ve had a look at hundreds of Career pages and here are the ones that pop out:

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The Digital Ocean page highlights why someone who’d love working for them, what their core values are, and even further takes you through every department’s mission so candidates can get a full idea of what their future team will be like.

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Expensify has found the perfect solution to showing potential remote candidates that their benefits aren’t all talk and no action. Each one of the perks they offer got its own page with proof and details.

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Remember to highlight how you’re working remotely and add in some team member testimonials. The Buffer team excels at promoting their remote work culture by regularly writing blog posts to shine light on their processes and team.

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Above is another example from GitLab. They’ve chosen to provide comprehensive materials on exactly how their remote team communicates and stays connected.

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CodeSignal clearly puts their team forward by showcasing employee testimonials and unique insights into their daily life.

With fewer people actively searching for a job, many of them find it tedious to sit through a lengthy recruitment process if they’re not fully displeased with their current workplace. Hotjar provides an overview into their different recruitment stages on the Careers page but you can also add these to every job description.

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You can go one step beyond a single Careers page to create social media accounts for your teams or to highlight your culture and open roles:

The Automattic team has a series of brief interviews with almost all of their team members up on YouTube. Perfect for getting to know your future teammates even before you apply.

Taking such approaches to the hiring process ensures you’ll reach out to remote talent who’s perfect for your culture. On top of this, placing your job openings on your website helps you get in touch with people who are familiar with your brand. You can always repost your job ads elsewhere for more exposure or add structured data to your job posting web pages so they’re displayed whenever someone searches for a similar role.

Stand out through the perks you offer

Most highly-skilled individuals would now prefer a remote role. This makes the job market even more competitive as every company’s trying to provide the best workplace and unique benefits. From the company-wide retreats most distributed teams are already allowing employees to work only 4 days/week or giving the freedom to craft their schedule exactly as they want it.

I’ve looked through the current remote job ads to see what some of the benefits that stand out are:

• Paying for employees’ house cleaning
• Allowing new hires to take full control of a strategy for their role
• Transparent salary and benefit packages 
• A positive work culture
• Unlimited paid vacation
• Mental health days, support, resources, workshops, and wellbeing allowance
• Free travel credit
• Inclusion workshops
• Mentorship and life coaching programs
• Online fitness classes fully paid by the company
• Unlimited sick days
• New baby fund and other childcare benefits
• Employee stock ownership
• Free lunches delivered to their home
• Paid sabbaticals
  

At Thera, we give you the opportunity to provide medical and pension benefits to your employees, no matter where they are in the world. By taking care of the global payroll, benefits, taxes, and local compliance duties in your place, you’re getting the opportunity to focus on your team members and their wellbeing instead.

Do your research and reach out to potential candidates first

According to ManpowerGroup, 27% of employers note that job applicants lack the hard skills or strengths required for a role with an extra 20% claiming that candidates don’t have the right experience.

Not to mention that most companies fail to recruit people who are fit for the skill set needed:

But this doesn’t mean there aren’t enough professionals out there. In fact, there’s more jobs than skilled candidates to cover them. By 2030, the talent shortage could result in a loss of $8.5 trillion. 

To prevent finding your company at a standstill due to a lack of talent, there are two options to consider:

1. Opt to skill and reskill candidates that are a fit for your culture and have part of the required experience.
2. Reach out to the right people for the job yourself.
   

The latter helps you get the attention of top remote talent even when they're not actively looking for a new job. Reddit, Slack communities, asking around your network, scrolling LinkedIn, and even Facebook groups are all good sources to find candidates with the ideal background. 

The pitfall of hiring through traditional job boards is you’ll limit the remote talent pool you have access to. On top of this, you won’t be able to build rapport with the candidate before the recruitment process.

Meet up with potential hires and have them join your team for a day

If you know you’ll soon have a job opening or have been actively looking for a new team member but couldn’t find the right person, schedule a meeting with someone who caught your eye. You’re probably already familiar with top professionals from your industry either because they’re doing an awesome job at work, they’re writing about it, or are just active on social media.

If you have a recruiter to fully focus on connecting with candidates, have them talk to more people than usual. These intro calls let you spot if someone could be suited for a different role instead and you’ll be showing an extra interest in every person — whether you’ll hire them now or in the future. After all, a bad recruitment experience means they won’t be likely to apply to a new role opening in the future.

For all candidates (even if someone’s not actively looking for a job), invite them over for a couple of hours or a day to see what your team is like and how they work. Have them join a meeting, virtual team-building activity, or your Slack channel. These come in handy for showing future team members what your culture is like as well as what their daily duties entail. 

This tip along with the previous one both help you create a potential candidate pool you can turn to in the future.

Turn to your existing employees for referrals

Current employees can promote your culture and provide a sense of security as to what a new role will be like. This is because potential remote hires get to first talk to a team member and find out what the schedule is really like, how management is, what perks they’d get, and how collaboration works overall. 

Other benefits of employee referrals include: 

• Scanning for culture fit from pre-recruitment
• Working with highly engaged team members
• Ensuring new hires are prepared and have the right skills for all tasks
• Talking to candidates who are already aware of your work culture
• Improving your retention rates as employees who were referred by a friend are likely to stay with your company longer
• Decreasing time to hire
• Reducing recruitment costs
  

There’s a reason why so many companies are flooding their blog with employer branding posts. These give you the right setup for introducing your work processes and pointing out what an awesome bunch of people you are!

Some companies opt to feature their team members on their blog, having them talk about their experience at a company in an effort to highlight their team culture and day-to-day life:

For more out-of-the-box recruitment ideas, check out our list of 7 best remote recruiting practices. Have your own strategies for attracting remote candidates to share? Tweet us at @getthera with your best tips!