Tech recruiting has changed dynamically in just one year, with the COVID-19 pandemic requiring companies to either institute plans for remote hiring or double-down on their existing remote hiring goals. With the exception of companies that were fully remote prior to the pandemic, this shift has required talent acquisition teams to answer a new question: What skills and traits do remote employees need to be successful?
In search of an answer, we reached out to the talent acquisition team at Sift, a San Francisco-based company that knows a thing or two about working with distributed teams. Sift uses machine learning to help companies fight fraud at scale while ensuring real customers don’t have to go to extreme lengths to prove they’re not a fraudster. The company was founded in 2011 and has offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Scottsdale and Dublin, Ireland.
A successful remote team member has the desire and interest to seek out continuous improvement and ongoing education.”
Having teams spread across the country—and one across an ocean—is not the same as operating a fully remote company. However, in a Medium post from last spring, Kellie Turner, a member of the Sift recruiting team, wrote that this experience helped smooth the transition to fully remote work.
“Sift successfully went remote days before the [San Francisco] shelter in place order,” Turner wrote. “How did we do this? We were lucky enough to have the foundation of WFH with critical systems in place in order to be successful.”
In her post, Turner noted that the transition to fully remote work was followed by a hiring pause, which the talent acquisition team used to connect with candidates and fellow tech recruiters through webinars and one-on-one strategy sessions. Recruiters also set to work retooling their internal processes for when Sift turned the hiring tap back on, which it has since done. Sift currently has 53 open roles on Built In, over half of which have the option to work remote.
When recruiting for these roles, Katelyn Halbert, recruiter, told Built In that the trait her team looks for in candidates is curiosity.
Yes, “curiosity” is a common core value across the tech industry and is a trait many companies look for in employees who work in-office. But to Halbert, curiosity in remote employees is important primarily because of its relationship to professional development.
“Being in a virtual setting, an employee does not have the social motivators or interactions that expose them to new opportunities,” Halbert said. “A successful remote team member has the desire and interest to seek out continuous improvement and ongoing education.”
Sift’s focus on curiosity shows that while companies need to approach remote recruiting intentionally, they don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Remote candidates need to be exemplary communicators and collaborators with above-average Slack and Zoom skills. However, they still need to possess many of the same skills that make in-office employees successful, like the curiosity to learn and grow in their role.
