What kind of job offers fantasy football leagues, well-thought out approaches to DEI and horseback riding as part of its perks?
For these tech companies, it’s not one specific job — it’s remote jobs as a whole.
Unfortunately, remote roles are becoming more and more scarce. A LinkedIn report from January 2024 noted that the number of remote job postings on the site dropped by 9 percent from January 2022 to December 2023, despite still pulling in high numbers of applicants — five times the share of applicants, to be exact.
Remote jobs are becoming the QB1 of fantasy football.
Built In spoke with six talent leaders who are looking for their next remote all-star, discussing what makes their team so special and why sticking to remote is a key part of their playbook.
Affirm is a fintech company with the mission to deliver honest financial products that improve lives.
How is your company currently expanding its remote workforce? Are there any teams or roles that you’re especially focused on?
As a remote company, our focus is on building a workforce that supports our long-term goals. We have a variety of remote roles open across the United States in fields like software engineering, finance, revenue, product and people, to name a few. We also have several software engineering roles open in Poland, Canada, Spain and the U.K. We’re excited to continue expanding our global teams.
Describe your company’s remote culture. What are some of the initiatives that keep employees connected?
We’re a remote-first company, but we’re not remote-only. We believe finding the best people starts with finding talent in different places, and that’s why we created the flexibility to work remotely. But we also know the importance of keeping teams connected. We’re proud of our collaborative office spaces that are available for employees who live near San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Toronto in North America and globally in Warsaw, Poland, Madrid and London.
“We’re a remote-first company, but we’re not remote-only. We believe finding the best people starts with finding talent in different places.”
We also continue to value and support in-person team gatherings. Some recent examples include our all-company hackathon which culminated at our headquarters in San Francisco earlier this year and gave teams the opportunity to collaborate on their hackathon projects in person.
We’ve also recently revamped our early-career engineering program to offer a hybrid approach. Hires in our early-career program will spend Tuesdays through Thursdays in the office during their first year, working alongside a dedicated mentor. This provides a valuable opportunity for in-person collaboration.
How does hiring remotely enable you to build out a more diverse, talented workforce?
Our remote-first approach plays a key role in our DEI strategy. It broadens our talent pool, enabling us to hire from diverse backgrounds, regions and perspectives. It also supports our DEI pillar of ‘Belonging’ — we’re working to ensure all Affirmers feel included no matter location and have an equitable experience.
Additionally, it helps retain diverse talent by offering flexibility for caregivers, parents, and others to thrive at work while balancing personal responsibilities. Overall, it enhances our ability to attract, include and retain a diverse workforce.
Huntress is a cybersecurity company focused on protecting and empowering small businesses to mid-sized enterprises.
How is your company currently expanding its remote workforce? Are there any teams or roles that you’re especially focused on?
Huntress has been a remote-first company since we started our journey in 2015. My concentration here, as the lead technical recruiter, typically spans core platform and product engineering, from individual contributor to leadership roles. Kristel Bowman, our senior technical recruiter, focuses on product management, design, technical writers and information technology. Both engineering and product will scale significantly over the next 12-18 months, so we will have plenty of opportunities across the board.
We work together as a team to bring top talent to Huntress, and in a little over two years, collectively have seen the company nearly double in size to over 400 employees. It has been very exciting and rewarding to participate in the evolution of the Huntress Managed Security Platform, and every role we work on is crucial to our success. Being a 100 percent remote company has allowed us to engage with talent across the United States without needing to be tied to an office or specific geographic location. We offer roles that allow our employees to have more work-life balance and flexibility with their work schedule, which is a fantastic advantage for us.
Describe your company’s remote culture. What are some of the initiatives that keep employees connected?
I could honestly talk about this topic all day, so I will do my best to condense this into some of the more important elements of what it looks like, how we stay connected, and what I experience. Our culture is built on a foundation of transparency, collaboration, passion and mutual respect. I regularly get feedback from those I have brought into Huntress that our culture is very special, and I hear the phrase “best place I have ever worked” quite often.
Staying connected in a fully remote company is challenging. We have meaningful in-person week-long gatherings twice a year, one being departmental and the other being our Summer Summit, which is companywide. Virtual opportunities like our weeklong Winter Summit and monthly town hall Tuesdays or all-hands meetings keep us connected to the business and to each other. The level of transparency during our town hall meetings has been refreshing to experience, and our executive leadership goes to great lengths to keep us up to date on everything from our financial results, sales and marketing updates, new hires coming into the company and strategic planning.
How does hiring remotely enable you to build out a more diverse, talented workforce?
Return-to-office and new hybrid mandates have been tough on workers within the technology sector, not to mention the significant retraction we are seeing in the market regarding widespread layoffs. Being able to offer fully remote roles gives us a distinct competitive advantage, which has attracted a very diverse pool of talent for us. I pay close attention to the number of fully remote jobs and see less and less of them all the time. People want work-life harmony with flexibility, having less time on the road and more time to live their lives. It is about trust as well; we hire the best and give them the freedom to do their best work and bring their best selves each and every day.
“I pay close attention to the number of fully remote jobs and see less and less of them all the time. People want work-life harmony with flexibility, having less time on the road and more time to live their lives.”
Besides being able to provide fully remote roles, our values and sense of belonging also resonate incredibly well with people from all walks of life. To learn more about our culture, benefits, and testimonials from our team members, check out our careers page.
360Learning creates a learning platform that combines collaborative tools with the power of a learning management system.
How is your company currently expanding its remote workforce? Are there any teams or roles that you’re especially focused on?
360Learning is a remote-first organization. We’ve been operating in this fashion even before the pandemic pushed many other organizations to work from home. We believe in a more asynchronous approach to work and have created our work culture around the concept of “convexity.” This allows us to hire anywhere within the countries in which we have an entity.
“We believe in a more asynchronous approach to work and have created our work culture around the concept of ‘convexity.’”
Right now, we are expanding our customer success team. Hiring in our newest geographic entity, Canada, is a priority, but we still consider applicants based anywhere in the United States, as well.
Describe your company’s remote culture. What are some of the initiatives that keep employees connected?
Most of our teams host weekly coffee chats to check in with each other and talk about topics unrelated to our work. We also offer six different employee resource groups, have “Learner Lounges” dedicated to various topics within our Google Chat environment, and recently revived our fantasy football league.
How does hiring remotely enable you to build out a more diverse, talented workforce?
When you work in talent acquisition, it is incredible to be able to cast a broad net when searching for new, talented employees. We can cover a wide range of time zones and geographies when we hire remote employees. This can also be beneficial to our diversity goals. If we were hiring in only one geography, we’d be limited to the population diversity of that particular area. Hiring talent throughout the countries we target allows us the opportunity to more closely match broader population demographic diversity. We can work toward being a more diverse and inclusive workplace as a fully remote organization.
Empower helps people access and build their credit by offering credit cards and determining credit worthiness based on bank data, not credit scores.
How is your company currently expanding its remote workforce? Are there any teams or roles that you’re especially focused on?
We’re a fully remote company and this puts us in an advantageous position to hire great talent wherever it may be. Empower began with teams in the United States and Australia, but today, we have employees based across five continents and no geographic limits on where we hire from.
Our focus recently has been on expanding our engineering team, which has been growing rapidly alongside our suite of products. Looking ahead, we’re hoping to bring on additional product team members in as many time zones.
Describe your company’s remote culture. What are some of the initiatives that keep employees connected?
Our remote culture is built on trust and flexibility, with an emphasis on thoughtful collaboration. For the most team overlap, we maintain core working hours that prioritize key meetings and stand-ups. Outside these hours, our team has the agency to work how it best suits them. Life happens and we understand there will be doctor’s appointments or school pickups. We trust our teammates to make the best choices for themselves while meeting their professional responsibilities.
“We maintain core working hours that prioritize key meetings and stand-ups. Outside these hours, our team has the agency to work how it best suits them.”
We’re remote 95 percent of the time, but we bring everyone together for in-person off-sites twice a year. These gatherings are crucial for strengthening relationships and aligning our collective goals. The first off-site of the year focuses on strategizing for the months ahead, and the second looks toward the coming year and reflects on our progress. These events blend the flexibility of remote work with the collaborative energy of face-to-face interactions, and keep our team in sync and doing our best work.
How does hiring remotely enable you to build out a more diverse, talented workforce?
Hiring remotely allows us to tap into diverse skill sets and perspectives. We’re recruiting the best people for each role without geographic concerns, and we’re a more well-rounded, agile organization for it. It’s also made us more attuned to the small differences that make our team great. Working culture norms, for example, in the United States are very different from Australia, which are very different from the Philippines. Having this wide range of representation in our team has helped us refine policies and ways of working to better suit all our people.
Our remote hiring approach also helps us serve our customers better. Since we’re creating products for a diverse, international audience, having a worldwide team helps us better understand and meet these needs. It’s like having a built-in international perspective, and that’s invaluable for creating products that really resonate globally.
Scaled Agile is an information technology company that is the provider of SAFe, a system for business agility.
How is your company currently expanding its remote workforce? Are there any teams or roles that you’re especially focused on?
At the heart of our business are our customers and partners, so we continuously evaluate how to align the right talent with the right areas of our organization to support our mission to help enterprises achieve business agility through research and thought leadership. Right now, we’re strategically expanding teams in marketing, revenue and software development — key areas that enhance our customer relationships and ensure we stay connected to their needs. Our focus is not just on growth but on scaling thoughtfully and staying true to our core values and purpose.
Describe your company’s remote culture. What are some of the initiatives that keep employees connected?
Our remote culture stays true to our core values of alignment, transparency, relentless improvement and respect for people. It begins with our talent acquisition process, ensuring we bring in individuals who align with our mission.
“Our remote culture stays true to our core values of alignment, transparency, relentless improvement and respect for people.”
During onboarding, new team members are paired with buddies, allowing them to connect with leaders and teams driving critical work. To keep everyone connected, we promote initiatives like our “Do All the Good You Can” program, which fosters both remote and in-person team bonding through volunteer opportunities.
We’ve also built a strong community with platforms such as Voices of Scaled Agile, Inc., where employees share personal stories during our all hands meetings, and fun Slack channels like #mystery1:1s that randomly connect team members biweekly.
Our people newsletter ties it all together, highlighting business updates, celebrations, and team spotlights. These initiatives create an engaged, connected workforce — no matter where they are in the world.
How does hiring remotely enable you to build out a more diverse, talented workforce?
Remote hiring allows us to access top talent globally while enhancing our workforce’s cultural intelligence. Beyond bringing in skilled professionals, it’s about fostering diversity and inclusion. For instance, during a cultural appreciation session, employees from different regions shared insights into their local customs and business etiquette. These interactions cultivate a deeper understanding and respect within our team and allow us to better serve a diverse customer base. This broadens our perspective as a company and makes us more adaptable and culturally aware, which is huge for long-term success.
Spark Advisors helps independent Medicare brokers build insurance businesses.
How is your company currently expanding its remote workforce? Are there any teams or roles that you’re especially focused on?
Our team is experiencing an exciting period of growth, thanks to our strong product-market fit within the Medicare tech space and a hefty Series B. We’ve set ambitious goals for the coming year, planning to almost double our remote team by the end of 2025. Right now, we’re focusing heavily on our sales teams — specifically, our strategic growth team — to ensure we are all set and ready to rock for the next sales season. That being said, we have hiring goals across the board and encourage all prospects to keep an eye on our careers page. We will be hiring in all functional areas in 2025.
“We’ve set ambitious goals for the coming year, planning to almost double our remote team by the end of 2025.”
Describe your company’s remote culture. What are some of the initiatives that keep employees connected?
We’re proud to be a remote-first company. We use Slack to connect daily, have weekly check-ins with our teams and managers, and bring everyone together monthly at all-hands meetings to stay aligned on our company mission and values. Even though we’re scattered across the United States — including Hawaii — we’ve built a close-knit team that knows how to stay engaged and productive.
We also make it a point to create opportunities for in-person connections through retreats. This year’s retreat was in Georgia. We got to unwind and bond by horseback riding and ATVing while also taking moments to get inspired about what’s ahead for Spark during strategic meetings.
Another key to our remote success is that we work asynchronously, which allows our team the flexibility to work when it suits them, meaning everyone performs at their best. Our monthly virtual events also add a little extra fun to our everyday routines.
How does hiring remotely enable you to build out a more diverse, talented workforce?
Remote work allows us to tap into a diverse talent pool across the country, reaching individuals in areas where opportunities may be limited. We’ve welcomed team members from both small towns and big cities, and we provide a competitive compensation package that enables everyone on our team to thrive.
Over 50 percent of our workforce is female-identifying, and over 35 percent of our company self-identifies as diverse. We believe that diversity of thought and experience across all teams helps us best serve our insurance agents and beneficiaries, and hiring remotely has empowered us to build a team that reflects the diverse communities we support.
