The transition to remote work in March of 2020 arrived as an uncomfortable shock to many professionals in the tech industry.
Perhaps an even bigger shock? How much remote work has flourished since those early days of uncertainty.
According to Built In’s research, 68 percent of active job seekers in tech report that remote work is one of their largest incentives. Built In also found that 85 percent of companies noticed an increase in employee productivity after switching to remote work, and more than half of surveyed workers felt more efficient working out of a home office.
So why did it take organizations so long to take the plunge into a remote or hybrid work structure? For some, it might have been a preconception that employees could not work efficiently without being in the office. The more accurate answer, however, was that it required a massive overhaul of the current systems in place — team collaboration, company culture, virtual meeting software, onboarding and more. Since the system wasn’t visibly broken, what could remote work have to offer?
Leaders at creative multimedia hub Pinata feel similarly. According to CEO Kyle Tautenhan, Pinata has grown by 525 percent in the past year after implementing remote hiring, but the collective company culture has only gotten stronger as they’ve scaled.
“We have a slide deck to share things about ourselves as a way for us to get to know each other a little better — photos of pets, hobbies, interests, the city they live in, where they went to school and even favorite ice cream flavors,” he said.
As tech companies continue to strive for innovation and propel into the uncertain future, it’s clear that remote work is here to stay. That’s why Built in Austin caught up with six industry leaders to learn how their organizations have recently embraced remote hiring, how they’re standing out to job seekers in a saturated market and all the ways new hires are feeling supported in a virtually powered world.
Squire is a software technology platform for barbershops.
Which teams are expanding the most at Squire? What proportion of your open positions are available to remote workers?
Squire is in growth and scaling mode, so we’re looking for talent across the entire organization. We are ramping up our “Go To Market” engine and looking for sales, customer success, operations and marketing talent to reach more customers. Our engineering and product teams are also growing as we continue to innovate and build new products that serve our customers and help grow their business. As the company scales, we want to ensure that we have a solid infrastructure and are looking for talent to join our people operations, finance and legal teams as well.
Squire has always been a distributed workforce and will continue to support employees working remotely for all roles. We are also investing in building out our corporate office in New York to have a community space when employees visit our HQ and experience the Squire culture in person. We also have an office in Buffalo, NY and a hub in Austin, Texas that allow hybrid working options to employees if they are nearby.
What did you change about the hiring process to better accommodate remote applicants?
Squire has been a remote company from the very beginning and has always had a focus on hiring the best talent wherever they may live. We do our best to respect local time zones and schedule interviews during times that recognize work-life balance. We fully leverage video interviews for face-to-face interactions and totally understand if we occasionally hear a barking dog, lawnmower or any sounds of real life as we get to know candidates. We also try to give as much insight as possible about how teams work together virtually during the interview process so candidates gain an understanding of a typical work day.
We do our best to respect local time zones and schedule interviews during times that recognize work-life balance.”
How has the onboarding process shifted to ensure offsite employees feel welcomed and engaged?
Having always had a distributed working environment, we strive to have a fun and informative new hire orientation for all new employees. We have games and prizes during orientation to create an atmosphere of fun and connection as new employees learn more about all of the departments of the company and how they will all contribute toward company goals and objectives.
Another important aspect of new hire orientation sessions are hearing testimonials and hosting Q&A sessions with our customers and other community influencers. We are very intentional in having an onboarding process that is reflective of our Squire culture and values. And of course, we want our new team members to feel fully immersed in our unique brand, so we make sure all new hires receive their Squire-branded swag!
Luxury Presence provides a SaaS marketing system used by the world’s leading realtors.
Which teams are expanding the most at Luxury Presence? What proportion of your open positions are available to remote workers?
Luxury Presence is in a hyper-growth stage following our Series B funding. What does that mean for hiring? There’s a lot of it, across all teams.
We’re a remote-first company, but we have co-working spaces for employees located in Austin, Texas and Denver, and we will continue to create new co-working spaces as we expand and scale — Los Angeles and New York City are in the works. While it is not a requirement to be in office for almost all positions at Luxury Presence, we value in-person connection and provide opportunities to do so. The only team that encourages and may require in-person work is our sales team, and more specifically for training sellers with less than five years experience. They are open to remote training for more senior sellers who have a great foundation for their craft.
Due to our growth plans for this year and beyond, our sales, client success and technology teams are expanding at a fast rate.
What did you change about the hiring process to better accommodate remote applicants?
Since April of 2020, our team has invested in a remote-first environment. This meant shifting our entire interview process to accommodate remote applicants and candidates. To support this and continue to elevate the candidate experience, our strongest impact on the process has been our implementation of a candidate handbook. This handbook sets the stage, provides insights on what we offer and what you can expect from us throughout the process, all while giving you a peek into our culture. On top of that, we’ve added qualifying questions to ensure it’s a strong match before a phone call, opened up hiring across the states, adjusted the interview process to adapt to virtual meetings, offer office hours to director-level candidates and above to pick our leader’s brains, and much more.
This all stems from our value around transparency — we understand that interviewing for a new position comes with many moving parts. Providing insights and opportunities to connect with our team throughout the interview process is top priority in making sure it’s the best match when making your next career move, especially in a remote-first environment.
Providing insights and opportunities to connect with our team throughout the interview process is top priority.”
How has the onboarding process shifted to ensure offsite employees feel welcomed and engaged?
Our onboarding process now features a mix of live virtual events and self-paced modules that merge the need for connection and feedback. We have a learning and development team that provides real-time training to support both flexibility and accountability.
We set expectations: Our new employees know exactly how to measure their success starting day one. Regardless of location, our new employees across all teams join us for welcome events on their first day to provide camaraderie and are provided with a “new hire buddy” to support in the navigation of our culture, communications and expectations.
Remote engagement is a central focus at Luxury Presence, and we are constantly finding innovative ways to bring our newest team members up to speed to jump-start their success.
Pinata is a multimedia hub for NFTs and creative content.
Which teams are expanding the most at Pinata? What proportion of your open positions are available to remote workers?
Pinata has grown by 525 percent in the past year alone, so picking just one team is tough. The teams with the most growth this year will be in product, marketing and business development.
For product, we are looking for UX and UI designers. On the marketing side, digital marketers, content marketers and marketing automation specialists are all high priority. And for business development, we are interested in business development representatives and solutions engineers.
Being a fully remote company, all of our positions are available to remote workers. We’ve hired from nine different states and seven different countries so far and look to keep adding.
What did you change about the hiring process to better accommodate remote applicants?
The biggest thing for us is realizing that great people live and work all over the place. No longer are we confined to “this city” or “that state.” It’s been amazing hiring people from all over the U.S. and all over the world. Ensuring that our applicants feel comfortable applying regardless of where they are is something we strive to be great at.
No longer are we confined to ‘this city’ or ‘that state.’”
How has the onboarding process shifted to ensure offsite employees feel welcomed and engaged?
To start, anyone that joins Pinata receives an amazing welcome from the whole team when that first message pops up on Slack telling us we have a new team member.
From there, we share blogs, videos and other resources to get new team members up to speed on who and what Pinata is about. We then have welcome meetings across the organization starting with their department and eventually introducing them to the whole company during all-hands meetings.
As CEO, I meet with every new hire for an hour on their first day to tell the Pinata story and where we are going.
Finally, we also have a shared slide deck to share things about ourselves as a way for us to get to know each other a little better. It can include anything new employees are comfortable sharing — photos of pets, hobbies, interests, the city they live in, where they went to school and even favorite ice cream flavors.
Liquibase accelerates application releases with database automation tools.
Which teams are expanding the most at Liquibase? What proportion of your open positions are available to remote workers?
We are hiring across all teams here at Liquibase. It’s an exciting time to be joining us, as we are on the brink of some really exciting changes and you can feel the momentum in our growth. Teams with the most open positions right now are engineering and sales.
What did you change about the hiring process to better accommodate remote applicants?
Our process is entirely remote, using video chat and online testing platforms for technical interviews. We keep our process speedy and efficient, while maintaining a personal touch and still allowing each candidate to really get a feel for our culture. We make sure each candidate has the opportunity to video chat with the hiring manager, team peers and senior leadership. The team prioritizes giving lots of opportunities to get questions answered regarding our tools, the role expectations and the culture they can expect from us here at Liquibase.
We keep our process speedy and efficient, while maintaining a personal touch and still allowing each candidate to really get a feel for our culture.”
How has the onboarding process shifted to ensure offsite employees feel welcomed and engaged?
Since our team is fully remote, it is a level playing field for folks joining. Each Liquibaser goes through the same organizational onboarding process, and then depending upon role and department, they’ll go through onboarding for their specific job. We have video welcome sessions on the first day — one with HR and one with the hiring manager.
We’ve built out an interactive employee portal site that allows folks to navigate around and learn more about the company, our history, products and vision, as well as more personal notes like where to find funny Liquibaser dog pictures!
Which teams are expanding the most at Muck Rack? What proportion of your open positions are available to remote workers?
Muck Rack is hiring across all 10 of our teams in 2022, including sales, product, tech, marketing and customer success. In fact, we’re looking to hire more than 100 people by the end of this year. As a self-funded startup, we’re incredibly thoughtful about each role we launch and while we are growing rapidly, we choose to take a sustainable approach to hiring.
Last year we became a fully distributed team, pledging to never force anyone back into an office — which means that all of our positions are available to remote workers. We consider ourselves to be fully distributed versus “remote first” because remote implies that we have a main HQ; we have no main office because our offices are wherever our employees are. Thanks to this mentality, we’ve been able to grow our team all around the world with employees in 27 states and six countries outside of the U.S., including Canada, Poland, Bulgaria and Argentina.
What did you change about the hiring process to better accommodate remote applicants?
To align with our distributed work philosophy, Muck Rack takes a geo-neutral approach to pay within the United States. This means that pay is not determined by location and instead based on job level and function. This allows us to hire talent from all over the country, and also gives current employees the opportunity to relocate domestically without impacting their compensation. For all other countries, we pay based on market norms and use our U.S. salary bands as a reference point.
Rather than investing in office space, Muck Rack invests in its employees. We’ve adapted our benefits by funding co-working memberships, reimbursing our team for phone and internet bills, and offering home office stipends.
Muck Rack has deployed a standardized interview process to guarantee that all applicants are treated fairly and that we make equitable hiring decisions as a team. Additionally, we have partnered with new sourcing channels to engage with talent from all around the world.
Rather than investing in office space, Muck Rack invests in its employees.”
How has the onboarding process shifted to ensure offsite employees feel welcomed and engaged?
Our standardized onboarding process allows for a consistent experience for all new employees. We conduct regular surveys in order to collect feedback from our new team members to make sure that they feel comfortable and confident in their new roles.
Additionally, we onboard new employees in cohorts every other week — this way, our team can feel connected to colleagues from day one. New team members start on Wednesdays to ease them into their first week of work, and their first day is all about connecting with other people at Muck Rack. Not only will they meet with our onboarding team, their manager and immediate team members, but they’ll also be paired with an onboarding buddy who can serve as an additional resource within their first few months. Onboarding buddies will set up networking lunches, answer questions and check in with our new hires regularly.
By the time that our new team members have reached their third month, they’ve met with every single department at Muck Rack through recurring quarterly meet and greets. We continue to sponsor plenty of opportunities for our team to continue to build relationships, both virtually and in person.
Shipwell transforms supply chains with better connectivity across people, systems and workflows.
Which teams are expanding the most at Shipwell? What proportion of your open positions are available to remote workers?
All Shipwell teams are expanding. We are a remote-forward company so all of our positions are available to remote workers. However, we also understand not everyone thrives in a remote environment, so we have an office in Austin, Texas should anyone want to work out of an office. The choice to work remotely or not is left purely up to our employees — they decide what works best for their job productivity and how that fits with their personal lives.
What did you change about the hiring process to better accommodate remote applicants?
We interview all candidates the same, whether they want to be remote or not. We do not have a different process or treat candidates differently based on where they will work. All our interviews are structured to be held virtually over video calls.
We ask our Shipwell team members to turn their cameras on for interviews so candidates can better connect with our team. Seeing people’s faces is important when learning more about whom you may potentially work with. Having video calls also helps break up the interviews to be more digestible for candidates. It can happen over a couple of days instead of exclusively in one day, in person and without breaks. We have found candidates can move quickly through our virtual process because they have a lot more options for availability to connect remotely.
The choice to work remotely or not is left purely up to our employees — they decide what works best for their job productivity.”
How has the onboarding process shifted to ensure offsite employees feel welcomed and engaged?
We onboard all new Shipwellians virtually in new hire groups. We want new employees to still connect with other new hires, but being a remote-forward company means doing all onboarding through video calls. We structure a full week of onboarding for new hires, ship their equipment to them the week before they start, and welcome them on their first day with icebreakers and general equipment setup. We send them calendar invites for all their virtual sessions and even set up times for them to self-study or review new hire materials.
It’s very similar structure to in-person onboarding — it just takes a bit of additional planning and clear communication. Making sure new hires meet other employees is also important, so we have monthly virtual company events, connect them with a new hire buddy and hold monthly Donut connections through Slack to ensure constant and consistent employee interactions.
