The Ultimate List of Interview Questions to Ask Remote Workers
If it’s a hybrid position, ask the applicant if they will invest in a home office or use the kitchen table. The answers will help you see if the candidate has thought through all of the particulars of remote and hybrid work. When the team is remote, though, it’s not so easy to get an answer when you need it. There’s no “office” to pop into, and not everyone works the same hours. If your team is distributed across as many as 24 time zones, it may be a full working day before a question is answered. The day I watched Marie Forleo’s video on separating tasks into Important versus Urgent, my life changed.
So you can also arrange your work in the way that’s best for you – as long as you get it all done. Before every dream job, there’s a terrifying perfectly doable job interview. And interviews for remote jobs come with their own set of pitfalls. If your candidate is new to remote work life, get them thinking about how they’ll handle working remotely.
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We firmly believe that remote work is the future, and those who are looking for work – and the managers hiring them – had better be ready. They have world-class work from home experience communication skills and emotional intelligence. They aren’t afraid to ask for support when they need it or take on new challenges when they’ve got bandwidth.
Do you help facilitate a successful interview through attention to the allotted time and by bringing prepared questions? This signals initiative.” Finding ways to demonstrate these traits throughout the interview process “will make you a significantly stronger candidate,” Leech says. So spend some time reflecting on how you’d like to answer these questions, then ask a friend to join you on a video chat to practice your responses.
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Interviewers are trying to determine if you’ve done your homework about the company and why you’ve applied to this particular role. Maybe you’re more productive at home, where there are fewer distractions. Perhaps you live in a rural area where there aren’t many opportunities in your field, or you have to commute a long distance to get to them. Or, maybe it’s not the idea of working remotely that appeals to you—it’s the idea of working for that particular company that excites you. If you are a relative newcomer to the world of remote work, you might be wondering what types of work-from-home interview questions to expect. With a remote team, challenges with a distant product owner—such as missed meetings, lack of knowledge transfer and unresolved hurdles—become exacerbated unless you find a way to increase communication.
- Working from home offers a number of benefits but also poses unique challenges.
- As a remote worker, it’s easy to run into a problem and feel like you have to solve it on your own.
- With that, you can often be working on a team with members spread out across the country.
- Here are nine questions about working from home and motivation that you should be prepared to answer — and some ideas of what you should consider before you answer.
- Express why you are interested in the company by tying in aspects of your experience or skills with the company’s mission or values.
Someone who has already shown they can handle the challenges of remote employment is a good bet to continue performing well. This also happens to be an excellent opportunity to learn more about the company culture so that you can determine whether a prospective employer is going to be the right fit for you. “Candidates should demonstrate an awareness of how caustic conflict can become if unresolved in a remote environment,” Leech says. Talking things out in person tends to be the most straightforward way to resolve issues, so when you can’t do that in a timely manner, conflicts can simmer.
If you had a problem when the rest of your remote team was offline, how would you go about solving it?
If all someone can come up with is, “Which pair of fuzzy slippers to wear,” then they haven’t thought through all of the potential problems that can crop up when you work remotely. No matter how much planning you do in advance, or how organized your files are, or even how precisely the team followed the project plan, sometimes things go wrong. And, speaking of solutions, instead of just letting your boss know that there’s a problem, why not offer a solution as well? So, before you inform her about your designer’s flu, get in touch with your other designer and see if she can step in.
- Understanding how they switch out of work mode will help you better understand how they will do it when they are working for you.
- If your favorite job included group outings and frequent team lunches, or your least favorite one was when you felt stuck behind a desk, an interviewer may not see you as a great fit for a remote role.
- With the rise of remote work, companies will be hiring for remote positions more frequently and the interview process for a remote worker looks a bit different than that of an in-office employee.
- To the uninitiated, this might seem like a casual, even redundant question, almost a formality before delving into the heart of the interview.
- If your company has a more flexible work culture, this is a strong question to ask.
Practice the questions in the list above, be ready to impress employers with your communication skills and organization, and conclude with great questions of your own. These are some common habits among great potential remote workers, so try to demonstrate these traits when the interviewer asks what type of culture you prefer. A hiring manager with a successful team wants to maintain that company culture.