Hiring one remote developer is easy enough. Hiring a whole remote team that actually works well together? That’s where things tend to wobble.
Plenty of companies find this out the expensive way. They hire four great engineers in four different countries, hand them a Slack channel and a Jira board, and wait for the magic. Three months later pull requests are sitting unreviewed for days, nobody’s sure who owns what, and the strongest of the four is quietly interviewing somewhere else.
That’s rarely a talent problem. Mostly it’s a hiring-process problem. So if you’re hiring remote software engineers this year, here are five things worth getting right before the first job ad goes live.
1. Decide how you’ll work before you decide who to hire
Sounds backwards. It isn’t.
A mostly async team needs a very different person from one that’s on video calls four hours a day. Time zones matter too. If your product people sit in London and you hire someone in Manila, somebody’s going to be on a call at a silly hour, and it probably shouldn’t always be the new hire.
So before hiring remote software engineers, sit down and write it out. How much overlap do you really need each day? Do decisions get made in docs or in meetings? Who reviews code, and how quickly? It doesn’t have to be a polished handbook. A one-page note is plenty. But it’ll shape the job ad and the interview, and candidates can tell straight away when a company has thought this through.
2. Write a job ad a remote engineer would actually believe
Remote engineers read a lot of job ads. They’ve learned to spot the ones where “remote” really means “remote until the CEO changes their mind.”
Be specific. Say which countries or time zones you can hire in, because legally you probably can’t hire everywhere. Put the salary range in. Mention the stack, sure, but the problem is more interesting. “We’re rebuilding our billing system and it’s a bit of a mess” pulls in a different (often better) applicant than “exciting fintech opportunity.” If you pay one global rate or adjust by location, say so. People will ask anyway, and you don’t want to lose someone at offer stage over it.
3. Test for the job, not for the whiteboard
Live algorithm puzzles are an odd way to judge someone who’ll spend most of their week reading code, writing it alone and explaining it in text. And they weed out a lot of perfectly decent people who just go blank the second someone’s watching them type.
A better bet when you’re hiring remote software engineers is a little take-home task that looks like an actual ticket from your backlog, ideally a slightly annoying one. If it eats more than a couple of hours of someone’s evening, pay them for it. The interesting part comes afterwards, when you jump on a call and get them to walk you through it. People get surprisingly candid about the shortcuts they took and the bit they’d rip out given another day. That’s worth far more than watching a candidate sweat over a linked list.
Read how they write, too. The README, the commit messages, the email where they asked a clarifying question. In a remote team that’s a big chunk of the actual job.
4. Hire for communication, then for code (almost)
I’ll probably get pushback on this one. Obviously the code has to be good, nobody’s arguing otherwise. But if you’ve got two strong engineers and can only pick one, I’d lean towards whoever tells you about a problem on Tuesday instead of letting you find it on Friday. When everyone’s spread across time zones, that one habit saves you more grief than a slightly cleverer pull request ever will.
You won’t spot it on a CV. It shows up in tiny moments. Say the task brief was a bit woolly (on purpose, ideally). Did they message to check, or charge on and hope for the best? My rule of thumb, for what it’s worth: the person who emails back “quick question before I start” is usually the one you want. Keep half an eye on how they disagree, too. A bit of pushback is great. Pushback that makes you feel daft is less great, and it’ll read ten times worse in a Slack thread at 7am. Remote teams don’t get the chat by the kettle that clears up a mix-up in thirty seconds, so one badly worded message can cost you a week, easily.
Hiring five or six people at once? Then a specialist recruiter or a vetting platform might be worth paying for. Just be warned that “good communicator” means something slightly different to every single person who reads it. Tell them what it means to you. Write down an example, even.
5. The hiring isn’t over when they sign
This is the bit everyone skips. Offer signed, laptop in the post, done, right? Not quite.
Whether a remote hire stays put or starts browsing job boards again usually gets settled somewhere in those first four weeks. Find them a buddy. Not their manager, please; nobody wants to ask their boss where the staging credentials live. It also helps to have a small, real ticket waiting for them. Shipping even a tiny fix in the first week does a lot for a new person’s confidence. Sort their access on day one, which sounds obvious until you’ve watched someone wait four days for a VPN login. And check in properly at the 30-day mark, not just a “how’s it going?” in a DM.
Bringing in several engineers together? Stagger the start dates a little. Onboarding five people in the same week is chaos for everyone involved.
Quick questions
What’s the hardest part of hiring remote software engineers? Oddly, it’s rarely the finding part. There are plenty of good engineers about. What’s harder is telling which of them will be fine with nobody to tap on the shoulder, and then not tripping them up with a messy setup on your end. If a remote hire doesn’t work out, I’d bet on vague expectations being the culprit before I’d blame the engineer.
Should remote engineers be paid the same wherever they live? Ha, this one starts arguments. A flat rate is simple and nobody can call it unfair, but it adds up quickly if a few of your engineers happen to live in San Francisco. Pay by location and your money goes further, though whoever lands on the lower band may not love it. Pick one and put it in the job ad. Surprises at offer stage go down badly.
How long does it take to hire a remote engineering team? Longer than you’d like, usually, and a lot rides on how senior the roles are and how many you need. You can claw back a few weeks by having a tight brief ready and keeping the practical task short. Slow feedback between rounds is where most good candidates drop out.
One last thing
Hiring remote software engineers isn’t wildly different from hiring anyone else. It just punishes vague thinking faster. So before a single job ad goes up, figure out how your team actually works on a normal Tuesday. Be straight with people when you interview them. And keep checking in on new starters well past week one, because that’s usually about when everyone else stops.
