During the two years the world was dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, most employers began allowing their employees to work from home. While many employers have shifted back to having employees come into an office, an offshoot of working from home has come in the form of remote work.
Rather than limiting their search for candidates to the cities where offices are located, companies have begun hiring candidates who live elsewhere, while allowing them to remain where they already live.
Hiring for remote work
The possibility for an employee to work far from the office, often coming in occasionally for meetings or to do certain work, has been available for decades. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, companies began allowing employees to work from anywhere and sought to hire candidates without requiring them to relocate.
As the trend has continued to expand, largely pursued by employers with offices in costlier cities, the candidate pool for these high-paying jobs has grown, providing a big benefit to employers and employees alike.
However, hiring remote employees is not without its challenges. There are a number of things that you need to consider when pursuing and hiring candidates from far afield.
However, overcoming these challenges is possible, and has even become easier with advancing technology. Through the use of online and cloud-based services and solutions, your human resources team will be empowered to attract and retain the most qualified candidates.
Background checks for remote candidates
Something that employers have done for many years is to perform a background check on a candidate before making a hiring offer or make the offer contingent on the results of a check. Background checks allow an employer to verify important information provided by a candidate, usually related to previous employment and criminal records.
However, a background check can be used by a company to evaluate other pieces of information, both provided and unprovided by the candidate, to ensure the person they are hiring is the person they think they are hiring.
Performing a background check on a candidate living near an employer’s office location has become so commonplace that little hampers the process. With a remote candidate, the process can prove to be a challenge in a number of ways. Many companies have an individual or team within human resources who carries out all employee-required background investigations. These checks can be performed quickly, and the candidate is available to provide any additional information needed.
However, if a candidate lives across the country, or even in a different country, the background check process is often passed on to a firm that has a focus on performing such checks.
Such a service will receive the candidate’s information from you and then carry out research to verify what the candidate has provided. If a criminal check is needed, the firm will evaluate public records from locations where the candidate has lived and elsewhere.
Once the information is verified and the necessary checks are complete, you will be provided with the results. By using this option, your hiring team can avoid the challenge of doing a background check on a remote candidate.
Cost considerations
There are cost benefits and challenges when it comes to hiring remote employees. These considerations can impact both the employer and employee to varying degrees, and taking a look at them can help prepare a company to meet any challenges and exploit any benefits for employees.
When these things are considered and appropriately addressed, a company can make the most of any cost savings associated with remote employees and still provide those employees with the employment experience that will retain them.
One of the biggest things you need to look at with regard to hiring and retaining remote workers is any differences in income taxes. Although in the United States, all employees pay the same federal taxes, different states have different taxes on income.
Regardless of where an employee lives, you need to follow the income tax withholding and other mandatory costs for that state. This requires your HR and accounting offices to set things up differently than if all employees worked in the same office. Because of this, some employers will only allow remote work from certain states where they already have a physical presence, even if the employee does not work for that particular office.
On the other hand, if your office is in an expensive city and you have employees living in and working from different locations, you can adjust employee pay to reflect the cost of living for that particular location.
This can help attract and retain exceptional talent while reducing the salary requirements a candidate might expect. For employees, they may find that an employer will pay them more than the local going rate, which is a benefit that both employer and employee can take advantage of.
Making it official – signing documents with remote employees
Once you have chosen to hire a remote employee, you will want to get them to sign all the appropriate paperwork. A remote hire is not going to be able to come in to sign these documents, so your HR team will need to use one of two methods to have things signed.
With the first option, the necessary documents will be sent through the mail to a candidate, who will sign them and return them to you via mail. This can be a time-consuming, laborious, and costly process. Alternatively, you can take advantage of an online service that allows the candidate to sign the documents on their home computer.
Your human resources office will upload the required documents to the online service, mark the places where a signature or other mark is required, and send the package via email to the candidate. Once the remote candidate receives the email, they will access the documents online and are required to verify that they are signing the documents as if they were signing with a pen on a piece of paper.
The candidate goes through the documents and signs where required, then the service returns the signed documents to you. This process can be completed in a matter of hours without anyone handling an actual piece of paper.
