Expand your circle of candidates!

How many times have you “settled” for a less than ideal employee because you had exhausted your list of candidates and this person was the best one left? Imagine if you could expand your list of qualified candidates by ten fold! That is what happens when you can move beyond the traditional 50 mile radius that surrounds your central office.

Having a remote workforce strategy allows you to expand your search for qualified candidates to include those who could work from home. Granted, not every job is a good fit to work from home, but there are many job descriptions that contain tasks that could be performed away from the central office.

In some cases, it may be necessary to re-think how you have traditionally divided work between various positions. If it is your goal to support a remote workforce, you can perform an exercise that is described below to create modified positions that could be filled with a remote employee.

1. Extract all the “tasks” from a set of related job descriptions.
2. Classify the tasks as to if they could be performed remotely or if it is a requirement to be in the office.
3. For remote-ready tasks, identify the technology and tools that will be required by the remote employee to complete the task.
4. Re-assemble the tasks into job descriptions that will group remote-ready tasks into a single position, while moving the remaining tasks to employees who will remain in the central office.

Resist the temptation to keep things the same just because it has always been done that way. Not every service or task has to be delivered by a full time employee. Be creative!

Once you have identified a set of positions that are a good fit for remote employees, you can expand your search to include candidates that were not previously considered. The end result is a larger, more skilled pool of potential employees or contractors to match to your unique job needs.