your hiring process is filtering out the wrong people

Most remote hiring processes are designed to find good candidates... not to find people who are actually good at working remotely.

In today's send:
✅ What most remote hiring is actually testing for (and what it's missing)
✅ The signals that predict remote performance vs. interview performance
✅ A few changes to your process that catch the difference earlier

But first…

Top reads this week:

• Voice typing is one of the quickest ways to speed up everyday work tasks. Here’s how I’m using it.

• Most remote teams run more synchronously than they think. This breakdown of async vs sync is worth reading before you build out your communication norms.

• How to create belonging when your team is apart and why most culture efforts miss this entirely.

• 11 remote management strategies that actually hold up in practice.

• Burnout in remote teams is a leadership problem, not a wellness problem. Practical strategies for founders who want to catch it before it becomes obvious.

What your hiring process is actually selecting for

A standard hiring process, even a good one, tests for a specific set of skills:

• how well someone can structure an argument under pressure

• how clearly they can explain their thinking in a conversation,

• how well they read a room and adjust their communication in real time.

Those are real skills.

They're just not the ones that predict whether someone will thrive in a distributed team.

The skills that actually matter for remote work are harder to see during a one-hour call:

• the ability to work without external structure

• to communicate clearly in writing when nobody's watching

• to flag problems early rather than waiting for the next check-in

• to stay motivated when the team is six time zones away and no one’s checking either way.

Most hiring processes don't test for any of that, which is how teams end up with people who interviewed brilliantly and then needed constant management to get work done.

The signals worth looking for

The clearest signal is written communication.

Before a final interview, ask every candidate to explain something complex to you in writing: a past project, a decision they made, a problem they solved.

You're not grading them on content.

You're looking at whether they can structure information clearly for someone who wasn't in the room, with no opportunity to clarify in real time.

A second one is how they handle ambiguity.

The best remote workers have a bias toward action when things are unclear: they make a reasonable assumption, document it, and move forward rather than waiting for permission. You can test this directly by giving a brief that has a deliberate gap and seeing how they respond.

The third thing is what they say about their past experience of working remotely.

People who have worked well remotely have usually thought about what they need to work well.

They have opinions.

They've built systems.

The people who haven't tend to give vague answers about being self-disciplined that don't stand up to much follow-up.

What to change in your hiring process

Two practical adjustments that most teams can make without rebuilding their whole hiring process.

1. Add one async step.

   Ask candidates to complete a short written brief or a 10-minute Loom before the final interview.

   You'll immediately see the gap between people who communicate well in a structured conversation and people who communicate well in writing, without a camera and without real-time feedback.

2. Ask better questions about self-direction.

   Tell me about a project you led with minimal oversight gets you much further than are you comfortable working independently?

   And so does what does your ideal level of check-ins look like and why?

The goal isn't to make your process longer.

It's to make it test for the actual job.

ATR tip of the week

Look back at your last two or three remote hires and ask: did the way they showed up in the interview match how they showed up in the first 90 days?

If not, the gap is usually in your process, not the people.

Write down one thing you'd test differently next time before the next role opens up.

Forward this to a founder who needs help hiring the right people 👀

Other reads:

• Not every remote team needs the same stack, but most founders are running too many tools with no clear rules for any of them. This breaks down what you actually need and what you can drop.

• Heading into the end of year and still figuring out how to keep a distributed team aligned on goals; OKRs for remote teams is a good practical starting point.

•  

  ChatGPT just recommended your competitor. 

  ChatFeatured does the work to get you in the answer instead. Most customers see their first citations inside 7 days.

Have a great week!

Thanks,
Sam