Show HN: RemoteMore – We connect developers with full-time remote jobs

We did a very thorough research about the pre-screening.

We thought that technical skills was the central thing, so we had a technical assessment as the centre piece in the pre-screening. However, surprisingly this did not make much of a difference for the companies. They didn't contact more the people who have passed the technical screening, they almost never looked at the test scores. As long as the person has experience/education, that easy sufficient, and they pretty much always test the person in their stack anyway.

That was the reason why we removed the technical part of the screening.

However, the part that really made the companies interested in getting in touch with a person was the video. It turns out that hiring someone remotely is very much about trust, and even a very short video is really good at building trust.

We think of the video as soft-skills pre-screening, in particular pre-screening for skills that predict success in working remotely. Based on research, talks with lots of people in the remote space, a d our own experience, we have arrived at the conclusion that the skills needed to be successful in a remote position are: - Good communication skills - Good independent problem solving skills (some people include being organized, and to not get affected emotionally if something doesn't work out) - Have some level of intrinsic motivation about the profession, about doing this - Sufficient language skills to communicate

Turns out that a short video is about as good a filter for those things as having an interview with a person. It's also structured format, making it more objective than most interviews.

Of course, the videos are not about how good the person looks visually, but about how the person talks about the topics. We are looking for well structured answers, we are looking for a bit of passion about the profession, we are looking for people who look reliable etc. and not for TED talk level presentation skills.

If you have some comments/questions/feedback about the screening process, I'd be glad to hear from you!

(it is 8am here at the moment)

Yes, pretty much like that. I wrote one long reply in this thread on what we're looking for and it is about the same as this post above.

I would qdd to it that experience with working remotely successfully is a great predictor, but it leaves out the candidates that have not worked out remotely so far. In that case, the focus becomes on the other indicators.