When it comes to working and hiring remotely, most individuals fall into one of two categories: Those who see it as an opportunity to binge-watch Vincenzo on their couch while pretending to work, and others who see it as an opportunity to accomplish meaningful work without the stress of commuting.

We at ProDevs are part of the second group.

Here’s why we love ProDevs and remote work, how we became its primary drivers, and why we’ll never hire the old way again.

How ProDevs Made the Leap to Remote Hiring

ProDevs is based in Lagos, Nigeria, in case you didn’t know. In terms of the number of startups per capita, Nigeria takes the lead. It boasts of a thriving IT sector, with new startups springing up daily. It’s great news for tech people.

Nigeria is a large country with millions of people. As you can expect, finding new developers and other IT tasks got tough pretty soon. ProDevs had to hunt for talent outside of Lagos State to secure the best personnel for the project, which meant recruiting remotely.

Locating Skilled Remote Workers

It was rapidly apparent that hiring remotely had many of the same issues as traditional hiring strategies.

1. We had a difficult time getting in front of qualified remote candidates. Finding suitable applicants is difficult enough; finding individuals who produce the excellent job and desire to work remotely is much more difficult.

We needed to learn everything we could about our remote applicants in a short amount of time.

2. Then there was the question of screening. Thousands of applications flooded in after we announced open positions. Unfortunately, many of them were not qualified for the post. We discovered that resumes were more of a hindrance than assistance during the process.

3. Third, we needed to ensure that those who applied for the job genuinely possessed the required skills. In traditional work situations, this aspect of hiring necessitates a high level of trust; in remote recruiting, trust is a critical component of collaboration.

4. Finally, we needed to devise a method of hiring that was both efficient and effective. The process required to be scalable and reproducible; We needed to learn as much as possible about our applicants while keeping the process as simple as possible for us all.

We Partnered With Toggl Hire To Hire People Remotely.

Toggl Hire is a tool that lets you examine a candidate’s fundamental capabilities before hiring them. You can tell if an applicant is qualified for the job by asking a series of questions. Its key advantage is that it saves time and money during the initial stages of the employment process. Each of the ten workers hired through Toggl Hire saved us almost 10hours. That’s 10 hours you can spend on episodes of Game of Throne.

Here are the process and steps of recruitment made easy;

Creating a Pre-Screening Test and Defining the Position

It’s critical to know exactly who you’re looking for before generating a quick pre-screening test using Toggl Hire. Hence, before we started looking for a new SEO manager, we sat down and made a list of the responsibilities they should complete. This covers things like creating an SEO strategy, conducting keyword research, optimizing content, and determining outreach approaches, among other things.

Next, we identified the qualities that a great applicant must possess. Strategic thinking, SEO strategies understanding, creative writing, and other skills are among them.

Defining the tasks and skills your candidate needs to have is perhaps the most crucial step in hiring great people. Any mistakes made here will profoundly impact the hiring process later, so think this step through carefully.

Writing a Job Description

Putting together a job description that works is an art form. We don’t believe in walls of text filled with bullet points and buzzwords such as demonstrated ability, so we skipped all that mumbo-jumbo.

Recruiting Candidates

There were almost 100 applicants when a developer was being hired for ProDevs, with only 2% making it to the interview. Only 0.3 per cent of those who applied were employed. We knew exactly what procedure to implement.

Filtration of Candidates

We looked at some of the test’s leading questions and saw how the candidates replied to them to weed out certain contenders. If we were still undecided, we used the open-ended text questions to help us decide. Finally, if we couldn’t reach them by phone, we looked at their LinkedIn profile. We moved from 50 to 10 applicants in this manner, which is a significant improvement.

The candidates were then invited to take a one-hour test. Of course, with Toggl Hire. We scheduled an interview with those who passed and invited the top two to participate in a paid test week to assess how well they fit in with our community.

Register with ProDevs as a Tech Talent today!

If you’d also like to take advantage of our vast array of tech talents, sign up on www.prodevs.io today. You can either apply as a Pro Talent or Hire a Pro Talent.