The Best Hiring Tip for CTOs

Many companies have hired contractors remotely for the past 2 years. However, now as many of those companies return to their offices in US/UK/EU, they are letting go these contractors because they no longer accept remote.

So here's how to find them.

Disclosure

As a CTO, I've just built a team where half the headcount:

• Are located in countries like India, Pakistan, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina
• Were working for both big corps and startups in US, UK, and Germany
• Were recently let go
• Wanted to continue working remotely

This strategy is a sub-set of the broader approach described in my previous thread with @GergelyOrosz.

Finding Companies

Identifying companies that return to the office is not always easy, most of them don't publicly advertise it anymore.

Only the public traded companies do. If you have a wide network, you'll be able to spot employees who are unhappy+vocal about such policies.

Some companies are actually laying off full teams they built remotely during the pandemic.

Middle managers were empowered to hire remotely until recently. Now, with hard back to office policies, they are letting go such remote "extensions" and re-building in the office.

Finding Candidates

If you manage to identify companies that go back to the office, then it's easier to spot the employees to target:

• Go on Linkedin
• Search for employees that match the job title you're looking for
• Filter out anyone in the city of the company's office

You'll get all of their remote employees who've suddenly become a target for layoffs or redundancies.

I've found that even for remote contractors who haven't been dismissed, they feel very insecure about their job security at the current company. They are willing to interview.

You can also find employees "at risk" from companies that haven't publicly announced a return to office policy. I found out many of these candidates list themselves in freelance platforms (eg: @Upwork), instead of applying in normal job boards.

The Benefits

Many of them had never worked remotely before the pandemic, and the only experience they have working remotely is this last one as a contractor.

So they follow the contractor / freelance route for finding "clients". But what they really look for is a full time long term job.

The typical profile is:

• Senior engineer who worked several years at local companies
• Good technical skills (conversion rate for technical tests has been above avg)
• Have 1-2 years experience with international engineering culture (as a remote contractor)

I found that competition for these profiles is low. Most have offers on the table only from local companies (frequently their previous local employer before the remote gig). They are enthusiastic to accept an offer from a fully remote company (higher than avg acceptance rate).

I hope more CTOs find talented engineers wherever they are. For me, it's been amazing to build remote teams over the last 5 years.

Talent is indeed globally distributed. Many of these candidates look forward to international remote opportunities.

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