With the digital and workplace transformations already underway, but hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic, many employers are now recruiting and evaluating candidates using the ability to work remotely as a key criterion of employability. Working from home can be an advantageous situation for both employers and employees, but it does pose some unique challenges. Hiring managers are now attuned to the skills and traits required to work remotely. For your next interview, here are some key questions you may have to answer that are designed to gauge your remote work skills. Do You have experience working remotely? Such a question is designed for your interviewer to not only understand your experience, but also to gauge your interest and enthusiasm for taking on a remote role. If you do have experience, try to provide some details about the role and what specific strategies made you successful. If you haven’t worked remotely, describe some of your work habits that relate, such as your ability to focus, your self-direction and your time-management strategies. How do you maintain communication and collaboration with a distributed team? Communication and collaboration are not always easy when you work remotely. By asking this question, your interviewer is trying to determine if you thought through how to interact with others online and if you have strategies for encouraging remote collaboration. Try to talk about both formal and informal communication (emails, texts, chats, and phone calls). Today, there are many digital platforms companies use to facilitate communication and collaboration (MS Teams, Slack, Monday.com, Trello, etc.) Being able to talk about your comfort and ease with using such software is a good interview strategy. How do you schedule your time? Remote teams can be comprised of people with different working styles and who may also be living in different regions and time zones. This question is gauging the times during which you think you are the most productive, as well as testing to see if you are comfortable with the flexibility that usually accompanies working on a remote or distributed team. Answer this question by talking positively and enthusiastically about your most productive moments. This question is also an opportunity to talk about how you prioritize your tasks. With the flexibility of remote work, it is important to show you are organized and can manage multiple projects efficiently. Be sure to include your willingness to accommodate and be sensitive to the schedules of others—another chance to display your collaborative orientation! How would you solve a work-related problem if the rest of your team was offline? Recruiters for remote teams want to know that you are resourceful, creative, and that you have the independence and confidence to make important decisions. Your answers should show that you make a consistent practice of keeping your team informed of any potential obstacle on your projects. Talk about how you consistently use the various tools at your disposal (calls, emails, texts, chats) to stay in constant contact. Explain that if you are truly stuck, you have the courage to make decisions, but do so only after informing yourself as thoroughly as possible through research, connections with colleagues, and so on. These are just a few of the types of questions you will be asked in a remote work interview. Use these answers to help you prepare for interviews and roles that are, increasingly, moving to remote and hybrid working structures.
