If you work in a remote team, know what asynchronous communication is, and have experienced firsthand how it makes life easier for everyone, then you probably guess what the essence of the asynchronous hiring process is. The goals are still the same: saving time and creating comfortable conditions for productive work for all participants in the process. In brief, asynchronous hiring is a hiring process that has taken all the advantages of asynchronous communication and hit the jackpot.

In small startups, the founders, managers, and team leaders hire employees themselves, which is fine, except that it takes a lot of time from other important processes. In larger companies, the HRs still actively engage managers and heads of something who needs a new employee in the hiring process. The recruiter can only take over the screening part but can't accurately assess the required hard skills. Then he turns, for example, to the team leader or CTO to hire a technical specialist. What comes next? Offline or Zoom meeting scheduling, which would take into account the load in each participant's calendars. In addition to the fact that this approach stretches the process over time, it also takes a lot of employees' hours, interrupting them from deep work, usually at the most inopportune moment. In fact, this is the main point why no one likes to participate in hiring, and this task looks the most painful around others on the to-do list.

How does an asynchronous approach to hiring help?  Have you decided what idea you want to get across to the candidate? Record a video right away: tell a little about the company, about the features and challenges of the job, and ask questions that you are particularly concerned about in potential co-workers. As you see, this first step doesn't need to be postponed until the third Thursday of next month, when all the necessary calendars magically coincide.

You or the person responsible for hiring can send a pre-recorded video to the candidates immediately when they applied. The candidate can respond in video format as soon as possible and convenient for them. Talent will introduce themself, talk about experience, answer your questions about the job points, and ask their own. And the process is started. You, in turn, can view the response whenever it's convenient for you — between tasks, on a lunch break, along with other colleagues interested in hiring that employee. You can go back to the record and compare it with other candidates who sent their answers. 

One such three-to-five-minute video saves a lot of time for both sides. Did it become clear that the candidate is not suitable for the cultural fit? Or is their English not good enough, and this is critical for that job? Then you won't give them a test task, which means that you won't waste a candidate's and then your own time on checking in vain. 

Read more about the other not-so-obvious benefits of asynchronous hiring here, but you must have caught the gist: asynchronous hiring is easier, faster, and more convenient for everyone. And most importantly, it makes communication with the candidate personal, more than emails, trying their best to pretend personalized, but still looking fake, and even than Zoom calls, when everyone is too busy to make the conversation meaningful as it could be.

But still, how does asynchronous hiring work?

• Create the company's hiring flow

Decide how much selection steps are sufficient for you, and which candidates' skills are more critical to evaluate.

• Optimizes the process

Employers need to tell the same things at every standard first interview and ask approximately the same questions. Therefore, it is quite reasonable to optimize this part. Employers can record a video that tells about the company, its mission and goals, about the job and its challenges, and asks questions related to this job to potential candidates. This way, the approach still stays "alive" and somewhat personal, rather than the company's website page, for example.

• Review candidates, test them

Get your job replies in an asynchronous interview way and move the strongest candidates to the next stage using the same asynchronous interaction: chat, exchange of question-answer videos, send the test task and ask additional questions via video messages.

• Make an offer

Schedule a final face-to-face interview before or do without it.

Clean, professional and digestible in a short amount of time. You can use one of many resume templates available online, i.e. on Canva, resume building websites like Resumake or try LinkedIn Resume Assistant.

A typical CV or resume features:

• Name
• Contact details
• Links to your professional profiles
• Headline or Summary giving a general idea of who you are
• Work experience (with bullet points under each of your positions explaining your responsibilities, accomplishments and lessons learned)
• Education
• Self Study (courses and certificates)
• Languages and Interests

TIP: If you are creating a CV on LinkedIn, there is an option to save a Profile as a PDF. On 6nomads you don't even have to copy-paste your CV. When registering, you put your LinkedIn profile link, and the fields are automatically filled in. Customize it by describing your strengths, interests and career goals. Now you are all set: your profile contains all the necessary details and is ready to grab the employer's attention.

List all the technologies you have ever been exposed to. There are a few ways to showcase it (and the best thing is to do them all):

✔ Put the stack on the resume: in the skills section or in every project you worked on.
✔ Showcase your projects on GitHub and add a link to your resume. Check this article to learn tips, tricks and red flags for a GitHub profile.
✔ Pass 6nomads technical skills assessment.

Please don't. First, it's neither nice nor ethical. Second, you are going to get exposed during the technical interview. The dev team or a person you are going to talk to will know if you are actually aware of that framework or if you actually used that tool.

• Customize your headline. What is the point in repeating the title of your most recent role? Try to rewrite it, for example by including the languages or technologies you use the most.

• Create a summary for your profile. The summary serves as an elevator pitch that you can put between your contact details and your work experience. The basic summary includes your current role, your experience in the industry and with certain technologies, achievements and also your interest in the particular role and company. Just a couple sentences to give an idea of who you are and why you are a good fit.

• Use action verbs. Don't just list your responsibilities under each job you had, but start every sentence with an action verb like 'applied, 'facilitated', 'delivered'. Harvard Law School has a full list of action verbs published.

• Choose a special technique to develop your resume and create strong bullet points, such as STAR method, WHO method and CAR technique. Your CV is not just a list of things you did in life. The special techniques help you describe your functional skills, define your achievements and create a real story of your professional development.

• Tailor your resume to the job. It's even more important if you are applying for a job in larger companies as many of them use applicant tracking systems (ATS). ATS is a company's doorman that categorizes your resume and scans it for specific keywords in order to determine if it is worth being handed to the recruiter.

Now you are ready to:
✔ Save your CV as a PDF.
✔ Create or update your LinkedIn profile.
✔ Use the links to your LinkedIn and GitHub profiles to register at the 6nomads platform.

On the one hand, about half of tech companies have cover letter fields in their application forms, and 65% of fast-growing startups do too. On the other hand, the cover letter fields are mostly optional, and job recruiters spend only a few seconds on each application. We match companies with the most relevant candidates, so the need for a cover letter and extra test tasks usually goes down. You can also skip a lot of exhausting formalities, as almost all recruiters on 6nomads are CEOs, CTOs and team leads.

Preparing a cover letter is still a great opportunity to:
✔ Practice self-reflection and review your work experience
✔ Improve your writing skills
✔ Prepare for an interview
✔ Explain any gaps in employment

There is no universal rule on how to write cover letters and what information to include. Usually, when reading a cover letter a hiring person wants to see the answers to the following questions:

• Do you know the name of our company?
• Why are you interested in the position?
• Why do you want to work for a particular company?
• How is your previous experience relevant to the job?
• What benefits will you bring?
• Do you love what you do?

The general idea is to show that you understand yourself, the industry, and the company you are going to work for. As you are applying for a remote role, make sure to highlight your ability to work remotely. Don't forget to check the final version of your cover letter for grammar and spelling mistakes using a free check tool.

Congratulations! Four companies got your resume and maybe even read your cover letter. A hiring manager from the first one gives you a call just to confirm your interest, the second one wants to text chat on Slack. Then you get a take-home skills test from the third company, and the fourth one insists on a tech interview straight away.

The hiring process varies from company to company. The steps you may go through usually include but not limited to:
Pre-recorded interviews that are gaining broader use, especially within the remote work market. All the candidates get the same questions and make three-five minute videos answering these questions. According to 6nomads data, candidates who have pre-recorded interviews in their profile receive offers from companies almost 40% more often.
Preliminary remote coding tasks. It might be a homework-type assignment provided by a hiring company with a certain time limit or a coding challenge like the one we use.
Technical interviews are video interviews with tech-savvy people from the company, i.e. a dev team lead, CTO or a whole panel of developers. During a technical interview be ready for:

• Code review of your take-home tasks
• Quiz questions on software development fundamentals
• Coding challenges. You will have to open an IDE or text editor to solve some exercises in real time and discuss them

Usually, the tasks are harder than the ones the position requires, and employers care more about your solution to the problem and your explanation rather than the actual answer to it. To get an idea on how tech interviews usually go, check YouTube, for example, Joshua Fluke's channel.

General interviews. A hiring manager, a team lead or even a startup CEO might give you one or more phone screens or video calls and ask you about all the little things you put on your resume, your experience using different tools and technologies, your soft skills and basic culture and questions. Prepare yourself to answer remote specific questions.

Remember you are interviewing a company as much as they are interviewing you, so feel free to ask them about their remote culture or any support they offer to remote workers.

Check the remote jobs shortlist not to postpone, but to find the offer suiting you the best right now and good luck!