Some, but not all, remote jobs come with some or total flexibility over your work schedule. “The employer wants to know whether you can recover if things break down,” Leech says. Disagreements are inevitable, so knowing how to navigate and defuse misunderstandings before they get out of hand is an incredibly important skill—especially when you’re part of a remote team. How do you manage communications with clients and coworkers when there’s a three-hour time difference?
So my advice when answering this question, or any question about the remote nature of a job, is to be honest if it excites you, and be honest if it’s part of the reason you applied. Any time a job is fully-remote, you can expect the interviewer early in the conversation to ask your thoughts on working remotely. This question is designed to see whether you know how to conduct daily stand-ups, sprint planning or hold effective ceremonies when teammates are spread across different locations and time zones. Communication must be very deliberate, clear and effective when you work asynchronously.
You just have to know what skills companies want for remote jobs and how to point them out to potential employers. Transitioning from an in-office role to a distributed team can be difficult, so hiring managers want to know whether you’ve done it before. It’s not a deal breaker if you haven’t, but you’ll need to demonstrate that you have the ability to work remotely in other ways, such as freelancing experience or working on side projects.
Do you help facilitate a successful interview through attention to the allotted time and by bringing prepared questions? This signals initiative.” Finding ways to demonstrate these traits throughout the interview process “will make you a significantly stronger candidate,” Leech says. So spend some time reflecting on how you’d like to answer these questions, then ask a friend to join you on a video chat to practice your responses.
If you have experience working remotely in the past, be prepared to detail when, where, and how you were able to succeed in that role. Another option is to separate virtual jobs into their own “Remote Work Experience” section. Directly seeing https://remotemode.net/ a list of other companies that have trusted you to telecommute builds a hiring manager’s confidence. Just be sure you don’t distract from your best qualifications by inadvertently hiding some relevant non-remote experience in a lower section.
Let’s start by getting this out of the way—most people talking about remote work are describing something very different from my experience. Twitter pundits have been quick to form and share opinions, and I’ve seen a lot of misconceptions and misinformation about what “remote work” is, and how it works. When you’re working remotely, it’s important to always have a back-up plan. You never know when your internet could disconnect, when your power could flicker out, or when your computer could just decide to die. You’ll want to let a potential employer know you’ve thought through these scenarios and that you’ll be reliable, self-sufficient, and communicative — no matter what.
Your boss needs to KNOW that you can handle managing a project, from wrangling your teammates to meeting the deadline. Leslie shows that she has the tech chops AND the organization skills to be the leader of her own projects, so her boss won’t have to check on her 100 times a day to be sure she’s getting the work done. It might seem a bit vague and general, but the reason you might get asked a question like this is because your potential employer wants to get a handle on your management skills. When you’re a remote worker, you’ll have to organize and coordinate projects differently than you would in person, so bear that in mind when you reply to this. This is a great question because it shows your comfort level with tech, which is so important for a remote worker because you simply have to use tech to work remotely. And it also shows some of your personality and outside interests, which is one way a company can gauge how you’ll fit into a team.
Whatever reason you give for taking up a remote job, it needs to have weightage and has to be valid. Refrain from anything that makes remote work sound like it’s easy, and you’re taking it up for the sake of running personal errands. I know that communication in remote teams can be very tough, so I always try to work from home experience overcommunicate when interacting with my coworkers on Slack. In some cases, they also want to know if you have experience using the tools they’re using, but that’s not usually a big deal. If you’ve used communication tools in the past, chances are, you can use whatever the company you’re applying to uses, too.
You’ll often get some variation of this question during the interview process—whether for a remote job or not. That doesn’t mean you can’t support one another, but even that takes a bit more initiative when you’re working remotely. According to Jones, the key here is to have a detailed, thoughtful answer (complete with specific examples) prepared. That should be fairly easy for people who’ve worked remotely in the past, but if you haven’t, don’t sweat it. “Sometimes people get tripped up when they are asked a question about a situation they’ve never been in—and remote work is new to a lot of folks,” Jones says. “If this happens, communicate what you would do if you encountered XYZ situation in a remote role; sometimes the thought process is more valuable than the actual answer.”
But you’ll ALSO have to prove that you can handle (and excel in!) the conditions of a remote job, down to the little details. Employers want to know about the logistics because in a remote job, when you can’t waltz into a coworker’s office to sort something out, little things – like how you communicate problems – make a big difference. Not asking questions can cost you the job whether the interview is a phone call, video call, or in person.
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