If they haven’t had experiences before this, you can see where their pain points are and help them find solutions. Even if someone hasn’t had the best experience with remote work in the past, they can still be ready to take on the role with ideas in mind on how to succeed. This question gets down to brass tacks – their experience with working remotely. It’ll help you determine if they’ve ever worked remotely before or if this will be a new opportunity for them. It’s up to you to decide if you’d want someone with experience or brand new to the opportunity.
While that’s normal, it’s important that you can demonstrate that you know how to self-educate or ask for additional help where needed. When you’re not in the same physical space, you need to be proactive and find the information you need. Remember to demonstrate that you understand how caustic conflict can be in a remote environment. Whatever your answer, be sure it reminds the interviewer you are a great job candidate.
Do You Have Any Questions for Me?
You need to know they’ll keep plugging away (on the right things) without constant check-ins from you. There’s nothing worse than having to think on your feet in an interview. When you’re already nervous, you don’t want to have work from home experience to scramble to find a suitable answer to a tricky interview question. Our free Weekly Newsletter includes new remote and flexible job listings, information on top companies hiring, helpful articles, special offers, and more.
- Others have been laid off or were already unemployed, struggling to find work in a struggling economy.
- If you haven’t worked remotely before, share comparable experiences like when you worked from home a few days per week or any freelancing experience you have.
- Your coworkers will understand you (and why you keep asking them to see the data) if they know how you hold all the threads together in your head.
- And it just so turns out that knowing yourself is ALSO the key to success in an interview for a remote job.
- You’ll also have to field questions on how you’re going to handle the logistics of working outside the office, from working with your team members to managing your workload and communicating with your boss.
So hiring managers want to know what motivates you to come to work each day. Hiring managers are careful to hire people who won’t disrupt/harm the current team. That’s a big factor in terms of what employers look for when hiring. Hiring managers believe that if you’ve overcome challenging projects in the past, you’ll be more likely to handle unexpected challenges in the future, too. Feel free to talk about what has worked best for you in past roles, too, even if those previous positions were not remote jobs. Since a hiring manager won’t be able to observe your work habits each day and offer tips/corrections, they need to be sure you’ll prioritize effectively from day one.
How to Answer the Question
Fortunately, we’ve got you covered on some common interview questions for remote jobs and ways to answer them. This is another excellent example of a situational interview question and the perfect opportunity to use the STAR method. Leech advises including a detailed example of how you’ve resolved a conflict in the past. “If you weren’t able to resolve things, share what you should have done instead, as it demonstrates an ability and desire to learn from your mistakes,” she says. Discussing what you learned can be incredibly valuable, so if you don’t have a glowing success story, it’s OK to share an example of a time things didn’t work out the way you’d hoped. As interesting and relevant as those examples may be, the goal is to keep the focus on your conflict resolution skills.
Among the storm clouds known as COVID-19, there were few silver linings. One was that being forced to work from home all of a sudden changed our collective ideas about remote work. Though the pandemic is no longer front-page news, the dust has yet to settle on the long-term fate of remote work. Return-to-work and hybrid mandates continue to cause controversy, even as research increasingly shows that remote work makes for happier and more productive teams. Overall, make sure you touch on a few other things about the job that excites you.
Questions to evaluate work-life balance maintenance
To make sure you’re on top of all these questions, download my FREE interview prep worksheet, where you can review what you might be asked and write out your own answers in detail. You’ll be ready for your remote job interview in no time at all, so you can get that remote job you’ve been dreaming of for so long. Maintaining culture is more difficult when managing a distributed team, so hiring managers are especially careful of this when hiring for remote jobs.
Asking candidates how they stay focused on tasks no matter where they work will give you some insight into how they might handle distractions as a remote employee. By starting with the broad question, you’ll be able to hone in on a more remote-specific follow-up question. Whatever your secret remote weapon, working style, office set-up, or ideal daily schedule is, you’ll need to really think it through before your remote job interview. Practicing how you’ll respond is important when going for any job interview but especially so when it comes to remote work. The logistics of the interview itself and the increased demands on you to be independent, extra communicative, and technically adept won’t leave you much time for beating around the bush.
How would you recreate the important team building aspects of a job at home?
This will also give you an idea of what they’re looking to get out of their career. You can then talk about steps they would need to take along the way to achieve those goals. If they’re able to confidently answer and provide concrete goals, they have a good long term vision that aligns with the companies success. Here’s where you can divide candidates into those that care about salary, perks, or a title and those that are invested in improving your company.
