What Should You Look for When Hiring a Remote Employee?

A remote employee works outside your office. That person might live ten minutes away. They might live three states over. They might live in Buenos Aires, Manila, or Cape Town.

Each option can work well. Each comes with trade-offs. The right choice depends on the role, your budget, how you like to manage, and how much structure your business already has.

The fundamentals don't change. A good remote hire needs the skills to do the job and the habits to do it without someone looking over their shoulder. Finding that person takes a clearer process than most small businesses use for local hiring.

At Sagan, we help small and growing businesses hire full-time remote professionals overseas. We see the same pattern again and again: successful remote hires are rarely luck. They come from a well-defined role, a careful evaluation, and a manager who sets the new person up to win.

This guide walks through the whole process, from deciding which jobs can go remote to keeping a great remote employee for years.

Remote in your own city

A local remote employee gives you flexibility with an easy fallback. You can meet for onboarding, hold a quarterly planning day, or hand off equipment in person.

Payroll stays simple because you're already registered in your state. The limitation is the talent pool. You're still competing with every other local employer for the same people, at local wage levels.

Remote elsewhere in the United States

Hiring nationally widens the pool dramatically. You get a shared language, familiar business norms, and usually overlapping hours.

The trade-off is administrative. In most cases, one employee working from another state makes you an employer there. That typically means registering for state withholding and unemployment insurance, arranging workers' compensation coverage in that state, and sometimes handling local taxes.

A good payroll provider or PEO handles most of this. Plan for it before the offer goes out, not after the first paycheck.

Remote overseas

Hiring internationally opens the widest talent pool of all. Many countries have deep benches of educated, English-fluent professionals in accounting, marketing, operations, and customer support.

Latin America offers substantial overlap with U.S. business hours. Other regions can cover the hours when your office is closed.

The challenges are real. Time zones can be wide. Expectations around feedback, hierarchy, and initiative vary by culture.

Legal structure matters too. A person who works full-time for you, on your schedule, using your tools, may legally look like an employee even if your agreement calls them a contractor.

Depending on the country, you may need an employer of record or a carefully structured contractor arrangement. Get advice specific to that country before you hire.

Cost is often the first thing owners notice about overseas hiring. It shouldn't be the main reason. The better reason is access to strong people you couldn't otherwise reach.

style="position:relative; top:-140px; scroll-margin-top:120px;">

A job works remotely when you can see, measure, and deliver its output through a screen.

Bookkeeping, scheduling and dispatch, customer service, marketing coordination, transaction coordination, executive assistance, and e-commerce operations usually fit. So do many analytical and creative roles.

Roles that need hands on equipment, in-person customer contact, or constant unplanned collaboration are harder. Sometimes the answer is splitting the job. A home services company might keep a field supervisor local while moving dispatch, invoicing, and follow-up calls to a remote coordinator.

Before you post anything, write down what the person will do in a typical week, which tools they'll use, and what "good" looks like at 30, 90, and 180 days.

If you can't describe the work clearly, a remote employee will struggle to deliver it. So will you.

style="position:relative; top:-140px; scroll-margin-top:120px;">

Job skills come first. A remote bookkeeper still has to reconcile accounts correctly. A marketing coordinator still has to understand the platforms your agency uses.

Beyond skill, remote work rewards a specific set of traits.

• Written communication. Much of the work happens in messages, documents, and task comments. Look for people who write clearly and briefly, and who ask good questions in writing.
• Self-direction. Remote employees organize their own day, notice when they're blocked, and speak up early instead of waiting to be asked.
• Reliability. Showing up on time for scheduled calls, meeting deadlines, and following through on small commitments are the foundation of trust at a distance.
• Comfort with tools. Candidates don't need to know your exact software, but they should learn new systems quickly.

Turn these into a written scorecard before you meet anyone. Sagan starts every search this way, defining the role's specific skills and traits on a strategy call before sourcing begins. A scorecard keeps you from hiring the most charming candidate instead of the most capable one.

style="position:relative; top:-140px; scroll-margin-top:120px;">

Where you search depends on the kind of remote hire you want.

For local and national hires, job boards, LinkedIn, industry associations, and referrals remain the most common channels. Referrals from people you trust tend to produce the strongest candidates.

For overseas hires, options include freelance marketplaces, country-specific job boards, staffing agencies, and specialized recruiters. Freelance platforms work well for short projects. They are less suited to finding someone who will become a long-term member of your team.

Whatever the channel, expect volume. Remote postings draw far more applicants than local ones.

The hard part is rarely finding candidates. It's filtering them well.

style="position:relative; top:-140px; scroll-margin-top:120px;">

Use a structured interview

Ask every candidate the same core questions, tied to your scorecard, and rate the answers the same way. A widely cited 1998 meta-analysis by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter, covering 85 years of hiring research, found that structured interviews predict job performance better than casual, unstructured conversations.

Useful remote-specific questions include how they organized their work in a past remote role, a time they got stuck and what they did next, and how they prefer to receive feedback.

For overseas candidates, assess spoken and written English directly. Don't infer it from a resume.

Test the actual work

The same research found work sample tests to be among the strongest predictors of performance. Give finalists a short, paid assignment that mirrors the real job.

A bookkeeping candidate might categorize a month of sample transactions. A marketing candidate might draft a campaign email. Pay attention to how they communicate during the assignment, not only the final result.

Verify identity and references

This step matters more than it used to. Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2028, one in four job candidate profiles worldwide will be fake. Proxy interviews and AI-altered video are growing problems, especially for remote technical roles.

Simple safeguards help. Require cameras on and verify government ID before making an offer.

Call references directly, using contact details you find yourself. Have a second person from your team join a later interview.

style="position:relative; top:-140px; scroll-margin-top:120px;">

Pay should reflect the role, the skill level, and the market where the person lives. Salary benchmarks exist for most roles in most markets. Use them.

For U.S. hires, some companies pay the same rate everywhere. Others adjust by region.

Either approach works if you're consistent and transparent about it.

For overseas hires, pay competitively for that market, not the minimum someone will accept. Strong candidates have options, and replacing a trained employee costs more than paying fairly.

Sagan members use a Global Compensation Guide for exactly this reason: setting salaries that are fair and competitive for international talent.

Look beyond salary too. Paid time off, local holidays, equipment, internet stipends, and professional development all matter. Settle payment method, currency, and transfer fees before the employee starts.

style="position:relative; top:-140px; scroll-margin-top:120px;">

Set communication rules before day one.

Which tool is for quick questions? Which is for tasks? How fast do you expect a reply? When is a meeting actually necessary?

Time zones deserve an honest look. A few hours of daily overlap is enough for most roles.

Customer-facing and dispatch roles may need nearly full overlap with your business hours. Back-office roles like bookkeeping or content production can work well with less.

Many U.S. businesses hiring overseas choose Latin America for close alignment. Others deliberately hire across time zones to get work done overnight.

Neither is right for everyone. Match the schedule to the job.

Asynchronous habits reduce the pressure on overlap. Recorded video walkthroughs, documented processes, and clear task descriptions let people work productively when you're unavailable.

Thinking about hiring a remote employee? Talk with Sagan about which roles fit remote work, how to evaluate candidates, and how to onboard a full-time global team member successfully.

style="position:relative; top:-140px; scroll-margin-top:120px;">

Remote hires most often struggle in the first few months, and usually for fixable reasons.

They didn't get access to the right systems. Nobody explained how decisions get made. They felt uncomfortable asking questions.

A written onboarding plan prevents most of this. Set up accounts and tools on day one, assign a clear first project in week one, and define milestones at 30, 60, and 90 days. Check in often at first, then taper.

This is why Sagan gives members a custom 30- to 90-day onboarding plan for every hire, along with ongoing training through Sagan University for owners and their global team members alike.

Training shouldn't end after onboarding. Remote employees who keep learning tend to stay longer and take on more responsibility.

There's a useful side effect, too. Documenting processes for a remote hire often reveals how much of your business lives only in your head.

style="position:relative; top:-140px; scroll-margin-top:120px;">

Measure outcomes, not hours online. Activity monitoring software tends to erode trust while measuring the wrong things.

Instead, define what each role produces. A dispatcher might own scheduling accuracy and response times. A bookkeeper might own a clean monthly close by a set date.

A real estate transaction coordinator might own getting files to closing on time. An e-commerce assistant might own order issues resolved within a day.

Agree on these measures in writing. Review them weekly at first. When results slip, talk about it quickly and specifically.

Be candid with yourself here. Many remote hires fall short because the business never defined success, not because the employee lacked ability.

style="position:relative; top:-140px; scroll-margin-top:120px;">

Trust at a distance comes from consistency. Keep your scheduled one-on-ones and respond when you said you would. Give feedback regularly, not only when something breaks.

Remote employees also need to feel like part of the team. Include them in meetings and company updates, and recognize good work where others can see it. If the budget allows, meet in person occasionally, even once a year.

Isolation is a real risk. Gallup research has found that fully remote workers report higher engagement than on-site workers but lower overall wellbeing. Productivity and connection are separate things to manage.

Offer a path forward. Raises tied to performance, growing responsibility, and new skills give good people reasons to stay. Many of the best remote employees want to build a career with you, not just hold a job.

Finally, accept that some hires won't work out. Address problems early, document them fairly, and part ways respectfully when needed. That protects your business and the rest of your team.

style="position:relative; top:-140px; scroll-margin-top:120px;">

Where a remote employee lives determines the paperwork, the time zone, and how often you can meet. It doesn't determine whether the hire succeeds.

That comes down to a clearly defined role, a careful evaluation, fair pay, and a manager who invests in the relationship. Businesses that get those right often find a remote hire gives them more than a filled seat. It gives the owner time back to focus on growth.

If you're thinking about expanding your search to global talent, Sagan is happy to talk through which roles fit, what the hiring process looks like, and how to support a new team member once they start.

Ready to make your next remote hire?

Talk with Sagan about your role, hiring needs, and how to build a strong remote team.

Schedule a Call →