I revamped our remote skills assessment into 7 steps – and this is how it affected hiring

It doesn’t matter if developers can solve puzzles on a white board, or if marketers can speak eloquently about optimizing various stages of the funnel – especially in an interview for a fully remote position.

What matters: A remote skills assessment.

Your employees won’t be doing much pontificating in their day-to-day in a fully remote environment. They’ll be coding, writing, strategizing, thinking and collaborating.

These are active endeavors grounded in specificity. So it follows that your skills assessment process should revolve around real-world exercises that deliver impactful business value.

What remote skills assessment is not

That means no brain teasers, monologues or quizzes.

There are only three things we screen for at Tremendous. That’s it. And together, they create a reliable formula for hiring exceptional talent for remote positions.

We look for:

• practical performance
• writing aptitude
• rationality

We don’t screen for raw intelligence or subject candidates to six hours of interrogation about their past experiences and accomplishments. We don’t really care if they can weave a deft story verbally.

We really, really care about how quickly and adeptly their minds can tackle the problems in front of them. We really care about what they can do now.

Here are seven steps we take in our remote interview process to screen for these qualities and get an accurate picture of a candidate’s skills. They each revolve around a singular task grounded within the scope of the job candidates are applying for.

And this structure can be applied to interviewing and assessing skills for any role, at any company, in any industry. As long as you’re hiring for a fully-remote role.

1. Give candidates the right project

This should be representative of a task they’d do as part of their daily work.

For engineering positions, we often ask candidates to architect a complex feature in a scalable and maintainable way without support.

We prompt product marketers to draft compelling copy for a landing page.

And we ask product managers to do a roadmapping exercise and flesh out a case study.

Regardless of role, the exercise involves some kind of writing assignment.

Because we’re fully remote, we need everyone to be able to communicate clearly on an asynchronous basis through comms channels like Slack, Github and Notion.

2. Give context in advance

Often, in interviews, candidates are expected to go in blind. They perform timed, live exercises without any prior inkling of what they’ll be expected to do.

This is not representative of how people do their jobs in the real world. They rarely – if ever – need to complete a deliverable without prior notice, or execute a task start to finish within an hour.

So we give candidates ample time to prepare. Before their virtual on-site interview, during which they complete the sample project, we give them any context they’ll need to complete the exercise.

We give engineers access to the codebase in advance so they can set it up on their computer at their leisure. The project is an actual codebase or app that we’re comfortable sharing, in the same language as our product.

We send product managers, salespeople, and marketers a Notion doc outlining the type of exercise they’ll be expected to complete, and include pertinent links to internal resources that may help them.

3. Give access to everyday tools

There’s no need to create false barriers to entry.

In the same way that no one is expected to go into a sample project blind, no one is expected to deal with any unusual restrictions regarding their tech stack.

If marketers want to use Grammarly, so be it. If engineers want to use double monitors rather than a white board, great. If PMs want to listen to music while they work, we don’t care.

We allow candidates to perform their work within the environment that makes them most comfortable, whether that includes additional tools, software solutions or hardware.

4. Invite them to a Slack channel

We encourage candidates to communicate as they work.

This is partly because they’ll be free to ask questions, request additional context and confer with colleagues when completing tasks on the job.

But it also gives us a small window into how each individual thinks, how they work through problems and how much hand-holding they need in their day-to-day.

We note the kinds of questions they ask, how they communicate their thoughts, whether they need a lot of help or whether they’re largely autonomous.

5. Let them use the internet

This isn’t a memorization test.

Our applicants can Google whatever they want. This may seem like a cheat code.

But the sample projects we give candidates can’t be solved with Google alone.

We aren’t asking marketers about the best way to convert a lead. We’re asking them to write, in their own words, original copy for a new product or partnership.

Because these exercises are specific and personal, we’re not worried about candidates finding the right answer on Google. If they generate copy from an AI chatbot, who cares, so long as the end result is great.

We also want them to have access to the internet because we all rely on it to do our jobs.

It would be unrealistic and needlessly complicating to deny them access to a fundamental resource for all modern knowledge workers.

6. Let them work alone

A lot of talented people get stage fright when they have to solve problems or complete a task in front of other people.

Allowing candidates to do their work without someone watching eliminates this variable.

Asking candidates to contend with a sample project while managing performance anxiety doesn’t reflect real-life working conditions. And it stresses people out.

In the office, there may be times when you need to sketch out solutions on a white board with a team, all crowded around the same conference table.

But in a fully-remote environment, there will rarely be any situations where candidates need to think on their feet in front of an audience.

We give candidates a few hours to do their exercise and see what they come back with. This is the best way to gauge aptitude in a remote setting.

7. Let them present results

When candidates finish the sample project, we invite them to walk us through what they submitted.

This gives candidates a chance to discuss their thinking when approaching the project and clarify their logic.

With the sample project presentation, we’re trying to discern whether they took the simplest, most rational approach to solving the problem or achieving the goals of the exercise.

Make skills assessments thorough, not long

Interviews shouldn’t be an endurance test, an assessment of public speaking talent or a memorization quiz. Aptitude in any of these areas has absolutely nothing to do with job performance, especially if you’re remote.

Conducting long, memorization-heavy, wide-ranging interviews will only mislead both the hiring manager and the candidate.

Focusing on the important stuff through practical sample projects has helped Tremendous attract incredible talent suited for a remote workplace. The right candidates actually enjoy the interviews – so they can be confident they’ll enjoy working here, too.