Chapter2: HowtoHireaRemoteTeam 22 3. Put Top Candidates to the Test with a Project After these video call interviews, a few candidates have likely emerged as the strongest applicants. At this point we like to put them to the test. Depending on the role, we’ll devise a task that is of moderate difficulty and indicative of the types of activities they’ll do on a day-to-day basis. Forengineers,thatmightbeusingtheZapierDeveloperPlatformtoaddanew service. For marketing, that may be writing a blog post in collaboration with someoneontheteam. If it’s obvious that this isn’t necessary, we might skip this step, though it’s often agoodwaytogetafeelforworkingtogetherevenforgreatcandidates. Moreoften than not, the task requires the candidate to interact with folks on theteam—maybeevenmorethanacoupleoftimes.Thatway,you’llgetasense of howtheycommunicateandcollaborate. Thetest should take only a few hours. We want to be cognizant of everyone’s time. 4. Check ReferencesandMakeanOffer Before making an offer, we send out an anonymous survey for a reference check using SkillSurvey. That helps get honest feedback on candidates from their references. Throughout this process, which takes on average 29 days to hire or 3.5 days torejectanapplication,weupdateapplicantsonthestatusoftheirapplication before makingthefinal hiring call and closing out the job opening.