An Employment Attorney’s Guide to Recruiting Remote Employees

Before you jump headfirst into recruiting remote employees, you must commit to putting a recruitment and hiring playbook in place. It needs to provide a road map for your recruiting practices. If you don’t develop a playbook, chances are high that someone on your team - probably someone with great intentions - will do something, ask something, or post something that puts your company at risk. A recruitment playbook will help your recruiting and hiring team stay on task, say the right things, look for the right people, and fairly evaluate candidates. 

You must ensure applicants can fairly assess your company and the role before accepting your offer. This starts with the job posting. Your recruitment and hiring playbook should have a straightforward process to ensure you have high-quality and legally compliant job postings. 

Job postings are often an applicant’s first impression of a company. Don’t make it a bad one. Your job posting communicates what your company is and what it values. It’s a tool to attract qualified candidates who hopefully care about what your company cares about. Your job posting should not sugarcoat what your company does. You need to be transparent and authentic so applicants can be confident they’ll feel good about working for your company. In addition, your job posting should state the pay range, especially for remote roles. There are three reasons I suggest this. 

First, you don’t want to waste your time looking at applications or conducting interviews if an employee would never work for the wage you’re willing to pay. Putting the pay range in the job description avoids wasting time. 

Second, falling to post the pay range creates more risk of pay inequities. After a few years, you’ll likely find that men, on average, earn higher wages than female employees. This problem compounds over time as the lifetime earnings pile up because employers often benchmark raises on past pay. A 5% raise for all employees means more money for those earning more. Putting the pay range in job postings is proven to help combat these compounding pay inequities, especially for women. 

Third, some states, like California, Colorado, and Connecticut, require a pay range to be included in the job posting. You can claim you’ll only hire employees from states that don’t have these laws. But this is usually a losing strategy. Eventually, you’ll forget this rule when you see a talented candidate’s resume. Plus, your job postings show up online in other states, which a state agency could argue is enough of a basis for jurisdiction. So post the pay range instead. This is a legal battle you don’t need to fight.

You should also audit your job postings for compliance at least once a year. Laws change. Mistakes happen. Poorly written language gets copied and pasted. It’s better to have an annual audit to catch and correct errors than to be forced to make fixes and pay fines by a government agency, court, or litigant.

For example, specifying that you’re seeking someone “energetic” or with “up to three years of prior experience” can imply you’re interested only in younger candidates. That’s a recipe for an age discrimination claim. Failing to develop and include language in your job postings about providing accommodations and being an equal-opportunity employer can send a message that you’re not interested in candidates with disabilities. A simple audit of your job postings can easily catch these types of mistakes.