ThemePeople & wellbeing
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Recruitment

Attract, meet & hire new talent

Who you hire and how you meet them shapes the team's relationship to hybrid from the first interaction.

Recruitment is where hybrid assumptions get baked in. If your hiring process requires candidates to come to an office, you are already filtering for who can do that. If you describe the role as hybrid without explaining what hybrid means in practice, candidates and the team are building mismatched expectations. If interviews are mostly in-person and the rest of the team is mostly remote, you are giving some candidates a different experience than others.

A hybrid-aware recruitment process is consistent (everyone goes through the same steps, regardless of where the interviewer sits), transparent (the candidate knows what hybrid looks like day-to-day, not just in the job ad), and fair (remote candidates are not disadvantaged by an in-person-centric process). Getting this right matters beyond ethics: you hire people whose actual working style fits how your team really operates.

Make it explicitWrite a short candidate-facing description of what hybrid means on your team: how many days in the office are expected or optional, how the team communicates, and what a typical week looks like.

How strong hybrid teams handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are patterns from teams that work well across locations, offered as illustrations to react to, not rules to copy.

Video-first interviews

Running all interviews on video, even for candidates who could come in, gives everyone the same experience and gives you a better read on how candidates handle the medium your team actually uses most. Interviewing someone in a conference room and then expecting them to work on video daily is a mismatch.

Honest hybrid description

Strong hybrid teams include a realistic description of their working norms in the job ad and amplify it in the first conversation: tools, meeting culture, office expectations, timezone coverage. Candidates who fit that reality well show up in the process; those who do not self-select out.

Consistent process across locations

When the process differs depending on whether the hiring manager is remote or in office, some candidates get more informal time with the team and others do not. Structuring the process so every candidate has the same touchpoints removes this inconsistency.

Include the team

A brief, optional chat between the candidate and a potential teammate (not an interviewer) gives both sides a feel for the working relationship and signals that the team is a real community, not just a reporting structure.

Questions for your team

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

What does your current job posting actually say about hybrid, and does it match how the team works in practice?
How does your interview process differ for candidates who can come in person versus those who cannot, and is that difference justified?
What do candidates learn about your team's communication norms and working culture during the hiring process?
At what point in your hiring process do you talk about the realities of hybrid work: expectations, tools, what presence means?
How has a hire not working out been connected (even partially) to a mismatch between what was described and what hybrid actually looked like on the team?

Watch for

Candidates who perform well in in-person interviews and then struggle in remote-heavy work are a predictable outcome of a process that does not test the medium they will actually use most.
Calling a role hybrid in the ad while expecting significant office attendance most weeks creates resentment from the moment the new hire encounters the reality.
When hiring managers make the key decisions about candidates without remote interviewers in the loop, the hire reflects the in-office culture rather than the whole team's perspective.