Follow Job van der Voort on Twitter @jobvo or check out Remote.com
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Chris Russell:
Welcome to RecTech, the podcast where recruiting and technology intersect. Each month, you'll hear from vendors shaping the recruiting world along with recruiters who'll tell you how they use technology to hire talent. Now here's your host, the mad scientist of online recruiting, Chris Russell.
Chris Russell:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the only podcast that helps employers and recruiters connect with more candidates through technology inspired conversations. If you want to know about the latest tools and tactics to finding talent online, this is your show.
Chris Russell:
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Chris Russell:
All right. Remote, an HR technology company enabling simplified global employment, recently announced a seed investment of $11 million. The fundraising round was led by Two Sigma Ventures with participation from several other investors.
Chris Russell:
The finance will be used to expand Remote's onboarding platform and extend coverage to 40 new markets by the end of 2020, including Canada, Germany, the US and France. Remote handles payroll benefits, compliance and taxes, all in one single solution across international markets. With remote work only increasing, hiring a contractor or a full time employee in another country is simplified with Remote' platform.
Chris Russell:
Joining me today to discuss the new world of remote hiring is their CEO and cofounder, Job van der Voort. Job, welcome to the show. It's great to have you.
Job van der Voort:
Thanks Chris. Happy to be here.
Chris Russell:
And your first name is spelled J-O-B. So [inaudible 00:02:14] having a great name for the industry.
Job van der Voort:
There's remarkably few people there to mention that, but I find it very funny as well.
Chris Russell:
Awesome. He's @jobvo on Twitter if you guys want to follow him. So, welcome to this show and he's joining us from Porto today, where he's based. So remote work is having kind of a moment here, Job. As I said at the start of the year, the virus outbreak that a certain amount of employees are not going back to the office, that seems to be a lot higher that whatever it was, but what's your take on what's happening with remote work right now?
Job van der Voort:
The reason I started Remote is because I expected most people to start working remotely, just not this fast. And it's interesting because for us, we want to promote remote work and working from home. And the context in which we envisioned that is where you can live a more comfortable life. This is not exactly the way we envisioned it, where you are essentially locked in your home and you can't live your normal life, rather you're stuck there, and that is the reason you have to work from home.
Job van der Voort:
I think in the end, it's going to be a great moment for remote work. And I think that the acceleration of remote work is greater than ever before, of course, and it will... Once there's a vaccine and once we start returning to our normal lives, I think more of people are continuing to work remotely, but given current circumstances, we can't cheer too much about it because this is no fun for anyone. And even our team, which has been working remotely from day one. Of course, this is a very stressful time. So in a way, it's good overall for remote work, but I would rather have seen it in a different context.
Chris Russell:
Definitely. So, give us a quick history of the company. I'm curious, when did you start it? And talk about the pain point you're trying to solve here for companies out there.
Job van der Voort:
In 2013, 2014, I was one of the first employees at GitLab, which is now the world's largest distributed organization. And there, we were faced with the problem... So we were distributed, and so that means that if we opened a job ad, we said, you can live wherever you want. And then we will hire whoever's the best, and independent of where they live.
Job van der Voort:
And so we did that, but then once you find someone great that lives in a country where you haven't paid anyone, you have to figure out how do you pay them? How do you provide them benefits? And this was a problem we kept facing. And GitLab now has close to 1300 employees and still faces this problem regularly.
Job van der Voort:
So how do you actually solve this? And we tried all sorts of ways and never found a great solution. There are some solutions, but they tend to be expensive or hard to work. And we never found a great solution. So at the end of 2018, I decided to leave GitLab and solve this problem once or for all. So I recruited my best friends we bought remote.com, so the domain and all of its assets, and we started this business.
Job van der Voort:
And our vision was always, if you want to hire someone from a different country, or if you want to hire 10 different people from 10 different countries, it should be at no additional cost in terms of overhead or complexity. You should be able to just make these people an offer, employ them directly and started working with them. And it took us about a year to get to the point where we could actually do this for a few different countries. But today, luckily, I think we've been able to do so.
Chris Russell:
And tell me more about how it works and what countries you're currently supporting with this type of product.
Job van der Voort:
So the way it works is that Remote works as an employer of record. So that means we have an actual entity in every country in the world in which we are active, and that means that if you want to employ someone, let's say you want to employ Jane in Portugal, you come to us, you tell us, I want to employ Jane. This is how much I want to pay her, and these are the benefits I want to offer her.
Job van der Voort:
And then what we do, is we first, that's all you have to do. That's all it is for you. What we do is we reach out to Jane and get her information and we employ her locally in Portugal. So she becomes on paper, an employee of Remote, and this is what an employer of record model does. And then from that moment forward, we take care of payroll, benefits, compliance, and everything that comes with employing someone, in this case in Portugal, and you as the employee, we just present you with a single invoice at the end of the month.
Job van der Voort:
So to do this, we have to actually have a business and a bank account and be fully operational in every country we want to be active in. So that means today, we're only in about six countries active. We hope by the end of the month, open several more. And as you mentioned in your intro, at the end of the year, we hope to be in about 14 markets or so.
Job van der Voort:
And so for now, it's the Netherlands, UK, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, and the US, and India, and we're working very hard on the number of other ones. So the best way to find this is to go to our website, remote.com/countries.
Chris Russell:
Nice. To me, I've worked from home for 18 of the last 20 years, and I've always felt that companies could expand their hiring reach if they actually embrace that kind of a strategy. I follow one guy on LinkedIn who says that companies who embrace remote hiring will essentially outpace companies that don't in the coming years. Do you agree with that statement?
Job van der Voort:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. To me, it never made much sense that if you have a company that you only hire from the talent pool, it's like in the vicinity of your office, it's extremely limiting compared to literally the whole world. So, yes.
Chris Russell:
How challenging is it to establish an entity in all these different countries? Does it take a lot of time? Is that the biggest challenge you face with setting these up?
Job van der Voort:
It's very challenging. The challenge lies mostly in effect that there's very little transferable knowledge between different countries. So setting up an entity in one country is a whole different ordeal from doing it in another country. The requirements for dates, the timelines, the documents, the costs, it's all vastly different, and in almost no cases is it easy.
Job van der Voort:
What we spend most time and money on is just figuring out how should we operate? Every country has different forms of entities that you can establish, what is the one that applies best to you? And then how do you roll that up in your greater corporate structure? And it's incredibly complicated.
Job van der Voort:
And then you also have the challenge, of I have an entity now, every country essentially wants you to operate your entity as if it's an independent entity, so that means that you have to do taxes every single year or [inaudible 00:09:23] every single year and comply with all sorts of local laws, which can be all sorts of things.
Job van der Voort:
So, there's immense complexity in just learning how a country works and the actual establishment is usually like a few forms and it takes a few months time, but the real complexity lies in those details.
Chris Russell:
So you have a remote job board on the site as well from remote.com. Is that how you also help companies hire people across the world?
Job van der Voort:
Yeah, a little bit. I think remote.com the domain, that it is, it should be the one true place where you find anything related to remote work. So we had a job board, we had it since close to founding and we plan to just make it, Remote the central place for anything related to remote work.
Job van der Voort:
So whether it is finding people, finding companies, finding jobs, or just things like tools and such, so it's more of a longterm plan. And for now we're very strictly focused on core employment rates, but yes, a customer of ours can post a website for free, and they tend to look at, well, the demands. So today for remote work is significantly higher than countries actually offering it.
Chris Russell:
HR Lancers is actually my business and anything remote in HR, it's just like people will just gobble that up. They apply like crazy. It's amazing. As a company, if you want more applies, just make it remote and you're going to triple the amount of applications you get. Awesome. So how long have you had the domain?
Job van der Voort:
Since we founded the company, so January last year.
Chris Russell:
January last year, okay. Six figure purchase, I assume, at least?
Job van der Voort:
Yeah.
Chris Russell:
Definitely. So being a fully distributed company, how many employees do you have right now?
Job van der Voort:
We're now 21 and we're growing quite quickly. So I think it will probably double by the end of the year.
Chris Russell:
How do you plan on maintaining your culture itself being a remote business? And talk more about how you manage remotely and some of the things you do specifically to keep your employees engaged.
Job van der Voort:
I think this is probably the one thing that you should really be intentional about when you run a distributed organization. How do you make sure that people still connect with each other? And I think the best way to think about this is that almost everything can work similarly to an office, but the one thing you don't have is accidental meetings between people, and you literally never run into each other.
Job van der Voort:
So that's what is lost there is what you have to recreate. And that means that you essentially have to make sure that people spend time together outside of the direct context of work. So outside of the context of, I am working on a thing and I need your help, or I want your feedback on something.
Job van der Voort:
And so the way we do that at Remote is we have a daily team call and in a team call, we have a time for announcements, but most of the time is spent on bonding activities. So usually we have a question of the day that everybody answers, which can be anything, or what is your favorite color? What is the best food you ever ate? To more personal things, to silly things.
Job van der Voort:
We spend a lot of time doing activities together, always making sure that one end they're opt in, and it's all sorts of variety of activities. So there's a group of people that plays Dungeons and Dragons. We play Pictionary once in a while, but there's a little book club, those kind of things. And then outside of a pandemic, we tried to meet up in person once a while. [crosstalk 00:13:03].
Chris Russell:
I was going to ask you about that.
Job van der Voort:
I think, my company might be called Remote, but it's important to recognize that there's value in being together. And I like to go to a restaurant, it's not like I like to work from home. Yeah, but I still like to go out to a restaurant and eat there, not just always take out.
Job van der Voort:
So in the same vein, it's important to sometimes get to see people in the real world. So we encourage people to get together and there's of course a budget for that. But we also plan our own gatherings when there's not a pandemic. And unfortunately for us, the company existed for about a year and the pandemic came to be, so we didn't have that many chances to all get together. And there's still-
Chris Russell:
What is the plan? How often did you want to get together? Like quarterly or?
Job van der Voort:
So with the people that are close... At the beginning, almost everybody of Remote was working in Portugal. Today, that's not all over the case, we would get together at least once a month. Now, I think maybe every six months, every year, depending a little bit on the size and how far people have to travel. It can be quite disruptive. We have people on in San Francisco, we have people in the Netherlands, we have people in Ireland and in Portugal. So some of those trips can be quite long and most people have families and some kids, so you don't want to do too often because it can be very disruptive, but basically it's often as it's sort of convenient, because it's nice.
Chris Russell:
I see companies now talking about how they're going to get back to the office, and it seems like you're seeing stuff like, we're going to alternate people coming into the office to hire them. Maybe we'll just do remote completely and just come in the office once or twice a week. So it's going to be interesting to see how companies adapt to this new reality overall.
Chris Russell:
I'm curious, Job, what types of startups do you think will come out of this? Putting your crystal ball hat on being an entrepreneur, what else do you think might pop up for HR? Just from work overall?
Job van der Voort:
Yeah, I think the tools are pretty great. We've been saying for years that the tools to work remotely already exists. I think the majority of tools that are used in the office are just web based, so you can access them just as well at home. What is becoming more and more important is the communication layer on those tools, so that if you're working together somewhere, you should be able to easily talk with each other.
Job van der Voort:
Then I think, we are right now using Zoom and it's like the most reliable, most stable video platform. And there's many alternatives, I would actually argue, there's not enough yet. And I think over time what you'll see is you'll see maybe video call integrations in other applications. So if you're looking at a Google doc or the Notion document together, you can quickly set up a video call, [inaudible 00:00:16:06].
Job van der Voort:
I mean these kinds of things are starting to become important, so that collaboration doesn't just mean, I have two cursors on my screen, but it also means I can actually talk with someone else and have a quick back and forth while I'm working on something.
Job van der Voort:
Essentially, I walk by someone's desk or if someone asks me to come over and I hover over the desk, that kind of experience, we want to see more. That's one thing that I am very curious about. I think it's going to be very interesting.
Job van der Voort:
One example for you. Microsoft Teams, of course got a massive boost, right? And everybody started using it, and particularly schools started using it. But then you start using it and it's terrible. It misses basic features that we're used to from Zoom. And I really quickly had to innovate and work based on the feedback that they've gotten, and I think that will drive some interesting alternative products, but also just better features for Microsoft Teams and for the software that we use nowadays in the office for the most part.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Cool. So I know you're hiring, I was checking out your opening before, but give us a sense of what you're looking to hire for, and I'm also curious what impresses you? How do you get noticed as an applicant when you're applying to a company like yours?
Job van der Voort:
So we're looking for all sorts of roles, product manager, head of sales and all sorts of roles in operations and in international expansion. And what impresses me? So I think one of the most important things, if you work for a company that works remotely is that you have great communication skills and part of great communication skills means understanding who it is that's reading and what is the context of them reading whatever you're writing?
Job van der Voort:
So we have clear instructions about how to apply with us, which is like a short cover letter in the body of your email. If you make it very long, it means that you have not spent a lot of time thinking about who's going to read it because we get hundreds of applications for each position that we have. And firstly, if it's not well written, that's not going to help you very much either.
Job van der Voort:
I think if you do those basic things, like making sure it's well written, that you follow instructions, you're already in the top 20% or so of all applicants, which is sad to say, but it's true.
Chris Russell:
Most of them don't follow the instructions.
Job van der Voort:
Yeah. Actually, for instance, if you don't include a CV that we ask in PDF, we mark it as it doesn't meet expectations automatically. And it doesn't mean we will reject you, because people make mistakes, but it's less likely to be picked up quickly.
Job van der Voort:
But beyond that, people that know what they want. I think it's important that if we create a job ad that says a particular thing, this is the kind of role. This is the kind of profile that we're looking for and you feel like you apply to us, but you're not sure about it or you're not sure how that fits with you, I think that that makes a big difference as well.
Job van der Voort:
Having a clear idea of what you want and what is important to you and what you're looking for in a job, I think that's very important. What I say to almost everybody that joins Remote is that, I want you to work on something that you feel passionate about or something that you like to do.
Job van der Voort:
Because if you're working on something that you don't enjoy doing, you will not do a particularly good job, at least not as good as someone that does enjoy what they're doing. And then experience is not as important because if you are very excited about something, it can really drive you to be better.
Chris Russell:
Yeah, I appreciate. Who's your ideal client? Is it mostly startups right now? Is it enterprise? Is it a mix of both?
Job van der Voort:
A bit of a mix of both?
Chris Russell:
I think what we see right now is mostly startups between 10 and 2,000 employees, something like that. At the point where you quickly start to stop calling them a startup, but we see everything essentially in that range. And the way we set up remote is that we are agnostic to company size. Our pricing scales, because it's per employee, and our product handles large volumes of people quite well.
Chris Russell:
But to me, it is very important that we're able to support even smaller startups so that you can start out actually giving your employees full employment benefits, be fully compliant and not start out hiring everybody as a contractor, which is not a scalable way.
Job van der Voort:
Right. And I guess the cost is 10% of total cost of employment?
Chris Russell:
Yeah, that's right. There's some details about that for... We make some exceptions for really high salaries when that model doesn't scale really well, but for most cases it's 10% cost of employment.
Job van der Voort:
Awesome. Well, Job, it's great to talk to you today. I appreciate the info on remote.com. Tell the listeners how to connect with you and any last words of advice out there for the remote hirers of the world?
Chris Russell:
Yeah, thanks Chris. So if you want to reach out to me, you can just send me a message on Twitter or email me at job@remote.com. And last message, I think, we set out Remote so that we could create more remote jobs in the world, and that's expressly what we want to do. If you are building a company right now, I think you have no choice, right? Just take the leap and rather than saying, "Oh, I want to look for people that are in my direct vicinity." Just say, "Oh, you can live anywhere as long as are, for instance, within six or seven hours over a time zone." And then give those people employment benefits from the start. Don't hire them as contractors. That's not scalable. And that is something that we see a lot, unfortunately.
Job van der Voort:
Awesome. Well, Job van der Voort. Thank you for your time today.