A big push for people to return to the office is the argument that spontaneous interaction is critical to the growth of the business. The fear is that people are not communicating and it has hindered innovation.

However, let’s look at the number of fully remote companies who have been thriving throughout the past few years. The big differentiator is the structure and setting up interaction channels to foster communication.

Mastering the interview has been more challenging as it is often difficult to read nonverbal cues and interactions. As we have grown more comfortable with this method of interviewing, the structure of consistent interview questions has been the single most important element in hiring success.

Guest Bio:

David Wald is cofounder and CEO of Aclaimant, an insight driven workflow solution for safety and risk management. As CEO, David’s primary focus is driving the company’s vision, identifying and executing strategic partner and customer relationships, and growing the Aclaimant team and investor base. The company has been remote first for the past 8 years!

Prior to Aclaimant, David spent time with the Lightbank Venture Capital fund in Chicago on both the investment team, and as an operator and EIR. He was also a management consultant at Bain and Company. David graduated from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and currently resides in Chicago with his wife and three kids.

Today we discuss:

• What's critical in a remote work/interviewing environment

Hiring Story:

• Intro to our top candidate's brother's high school friend… 

Challenges today?

• Artificial collisions- bumping into people in the hall, watercooler conversation across departments

• Zoom is not good for rapid collaboration

Why is this important to the company?

• Cant have passive actors in a remote environment

• I was waiting for….

• Onboarding is challenging remotely 

Rick’s Nuggets

• Communication must be fueled by leadership

How do we solve the problem? 

• Tooling:

• Every team, project & customer have their own room 

• candidates , customers & internal

• Scientific method

• Documenting every process and keeping it clean

• True information source & driving everyone to that location

• Office hours for every team (meeting) once a week

• Informally stop and chat

• Information needs to get out 

• Surveying tools, function specific data, 

• Every manager & director is plugged into the right sequence of events to gather feedback

Rick’s Nuggets

• Remote (Zoom, Teams) interview 

Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! (Value):

• Very deliberate about how you create connectivity

Guest Links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidawald/

Host Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/

Show Sponsor: www.stridesearch.com