16 Remote Job Interview Questions Sample Answers Included
About time management, you can talk about how you prioritise your work tasks. If there are multiple tasks, it’s best to prioritize the most important ones first and taper to the least important ones during your workday. This answer helps the interviewer understand whether or not you’re okay with work from home experience the lack of an in-office environment. In fact, it may be even more important to focus on it when working remotely than when in-office, where it can happen organically. So they’re going to choose a candidate who comes prepared with great questions and who seems engaged in the interview process.
Think about your day and how you are able to make the most out of every hour in ways that you simply couldn’t do from the office. A home is a special thing — it’s where you live, rest, and spend time with people you love. Now, thanks to the chaos of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic home is also where people work. Pursuing remote work is competitive and these positions are highly sought-after. Employers don’t just care about hard work and productivity; they want ethical and honest workers, too.
Tell Me About a Time When You Had to Adapt to Change.
Employers want to see that you’ve been successful and accomplished while working remotely. They may want to know if you were the sole remote worker in a previous role, or if the whole company worked remotely. And they may also be curious about what your home office setup is like, but that information can be conveyed in an interview.
If you’re unemployed, say you’re in a full-time job search and not currently working. Remote employers want to hire someone who is targeting specific factors in their job hunt. There’s nothing wrong with seeking a remote job or having a strong preference for remote work. Don’t make the mistake of acting like you don’t care about working remotely if it’s a big reason you applied.
Are you comfortable with not being around people all the time?
Therefore, you should be prepared to demonstrate that you not only understand the company culture but why you’d be a great fit. “One way to approach this is to discuss how working remotely will make it easier for you to focus and be productive doing the actual tasks of the job, compared to being in a busy, distracting office. While you’re acknowledging that working remotely is a great part of this job, it’s still the actual job itself that you’re most concerned with,” the Career Experts continue.
I know that communication in remote teams can be very tough, so I always try to overcommunicate when interacting with my coworkers on Slack. Another company, on the other hand, might be a lot more focused on remote communication among employees. You can have daily sync calls, brainstorming sessions, online co-working sessions, and so on. Every remote company uses several tools to communicate with its team and manage tasks or projects.
Top 10 Must-Have Remote Work Skills
It’s a good idea to follow up your answer with a question about how the hiring manager and their team handles distributed communication to show that you’re interested in understanding how the team works. This is a situational or behavioral interview question, which should signal to you that the hiring managers wants you to share a story based on your previous experience. We recommend using a structured approach to responding to interview questions by discussing the situation, task, action, and result (STAR). This is a common question during any interview process, whether remote or not. But being able to adapt to change is foundational to working in a remote team, particularly if the company you are joining is a distributed team spread across time zones and geographies.
Including an example of a real project you’ve worked on remotely in the past (if relevant) may also help to strengthen your answer. As lovely as rolling out of bed and into your desk chair might sound, remote work does have some downsides. Working in your home can be distracting (think your roommate’s loud sales calls or your cat constantly walking across the keyboard).
How Do You Plan To Stay Motivated in a Remote Setting?
Use our zoom interview tips to learn how to come across well in virtual interviews. These kinds of “office politics” are not unique to remote workers—at any organization, there’s the risk of executives biasing promotions towards folks they like. Even if everyone works in the same space, there’s no guarantee that relationships will form equally! And I suspect it’s human nature to reach for external factors when trying to understand why we weren’t selected for a promotion.
Working from home, on the other hand, may make it easier to get distracted. Finally, at the end of the interview, the interviewer is going to ask you if you have any questions about the job you’re applying for. To land your dream position, you need to show that you are capable of being productive and committed to being remote permanently. In other words, working from an ad hoc space won’t necessarily work for the long term; you’ll need to show that you’ve created an environment that’s distraction-free. Brought to you by writers with over a decade of experience as remote workers, digital nomads, distributed leaders and worldwide recruiters.