Hey Neil,
Thank you, it’s a pleasure! Indeed, a very relevant question to many more than before due to what the world has been up to.
A couple of points:
- Try to get a sense of the society of the country you’re trying to start hiring in. Visiting as a tourist usually does not help as much as talking to perceptive locals who’ve been around the world, and can explain how their society and national work culture is different from others. Having a local working/living experience (more than a year) yourself would help a lot but that’s usually not the case.
- Hire a strong senior recruiter with a soul of your company culture, first. This person, if hired well, will start to weave a web of your culture, and will have a stronger impact than any other method or process you have in place. This is not to say that you should not use your methods or tested processes, to the contrary.
- Avoid changing your process and system of hiring too much, based on what locals say. There surely are tweaks here and there that you want to incorporate but overall, keep what’s given you the best fit candidates elsewhere in place.
The remote or “work-from-home” method is a more challenging platform the cultural perspective. For me, it means that everything you wondered about (relationship building, culture) just takes more time, and requires more deliberate efforts. Ad-hoc kitchen/hall convos are out of the picture, so is “feeling the room”, etc. Human beings have more senses than vision and hearing that are needed for video calls for a reason - real life bonds and trust is built by relying on all of our senses giving us congruent (or, indeed, mixed) signals.
I’ll leave the more specific thoughts on it to people with more expertise. I can point you to Sergei Anikin’s post (Pipedrive’s long time CTO) in Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/09/10/three-key-ways-to-future-proof-your-business-in-a-post-covid-19-world/?sh=bcaa7994a4e3.