Zephyrnet Logo

This tech startup founder drew few job applicants for work at his Paris office, but he reaped a deluge of quality candidates after switching to a remote work plan in 2016. See his best tips for going remote now.

Date:

  • Platform.sh CEO Fred Plais decided to run his startup remotely back in 2016, to help recruit enough employees to turbocharge the company’s growth.
  • The gambit succeeded: Platform.sh went from struggling to find enough candidates to receiving thousands of applications, allowing the startup to pick the top 0.6% applicants to fill just 80 positions at the startup.
  • As startup founders debate giving up their office leases permanently, Plais cautions founders to weigh the benefits of going remote against the cons of losing employee culture or team unity, and adjust their management tactics accordingly.
  • “Remote’s not a religion; you have to adapt to the specificities of the employees that you’re going to hire,” Plais told Business Insider.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Months of shelter-in-place orders have prompted both startups and big tech companies to consider downsizing their office spaces and making their remote-work policies permanent. These moves are welcome news for the tech workers who have long complained about the San Francisco Bay Area’s high cost of living and its housing crisis.

But the shift can also be a big boon for startup companies, according to Platform.sh CEO Fred Plais. 

The French startup founder took his six-year-old company remote in 2016, after struggling to recruit enough qualified candidates for open positions in Paris. Platform.sh helps developer teams test and release code more efficiently.

Pivoting the company to a remote-first model helped boost the profile of the DevOps company – which helps teams of developers manage their software projects —  beyond Plais’s expectations.  More than 14,000 prospective employees flooded the startup with applications from all over the world, allowing Platform.sh to pick the top 0.6% to fill its 80 available jobs. Plais claims that the company would not have attracted that interest back when it expected employees to show up at the office.

Besides access to talent, the global distribution of the workforce across time zones means that a team of engineers is available for a customer emergency at all times of the day. It’s a strategy that is vital for companies with global clients, like Pinterest and Johnson & Johnson. 

Plais has also discovered some personal advantages to the shift. For one thing, employees can no longer pull him into meetings and disrupt his agenda at any given moment. There’s also less “water-cooler” banter throughout the day, allowing him to stay focused.

“You don’t get distracted the same way. You can manage your time very very well,” Plais told Business Insider in a Zoom interview.

‘Remote’s not a religion’

Platform.sh now has 180 employees on its payroll, and its workforce is spread over 150 countries. The startup has just a single office in Paris, where fewer than 15 employees work every day.

But before startups give up their expensive office leases to follow his company’s example, Plais says, founders need to figure out a strategy to compensate for the loss of an office life.

After all, tech companies have spent years perfecting their office perks, which often become the stuff of legend. Traditional offices were replaced by sprawling campuses, free cafeterias, shuttle buses, ping-pong tables, and more.

The average startup employee, often fresh out of college, may still look for a buzzy office culture. But Plais thinks that his own target employees tend to be settled with families. They value the ability to move to a suburb with space in the backyard, and they need to make sure that half their day isn’t wasted in a commute.

Even for prospective employees who fall into this category, though, there are still subtle things that a remote-first startup needs to consider to build team unity while most workers are outside the office. 

Employees may not be meeting face-to-face on a daily basis at Platform.sh, but Plais says that video check-ins with teams, concentrated around timezones, are still vital. The company also holds an annual retreat, where employees fly in and spend the week together. Smaller gatherings, based on where employees are located, also occur frequently.

The company has also fine-tuned its onboarding process, complete with a buddy system, so new hires getting their first impression of the company don’t wind up lost or confused.

‘Remote’s not a religion; you have to adapt to the specificities of the employees that you’re going to hire,” Plais told Business Insider.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/platformsh-ceo-fred-plais-remote-work-can-fuel-startup-growth-2020-6

spot_img

Latest Intelligence

spot_img