Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

Most founders think they can hire the same way for remote work as they did for in-person teams. They post the same job descriptions, ask the same interview questions, and expect the same results.

Then three months later, they're wondering why their remote team is struggling to deliver, why communication feels broken, and why they can't tell if people are actually working.

The problem isn't remote work itself. The problem is that your hiring process needs to completely change when your office becomes digital.

Let me show you what works 👇

📒 DEEP DIVE

Remote Hiring Mistakes That Kill Teams

Why personality matters more than skills when building distributed teams.

The Distraction Test

Your remote employees are sitting at home with Netflix, PlayStation 5, and every other distraction competing for their attention.

We live in the attention economy now. The most limited commodity isn't time—it's focus. And everyone is fighting for it.

When someone works from your office, there's social pressure. The boss might walk by. Coworkers are around. There's an unspoken expectation to look busy.

When someone works from home, they need to be the kind of person who can sit directly in front of a TV that's turned off and choose to focus on work instead. Not because anyone is watching, but because that's what needs to get done.

Most people can't do this. And you'll know really early if they can't.

How do you test for this?

During interviews, ask candidates about their home setup and how they handle distractions. Ask specific questions like "Walk me through your typical workday at home" or "How do you stay focused when you have complete freedom over your schedule?" 

Output vs. Input

In-person work has always been built on a lie: hours worked = productivity.

The visual scan mentality—walking around the office and seeing everyone "busy"—was never accurate. 

Remember that scene from Office Space where the guy admits he probably does 15 minutes of real work in any given week? That was happening in offices everywhere.

Remote work forces you to face reality: you can't pay people for looking busy. You have to pay them for getting things done.

This means every role needs clear deliverables, specific milestones, and measurable output. No more "put in your 40 hours and we're good." If someone can deliver their expected results in 25 hours, great. If it takes them 50 hours, that's a problem we need to solve.

This sounds simple, but it changes everything about how you structure compensation, performance reviews, and daily management.

Before you hire anyone, write out exactly what success looks like for that role:

• What specific tasks will they complete? 

• What measurable outcomes are you expecting? 

• How will you know if they're performing well after 30, 60, and 90 days? 

If you can't answer these questions clearly, you're not ready to hire remotely.

Two Types of Remote Workers

After 20 years of building teams remotely, I've learned there are really two types of people when it comes to remote work:

1) Highly driven 

These are the people who will work themselves into the ground because there are no built-in boundaries. These people are dangerous to themselves—they'll burn out because they never "leave the office."

2) Low initiative 

These team members need external motivation to stay productive. Put them in a room with distractions, and they'll find every excuse not to work.

You can't train drive and ambition into someone. Either they have the internal motivation to deliver without supervision, or they don't.

So, how do you spot these types when hiring?

Look for candidates who have examples of taking initiative in previous roles. Ask questions like:

• "Tell me about a time you solved a problem that wasn't technically your responsibility." 

• "What's something you improved at your last job that nobody asked you to improve?" 

High-initiative people will have multiple stories ready.

What you're really looking for is someone who exceeds expectations. Someone who sees a problem and fixes it without being asked. Someone who delivers their work and then asks what else they can do.

Setting Real Expectations

Here's where most founders mess up: they say one thing during the hiring process and expect something completely different once people start.

My expectation is that remote employees have Slack on their phone and are available to answer almost all the time. Not when they're sleeping, obviously, but throughout most of their waking hours.

I used to say things about "work-life balance" and "getting off the clock" because those sounded like the right things to say. But that wasn't honest about what the job actually required.

The reality is that remote workers are "on call" rather than "on the clock." Like a doctor who goes home but keeps their pager on for emergencies.

In your job posting and during interviews, spell out exactly what responsiveness looks like to you.

If someone told me during an interview, "Look, I work infinitely better early in the morning and I work very badly at night, so I'm not going to answer things at night but I'll be super responsive early in the morning"—that's fine. Let's have that conversation upfront.

But I can't pretend the job doesn't require high responsiveness when it absolutely does.

Why Digital Offices Win

Digital offices actually give you better visibility into team performance than physical offices ever did.

There's one of me and finite time to walk around checking on people in a traditional office. But in a digital office, I can recap every Slack channel and see exactly who's engaged and who's not.

We track engagement on Slack and Basecamp. We know who's responding, who's contributing to discussions, and who's checked out. That's part of the output.

I know when every person on my team actually works because I know when they respond to messages. Some of my people are up at 5 AM responding to things. Others don't check in until 10 AM. 

I don't care about the timing as long as the work gets done.

The key is having these conversations during hiring, not discovering them six months later.

🎙 EPISODE OF THE WEEK

This week on "Build Your Business," we're diving deep into The Trust Equation with Andrew Jackson, COO of TurnKey Coach.

What makes people trust you in business, and what breaks that trust without you even realizing it?

We break down the three components of trust: ability, integrity, and benevolence. Why trust is contextual and must be consistently demonstrated. And how trust acts like a "bank account" that you're either building up or draining with every interaction.

Check it out: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

BEFORE YOU GO…

Remote hiring is about finding people with the right personality and drive to succeed in a distributed environment.

The freedom that comes with remote work benefits everyone: no commute, no clock-watching, no artificial boundaries. But that freedom only works when you hire people who can handle it responsibly.

Your talent pool just became the entire world. But your standards need to be higher than ever.

Hire slowly, fire quickly, and be brutally honest about what the job actually requires.

Talk soon,

Chris.