Hiring, Managing, And Connecting A Fully Remote Company with Marcelo Lebre, CTO & Co-Founder of Remote

Marcelo Lebre is a product-oriented engineer who is passionate about building products, scaling architectures, and scaling teams. He is a whole-hearted supporter of entrepreneurs and a startup advisor. Marcelo is also a believer of ordinary people coming together to build extraordinary things.

He is also the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Remote, a company making it easier for other companies to build teams anywhere in the world. Remote takes care of global payroll, benefits, compliance, and taxes so companies can focus on their people and work!

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Marcelo’s background and how he gained his current role at Remote
• Common problems companies face when hiring distributed teams
• What Remote does and the solutions they provide to employers and employees
• How Marcelo and his co-founder started their company and how they manage their team
• How working remotely has allowed people to be their authentic selves
• Marcelo talks about the structure and distribution of his Remote team
• How the shift to remote work will impact the hiring process for companies
• Marcelo’s shares advice for hiring people from different cultures
• How to assess a candidate’s maturity and trust when recruiting for remote teams
• How hiring the wrong person can affect your company, your team, and your new employee
• Where to learn more about Marcelo Lebre

In this episode…

The shift to remote work has taken the world by storm. Remote teams and freelancers have been in existence for years now, but the current COVID-19 pandemic has forced many companies to change tactics.

Although this shift to remote work is welcomed by many, it poses several challenges for companies looking to recruit new members to their workforce. There may be similarities, but how do you handle hiring virtually versus conducting in-person interviews? What are the adjustments you need to make when managing a physical team versus a remote team? Not only that, but there are consequences of hiring the wrong person, as Marcelo Lebre explains.

In this week’s episode of Elevate Hire, Greg Toroosian is joined by Marcelo Lebre, CTO of Remote, to talk about recruiting and managing remote teams, the shift to remote-first technologies, and how this change will impact hiring and growing a globally distributed team. Marcelo also shares his tips for recruiting people from different diversities with varied cultures, backgrounds, and beliefs.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Elevate Hire
• Remote
• Remote’s Handbook
• Marcelo Lebre on LinkedIn
• Job van der Voort on LinkedIn
• Notion
• Greg Toroosian’s Talk on Being Your Authentic Self

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Elevate Hire, a talent acquisition firm which provides leadership and senior level recruiting services for early-stage companies. Elevate Hire also offers advisory and consultancy services for select clients.

Elevate Hire was founded by Greg Toroosian after more than a decade in the Talent Acquisition space, working with startups, globally recognized brands and recruiting agencies, because I found that too many early-stage companies were struggling to recruit and retain top talent during crucial times of growth.

Because recruitment and talent retainment are keys to having a successful company in today’s fast-paced economy, Elevate Hire is committed to helping you recruit the right top tier talent, at the right time, can differentiate the most successful companies from the rest of their field.

If your company needs assistance with talent search, hiring process improvements, choosing and implementing recruiting tools, team training, or if you’re in need of an advisor, get in touch with us today to find out how we can make this work so that you can start building the company of your dreams.

Click this link to learn more about us and the services that we can provide for you and your company.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:04

Welcome to the Elevate Hire podcast where CEOs, founders and executives of early stage companies talk through their experiences and building teams.

Greg Toroosian  0:16

Greg Toroosian here, Founder of Elevate Hire and host of the Elevate Hire podcast where I talk with CEOs, founders and executives about the challenges and successes they’ve had while recruiting for their teams. In this episode, we will be discussing the shift to remote first technologies to support this, how the change to remote teams will impact hiring and growing a globally distributed team. This episode is brought to you by Elevate Hire, a talent acquisition advisory consultancy and execution firm who recruit leadership and senior level team members for early stage and rapidly growing companies. We believe that recruiting and retaining talent is key to having a successful company in today’s fast moving and currently uncertain economy. Being able to recruit the right top tier talent at the right time can differentiate the most successful companies from the rest of their field. If your company needs assistance, recruiting key team members, improving your hiring processes, choosing and implementing recruiting tools, structuring and training your team, or if you need an advisor then we can help. For more details visit elevatehire.com. My guest today all the way from Portugal is Marcelo Lebre, CTO at Remote. Remote is solving global employment by enabling companies to employ talent globally in minutes. Marcelo, welcome to the show.

Marcelo Lebre 1:28

Hello there, happy to be here.

Greg Toroosian  1:30

Great. Thank you. I appreciate you making the time so late in the day over there. And I know you guys are crazy busy right now with everyone switching to being remote. So thank you. So can we actually start off with you giving the listeners just an overview on your background and how you actually got to be in your current role?

Marcelo Lebre  1:47

Sure.

Marcelo Lebre  1:51

So mainly I started it as the co-founder of Remote with our CEO, Job, Previously the VP of product at GitLab. You’ve been friends for a long while. And we always discussed, we’re always very passionate about building teams and having people do things that they love and how it shows on their day to day jobs, and how people should everyone should be able to just to fundamentally what they love and what they believe in. I was previously a VP of engineering, Adam Bible began a team of 40 something 50 engineers at a time. And I mean, throughout the years, one of the things that is very, was very clear to me is how inefficient some of the office space rituals are and how that propagates into the things that we deliver at the end of the day. Yeah. So you and I, we always discussed tech Clean issues such as these together, and the opportunity came along, so we just took it. And we knew from the get go what we wanted to solve.

Marcelo Lebre 3:12

And we just did it. That’s amazing. Amazing. jump straight in. So the opportunity, so the need and jump straight in. That’s great.

Greg Toroosian  3:21

Yeah, I mean, we can talk about a lot of those off his base inefficiencies. So I’m sure we’ll get into that. But thanks for sharing. That’s great stuff. So tell us more about Remote and what you guys are actually doing over there a bit more about the service and the platform.

Marcelo Lebre  3:36

Sure. So if you want to hire a distributed team. In practice, this means hiring people in many different countries, legal legal jurisdictions, geographies, whatever. The only way you can do this is either opening an entity over your company and each new country or just hire a contractor slash freelancer. And there’s all sorts of problems with this with these two approaches, one is for you to create your own legal entity. It’s a pain in the ass. You’re going to spend a lot of money, time and gray hairs, just trying to understand how local law works. You need to hire people, to manage that entity, employ people through that entity, so on and so forth. And it doesn’t matter what size your company is. It’s still a big puzzle, right? It’s not a light endeavor to take on. And the second approach, which is actually to hire a contractor or Freelancer comes with I mean, one, one good advantage is that people can just start, but the biggest there are many issues with this. And the fact that this person is not really your employer. This person will most probably have to deal with all the issues that come with having your own sort of business as a freelancer, accounting, and all those amazing bureaucratic procedures at all the no one wants to go through. And at the end of the day, what matters is that not only are you not spending the energy that you should doing things that you like, but you’re actually doing other things that are boring, and sometimes boring. But also, society, throughout the world is sort of built in a way that if you want to do something, as in, buy a house, buy a car. First thing the bank will ask is Where do you work?

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