How to hire remote employees for your Forex brokerage

How can Forex brokers hire the best remote employees?

As the pandemic has put the globe on lock down, the world of Forex seems to be lucky enough to be operating in an online environment with plenty of activity and volatility across financial markets.

Heightened volatility has resulted in higher trading activity and volumes. Data from Tokyo Financial Exchange (TFX) suggests there has been an increase of +35.2% on a year-on-year (YoY) basis. With volumes up, brokers are looking to hire more Forex employees to handle the demand. Given the current circumstances, many Forex brokerages are turning to hire more remote Forex staff with flexible hourly contracts.

We’ve seen quite a few articles discussing how COVID-19 could cause a permanent shift towards working from home. In this post, we’ll explore how you can attract top employees to your brokerage and tips for interviewing, hiring, and on-boarding new Forex employees remotely.

There are quite a few advantages to hiring remote employees, with some of the most significant being lowering fixed costs and a large pool of high quality candidates. So let’s take a more in-depth look into what you need to prepare to attract the best remote Forex workers to your business.

How to attract the best remote employees

1) Define company values and corporate culture in advance

As we discussed in a previous post, a clearly defined set of values and corporate culture help steer company decisions and daily engagements at your Forex brokerage. They enable different departments to come together to execute plans in line with the higher objectives. When building job specifications to attract new Forex employees, make sure that your culture is evident so that you can attract the right people for an initial interview. For example, if you support growth via education, ask them to tell you what they’ve learnt over the past year, and make sure they are positive about ongoing education before inviting them to an online chat.

2) Clearly define the role and person requirements

Make sure you are preparing an in-depth job description that will lay out what you are expecting from the candidate, as well as the traits and qualities they should have. Use key task outlines, and information like “day in the life” summaries to help show potential candidates precisely who you are looking for and if they will be a good fit.

3) Diversify your sources for finding potential candidates

Don’t simply post on standard job sites. Search and identify websites that specialize in remote work. Some frequently used websites include:

• Remoteok
• Flexjobs
• Ziprecruiter
• Remotive

Posting on websites that specialize in remote employment will allow your ads to target an audience that is already specifically interested in working remotely or has experience in doing so.

What do you need to be aware of when hiring remote staff for your Forex brokerage?

As a business owner, you’ll also need to be aware of what remote Forex employees need. So, make sure you’ve covered all bases to do with hardware, software, remote access rights and most importantly, security. 

Let’s look at some tips and best practices when hiring remote Forex workers.

• Your recruiters should use standard culture and ethics questions as a benchmark for the interview, and have different role-specific questions to assess their competency for the position you are looking to fill. Make sure that you’ve already drafted ideal answers that you’d like the candidate to provide in their responses and consider having a scoring system for answers.
• Remote employees need to make sure that they are organized, dedicated and have excellent communication and time management skills. Check a candidate’s references and whether they have any experience in remote work and for what role.
• Check that they are familiar with time-tracking software and how to report their workload. Discuss if they have experience with online communication channels and project management software. Inquire if they have an office set-up at home or a place where they can work uninterrupted.

The three checks above will give you a basic understanding of whether they’ll be able to manage to work remotely. Once you’ve completed the interview, it’s common to give final round candidates a test project to make sure they can manage their duties. Allow them to work remotely for a day or two, and see how they are handling the project. Have they met your deadlines and have they been communicative throughout the process?

Common mistakes to avoid

There are some common mistakes you need to avoid when hiring remote Forex workers. Those mistakes are: 

1) Trying to lower base salaries

We all know it’s much more affordable to hire employees from countries with lower base salaries. However, make sure that it doesn’t harm your performance. Low wage workers are often associated with risky performance, and if your salaries are often less than the going market rate, they’ll quickly feel undervalued and look for other opportunities.

Offering a competitive salary enables you to attract higher-quality candidates from reputable backgrounds that are in high demand. You are also more likely to keep them loyal.

2) Micromanagement of staff

Make sure that your employees are held accountable for the hours they work, as well as their performance. But don’t micromanage them or track every single minute of the day.

Ensure there are no distractions that stop them from performing, minimize possible drains on time like blocking social apps and specific sites on work devices, but keep your corporate tracking to a minimum. By showing trust, you are reinforcing a positive culture at the workplace. If they don’t deliver, you can always put them on a performance plan.

3) Hasty decision making

Try not to rush when hiring your brokerage’s remote staff. Make sure you only hire those you think suit the criteria required for the position. Build a hiring committee of at least two people so decisions can be discussed before you bring a new employee onboard.

From what we’ve seen, it seems that remote working is here to stay. Take the steps outlined in this post to ensure your brokerage is best equipped with both the personnel and the software platforms necessary to operate in a remote environment.

CurrentDesk enables you to run your brokerage entirely remotely from one portal. You can quickly and securely deploy a full operations setup in minutes, whilst having all your internal departments working remotely and securely.