RWL068 Building Connections and Efficiency in Remote Teams

Remote Work Summit With Meet Edgar

Speaker 1

0:00

Okay, hello everybody, welcome to another edition of the Remote Work Life Summit and today, yet another great and special guest with me who belongs to one of my favourite companies, let alone my favourite pieces of software, because I just love all things social media. Because I mean, I just love all things social media. I'm with Sarah Park from Meet Edgar and that's meetedgarcom. Sarah is the president of Edgar. She's a president advocate at Edgar and it's really really important. I think that, in fact, what Meet Edgar and Sarah's company have to offer is really core to this whole summit, because what you're going to find is you're going to have to be communicating with potential employers and, in your role, you're probably going to have to be, more often than not, using social media. So there's two strands to this. So I just want to say a massive thank you to you, sarah, for giving your time and speaking to us today. Thank you.

Speaker 2

1:07

Yeah, thank you for having me here.

Speaker 1

1:09

No problem at all. So, Sarah, like I said, Meet Edgar has got to be one of my favorite pieces of software, because it just makes your life easier. That's one of the main things. But first of all, I want to start off and find out a bit more about you, because I noticed that one of the things that you said before you started with Meet Edgar is that your Monday morning sucked right.

Speaker 2

1:40

Yeah, I did always hate the Monday morning grind.

Speaker 1

1:43

yes, and that's quite a common thing. Tell me more about that. Tell me more about that, and tell me more about you and how you got to be with Meet Edgar.

Speaker 2

1:52

Okay, yeah, I think you know one of the biggest changes for me with starting out with Meet Edgar is really getting into working remotely. I lived in, you know, like a really small little mountain town, so the Monday commute for me was just like an absolute nightmare. I usually involved scraping my windshield off with ice and digging through a bunch of snow and getting up hours earlier than I actually needed to be at work, for it was a really short commute, but there was just so much other stuff involved with it.

Speaker 2

2:28

Yeah, exactly, and you know that's always part of the drag, you know, of waking up on a Monday morning. But yeah, you know, working at Edgar has been a huge change for that. I started working remotely. That was actually. This is actually my first you know major company that I'm an employee with working remotely. I always believed that you had to go freelance or work for yourself in order to have a work environment like this, and Meet Edgar has really been such a cool opportunity for us to sort of build the exact work environment that I think is really know, is really like, is really extra productive for workers and is really inclusive for people who, you know, have a life outside of outside of the office. So, yeah, it's been a big change. Mondays are not such a drag anymore. My commute pretty much consists of getting up and making a cup of coffee and then walking over into my office. So it's been really, you know it's a great change. You know getting to work with my dog next to me and stuff like that.

Speaker 1

3:31

Excellent, that sounds good to me, and working from home is good as well. So do you work from home or do you work from a? Well, I suppose you work from anywhere you want to work, don't you?

Speaker 2

3:41

Sure, most of the time I do work from my home office. I know there are other people in our company who like to work in coffee shops or get co-working spaces or something like that, but for me I find that I'm the most productive when I can just be at home. So I have, you know, sort of a dedicated office space set up that's separate from, you know, the rest of my house. After work is over I can shut the door on my office and not have to worry about coming back in here. So I really do treat it like a whole sort of separate workspace in my house. But it is really nice not having to drive anywhere or worry about a commute, or you know that kind of thing.

Speaker 1

4:17

No, it sounds good, sounds good. But I mean, it's great to know more about you and I'm going to be asking more about you through this whole process, this whole interview, but I also want to know more. As I said, I told everybody how excited I was about Edgar and how much easier my life became once I started using it. Tell us more about Meet.

Speaker 2

4:38

Edgar media tool. It helps content creators automatically distribute your content across all of your social networks. So we work with Facebook, twitter, linkedin, and then we are currently in progress on building an Instagram integration, and then Pinterest is sort of on our timeline for the future as well. So we're really built for small business owners who just want to be able to have a consistent social media presence, but without having to feel like you're sort of chained to all of your social media profiles. So it adds sort of the ease of just being able to, kind of like, set up all of your content, organize it by category, organize your posting schedule by category, and then just hands off, walk away and all of your you know posting out to your, to your website and your content is all totally automated with edgar it sounds good and it's um, I mean, it's one of those things, isn't it, with social media?

Speaker 1

5:33

and when I was speaking, in fact I was speaking to who was it?

Speaker 1

5:36

I was speaking to matt tran, who is the ceo of remote eyes and also he has a, um, a youtube channel, and one of the things that he said, which a lot of other people like yourself who hire another ceo say, is that, um, your, your social media profiles are kind of really a key part of the hiring process, um, in terms of not only the, the content, the relevancy of the content, um and the, I suppose, the frequency of the content in some ways, um, but also the actual aesthetics of the content too, um, so I think, um, well, I think, first of all, you guys should go over and look at meet edgar, meet edgarcom, because it can help you with all of those, those areas.

Speaker 1

6:21

So, but and we're going to get a bit deeper into that in a minute but, um, before I get into that, in terms of your sort of the strategies, in terms of um, how you can use your social media profile and use communication to, to, sort of um, take your career forward, I just want to ask you a bit more sarah about, uh, the remote aspects of ofel, because I know that it's deliberately a remote business, right Yep that's right.

Speaker 2

6:49

It is the core of how our company was built, so we've always intended to have a remote workforce.

Speaker 1

6:55

Okay, and it's one of those businesses that you're US. Do you hire for US only or do you hire all around the world? How does that go?

Speaker 2

7:05

We hire primarily North American business hours and the reason for that is because, I mean, I think we do remote work just a little bit differently than some of the other companies that are out there, you know, also operating remotely.

Speaker 2

7:17

We really like to work synchronous work hours and you know we can talk a little bit more about why we have felt that that's important for our team.

Speaker 2

7:26

But we really like to make sure that when a lot of our work ends up being quite collaborative.

Speaker 2

7:33

So we found it was a bit of a drag when you would sort of have to work together with somebody else who you might not have any time zone overlap with, it kind of stretches projects out in a way that is a little bit more difficult, hard to get that back and forth conversation going and it's actually really hard to schedule meetings when you need to be sitting down with a bunch of people across your team. So currently we are just doing North American work hours basically, so it's not complete time zone overlap. We obviously have people, you know, on the east coast versus the west coast, um, but we have, you know everybody has sort of like a core set of hours where everybody is, you know, in the office at the same time, so it's easy to reach out to people and get your questions answered when you need to that makes sense and, um, if you're right, you're right in saying that, because all of the other people that I've interviewed, so far at least, they tend to not necessarily have those, you know, synchronized hours that you mentioned.

Speaker 1

8:29

They work different times, so that really makes sense, I suppose, especially for the type of work that you're doing as well, which is, like you said, highly collaborative, and it sounds like you've overcome that. The I suppose one of the biggest challenges is the times. I want challenge and you've done that through doing that. Are there any other challenges that you have sort of met through working remotely, either yourself or with Meet Edgar, at all?

Speaker 2

8:55

I think from a company perspective, one of the bigger challenges is, you know, when you don't have everybody in the same physical space, when you don't have everybody in the same physical space, I think you do miss out on some of the more spontaneous collaboration, you know, opportunities that might come up. So because you don't have people maybe grabbing lunch together or bumping into each other in a hallway or even just like when you're walking by somebody's desk and can kind of see what they're working on, so you kind of lose a little bit of the context of what's going on in the company outside of just your own job or outside of maybe just the people that you talk to more regularly. So that's a bit of a challenge that I think we didn't really anticipate in the beginning. I think it's really easy to see those little touch points as not being that important. But we did find, yeah, you know, our employees were not receiving the benefit of as much context as you would if we were all in the same office building.

Speaker 2

9:50

So we've had to look for ways to kind of like manufacture that experience in our workplace and be really purposeful about bringing people together both for, you know, like a meeting that has to have, you know, a specific outcome, but also to have conversations where maybe there won't be a very specific you know direct outcome out of it and just encourage people to sit down and have like a 15 minute conversation where maybe you're just tossing ideas back and forth and, yeah, maybe nothing will come of it, but you'll have that experience of having been able to talk to that person or, you know, maybe some other creative idea will come out of that.

Speaker 2

10:28

So it's kind of it's kind of been a challenge to make sure that we're really seeing the value of spending that sort of time. That doesn't necessarily always feel super, super, you know efficient or productive, or like you're checking things off of a list, but you know that's. That's definitely been something that we've had to add in to our company over the years. So that's been a challenge. And then, honestly, from a personal level and I think this happens to a lot of people who do work remotely it can be kind of hard to like know when to turn work on and off, oh yeah.

Balancing Work and Social Interaction

Speaker 2

10:59

So we are really really big at Meet Edgar on. You know the nine to five work hours and not everybody works nine to five. Some people have those hours shifted a little bit, which is actually another huge benefit of working remotely. Like, we have a lot of people on the West Coast who kind of prefer to work East Coast hours. They can be done with work at the end of the day and that's totally fine. But yeah, just sort of making sure that people are keeping work contained to that eight hour period, um, and you're not really letting it spill all over your home life or you know your physical space, even like having it spill over onto your sofa it's always kind of a challenge well, I think you've got.

Speaker 1

11:37

I mean you, you talked about your home office. It sounds like you're really disciplined. You've got everything sort of um in a compartment in a way and you sort of shut the door. But I suppose when you're really passionate about what you do, by itself it sounds like what you are it is really difficult, isn't it, to just switch off, because you think to yourself let me just do that little bit and that little bit sort of thing.

Speaker 2

11:58

Yeah, and then before you know it, it's like 8pm and you're sitting in the dark and you've just been working all day. Yeah, I think you know I've had to create this space for myself. It's something that, like I did, I definitely didn't do in the beginning and there really did come a point where, you know, I realized I am actually a lot more productive if I have, if I make sure I'm giving myself breaks from the day instead of being kind of half on, half off 24 hours a day. I find that I'm just a lot more effective at my work when I can be 100% here, 100% on for those work hours. And then you know my productive workday is done. But you know, like, of course, as anyone else who is really passionate about the work that they're doing, of course you're kind of brewing some of those problems that came up in your workday, sort of you're backburnering it a little bit for the rest of the day and you know, maybe you'll have the great idea in the shower or something like that.

Speaker 2

12:53

But if you make sure you're switching out of that like really productive task mode, at the end of the day it kind of does leave you a lot more space to you.

Speaker 1

13:11

it kind of does leave you a lot more space to you know to be problem solving and you know thinking about yeah, it's my best ideas come when I'm actually about to go to sleep. So I hear that. I hear that and I mean you mentioned some of the challenges that you've had in terms of the work side of things and the, the way you've manufactured um sort of like the 15 minute conversations. What about the, the um, the social aspects with with edgar are, I mean, how, how does that? What does that look like?

Speaker 2

13:35

um, yeah, so you know, because we're all remote and everybody's sort of in their own home offices or coffee shops or wherever they're working out of, you definitely don't have as much of the sort of social interaction that you might have in a normal workplace. There's no sort of after work happy hour or anything like that that people are doing. But we use Slack. It's a chat program during the workday. So for us, showing up at work is like logging into your Slack. So we always make sure we have some social channels as well going so people can be chatting with each other throughout the day. I definitely think more in our remote environment, even than in a, you know, co-located office.

Speaker 2

14:19

I do think it's actually pretty important to bake a little bit of downtime into your workday as well. So we have, you know, we have sort of like a Slack water cooler channel. We have this, we have this bot set up that's like a question of the day thing, so it just asks sort of a random question to see a conversation going and people can kind of pop in and out of there throughout the day if they need a little bit of a break from like whatever they're working on, just to sort of remember that your workspace is made up of other human beings and, you know, sort of get to know people and build a little bit more rapport. So it actually is really, really important to us to keep those things going. We've got a couple of other channels, like you know. There's one, I think, that you know people are talking about what TV shows they might be watching, like that, and one that's like vacation photos, and I love the vacation photos channel, it's always really fun to see what people are doing outside of work.

Speaker 1

15:13

But yeah, we always try to keep those those conversations going as well well, it sounds like you're doing exactly the same things that they do in co-located offices in terms of conversations, and I think that's same things that they do in co-located offices in terms of the conversations, and I think that's that's pretty important, isn't? It is the actual communication, and I think that's come up quite a lot in all the conversations I've had so far is um all the different forms of conversation, whether it be written, um whether it be visual or um audio, that seems um something that's really integral to all, or even more important with remote offices. Is that the same with you?

Speaker 2

15:52

Yeah, I definitely feel like with a remote workplace, you have to be a lot more purposeful about that conversation, like it has, you have to make accommodations for it and you're actually thinking about, you know, I think when you're in a co-located office, you're probably not thinking as heavily about like okay, what is the best venue for this conversation? Do we meet in a conference room? Do we have a, you know, video chat about it? Like, I think, you know, in a co-located office, it's really easy to just grab somebody and grab them for a quick chat. But for us, you know, we do have to be thinking about, like venue.

Speaker 2

16:27

How is this conversation going to happen? Are we going to rely on it coming up in a group chat where people are, you know, chatting back and forth via text? Are we relying on email? Are we relying on video calls? And and really figuring out what the best channel is for the different types of conversations we have to be having? So, yeah, for us, communicating is such a big thing. I think it's pretty easy when you're working remotely to just forget about everyone else that you're working with and just you know, zone in on your own stuff. But we find we do our best work when we're making sure we're staying in touch with each other.

Navigating Remote Work Opportunities and Strategies

Speaker 1

17:02

So Sounds good, to me Sounds good. And you said this is your first remote role. Is that true? Is that what you said at the time?

Speaker 2

17:11

Yeah, with like a company Previous to this, I really thought that like, okay, I definitely knew I wanted to work from home and have sort of a more of a remote work life and I really thought I had to start my own business or go into freelance work or whatever something like that, which I did do for for a good period of time. I've been really, really grateful to you know, be able to build a remote workplace like this one with, like actual benefits and health insurance and stuff like that. Yeah, I really thought that it was. You know, when I first sort of stepped into this world, I really thought it was going to be much bigger of a trade-off.

Speaker 1

17:51

And um. With that in mind, what so this, this, this was your first workplace remote role. Um, what um? Or how did you go about finding this role then? How did you find it?

Speaker 2

18:11

And also what attracted you to this particular organization, meet Edgar or Edgar. Well, so I was working freelance at the time when I started working with Meet Edgar. Actually, before Meet Edgar was the social media marketing app that it is today. We used to actually do a lot of social media training for small businesses, so that was about the time when I discovered the company. But I discovered it because I was doing a lot of freelance work and I was running my own business and I was just pretty active on social media and, you know, doing a lot, you know following a lot of people who's like sort of thought leadership I really enjoyed, or people who are, you know, posting blog posts about social media and tips on marketing and things like that. So I was actually like a pretty big part of that community when I first discovered this role and I found the job because Laura Roeder, one of the blogs that I followed, was posting about the job. So I actually think social media is a really, really great way to kind of keep up on companies that you like or are interested in and kind of be the first to hear when they have job openings. So that's actually exactly what worked for me.

Speaker 2

19:21

What attracted me most to the company is I think I just have always really loved the mission of the company. I think marketing on social media is something that a lot of businesses, I think, get a little overwhelmed by, especially the time. It's very can be time consuming if you're not really sure what to do next, um, and if you're not automating all of your, you know, automating the basics of your social media presence, um. So it's something that I, you know it really resonated with me just about making that whole world a lot more accessible, um, and yeah, so I kind of just jumped right in and wanted to, wanted to be a part of educating small businesses around it.

Speaker 1

20:01

so excellent Sounds good to me. And you said you saw Laura's blog post, Did you? I mean, what was your strategy in terms of getting from seeing the blog post to getting the role?

Speaker 2

20:18

My strategy.

Speaker 1

20:20

Your secret sauce.

Speaker 2

20:22

My secret sauce? I don't know. It's a tough question, I think, for me. I really feel strongly that you know. I think there's a lot of conversation out there right now about, you know, work life versus home life and bringing your whole self to work. I definitely think that work is a huge part of your life. I don't think it's all of your life, but I do believe that if you, you know, feel a lot of it, I think that you know you have to know yourself really well in terms of where you're going to be able to produce your best work, and that comes across really well when you're talking about a position that you think is going to be a really perfect fit for you. I think it worked well for me to know that, like, okay, I'm going to put my whole self into this hiring process and you know, I'm really not going to be shy about my personality and what I bring to the table, and hopefully that will help me stand out from other job candidates, and I think that is what worked pretty well for me.

Remote Work Hiring Practices

Speaker 1

21:26

So well, it did something work because you're you're in the seat, so that's, that's good, that's really good. And you talk about the mission, you talk about knowing yourself. In fact, actually it's funny you say that because that's one of the the core pillars of this whole summit is is like real self-discovery and knowing yourself and then making a connection with you know, finding that connection between yourself and the company that you want to, you want to work for. And not only did I mean for my, for me as somebody who's used the Meet Edgar application. Not only did I like um, obviously, the whole premise of the, of what the software does.

Speaker 1

22:06

I loved the um, I mean one of the things. I looked, I looked quite deeply, I looked at the values as well, um, I looked at um, the values of the company, I think, taking ownership, um, valuing your value, which is basically what you're saying and choosing kindness. I love that because it speaks to something a bit more than just um. You know, it's not just, it's not just a piece of software, it's actually there's a lot more to it than that. Was that also what um attracted you as well to meet Edgar?

Speaker 2

22:36

Yeah, I mean definitely. I think you know the value, the value for value, um, part of our values is is something that has actually really stood out to me personally. It's something that I think really resonates strongly for me and for everybody else at our company. It's just this idea of you know, knowing the value that you bring to the table and doing everything you can to demonstrate that value. So you know, we actually get a lot of job applicants and I see a lot of people who are out there in the sort of job seeking world who are talking a lot about what value this job will bring to me. But you kind of have to make sure you have a good understanding of the company as well so that you can understand how you can best provide value to the company and make sure you're getting that part across as well.

Speaker 2

23:21

So it is this sort of mutual exchange idea that I think you know, really stands out to me, and we view that with everything we do. So not just with our employees, but we view that with our customers, the people who are reading our content, people who maybe aren't customers yet but, like, have you know, are on our email list. So we always think about every email we send out has to be worth that value because they've trusted us with their contact information. So you know, that really is something that's baked into everything that we try to do as a company.

Speaker 1

23:50

Sounds good. Excuse me, I've got a bit of a sore throat so I'm just getting my frog out my throat there. Sorry about that. So there's what I could see as well. There's four core, I suppose, areas in which you hire. So, from what I saw, there's the development, there's operations, there's customer experience and there's marketing. Is there a typical type of role that you hire? I know you're not hiring at the moment, but is there a typical type of role that you hire for?

Speaker 2

24:21

A typical type of role? I think not as much. There's only there's a couple of roles in our company where we have, you know, multiple people in that role. So you would find that very. You know, most often with customer, our customer experience team. So you know, we've got a couple of people who you know work in our inbox. I think everybody does have sort of their own specialty or sort of special sauce that they're bringing to the table. That keeps our team really balanced, but the core of that job is pretty similar for everybody in that department. Same goes for our development team. I think everybody's got sort of their own sort of special area that they're really great at, but the core of what they do, you know, is pretty similar across the board. In marketing we kind of have, you know, know, more of a variety in terms of the roles that we're hiring and same goes for operations.

Speaker 1

25:09

Okay, sounds good. And again, I've had a bit of a mixture in terms of the feedback from other remote companies, in terms of the I suppose I don't use the word caliber, um, more the um, the level of experience, should we say, in terms of the types of candidates they hire. Some say that they prefer to hire those who've got a level of experience that is quite developed, whereas others are prepared to develop people as they go. But obviously you have to have some experience. Where do you fit on that sort of, on that scale?

Speaker 2

25:45

have to have some experience. Where do you fit on that sort of um on that scale? I think for us it really is quite dependent on the role that we're hiring for um and what our bandwidth is. I would say we're probably a bit more on the side of hiring people who can really hit the ground running and be providing value from day one. A lot of the reason for that is because we are remote, so we don't really have as much leeway or as much bandwidth to really be sitting down with somebody you know, throughout the whole day.

Speaker 2

26:08

But at the same time we've had great success with people on our teams, people on our team who have grown into new, you know, areas of the business you know as a startup company that's, you know, rapidly growing. We always have these areas of the business that we haven't explored yet and we really do entrust the members of our team to identify those areas and say like, hey, I know nobody's ever done this at the company before, but I really want to dive into it and really explore and learn those things for the first time too. So we've had great success on both ends of that spectrum too. So we've had great success on both ends of that spectrum, but when we have a very specific sort of goal in mind for a hire, we really do like to look at people who have had some proven success with that.

Speaker 1

26:51

Sounds good to me. And again, I suppose there's certain times of year and in fact that's a question I've asked other CEOs, other leaders like yourself in terms of when you hire, there's peaks and troughs in the years, to when you hire and when you're quiet, et cetera. Do you have, again, a typical sort of time of year when you hire most at all?

Speaker 2

27:12

We haven't really noticed, you know, like a large variance across the time of the year. For us. We hire, you know, because we're a bootstrapped company as well and, you know, small team. We hire pretty much just as our needs dictate, more so than anything else, and every hire that we have is really it's motivated by a need in our business. So we haven't really found too much of, you know, a sort of seasonal shift with that. But I will say, you know, know, most companies, I think, that are serving other businesses, we do have like kind of a quiet time right around now during the holidays and stuff like that.

Speaker 1

27:49

But yeah, that's about it okay and if anybody's interested, well, I'll tell you what you should. Look anywhere I know. I know that um meet edgar is not hiring at the time of recording this video, but if you go to meetedgarcom forward slashI think it's careers um you can check out. Laura's got a video there. Um, it tells you all about the company and I think it's good to actually just absorb all you can from now so that you know as and when meet Edgar um are hiring. Again, you'll know everything you need to know and, uh, be able to hit the ground running in terms of your application.

Speaker 2

28:21

So yeah, we have a lot of material about the company and you know our company values and what it's like to work with us all available on our website as well.

Speaker 1

28:30

It's really good. I even saw your. You have a book, a sort of an onboarding booklet, there as well. I thought that was great. You know, not many people put that out in the open. That was really good.

Speaker 2

28:45

Well, you know a lot of people that we get in, a lot of job candidates that we receive. You know, for a lot of people it's, you know, maybe their first time looking into working remotely and I think a lot of people don't really know exactly what to expect. And even if you have worked remotely, you know I've mentioned that Meet Edgar does do a few things differently than other companies might do and you know every company, I think, has their own sort of customs and their own culture that you know kind of organically happens within those companies. So you know, I think it just helps to set the expectation for what you know, what it would be like to work with us.

Speaker 1

29:18

No, I think it's really. It's great, because the question that I get asked a lot is what you know. I don't know what the company wants you know, or if it's an interview, I don't really know what they want. If you look at Meet Edgar's careers page, there's no excuse. You can see everything that they want, everything that's expected. I think it's really good. It's one of the best I've seen. Anyway, Thank you, respected, um, I think it's. It's.

Speaker 2

29:50

It's really good it's one of the best I've seen. Anyway, thank you in terms of um. So your process for hiring what, what? What does that look like? I mean just just briefly, um, we have basically, I think, at its core it's it's four steps, but they can kind of go on. It goes a little bit longer just because we are hiring people remotely and for us, like on day one, you have sort of like the keys to the kingdom and we really, we really we don't have like a introductory period for new employees. It's really like on day one you're part of the team.

Speaker 2

30:16

So our interview process is a little bit more extensive than you might see at a different company, but it's basically, I think, at its core, four steps. It would be a pretty long application form. So it's a long form, written like lots of open-ended questions application form. It's hosted on Google Forms so we're seeing everybody's written answers. We review all of those blind, so we take out all of the identifying information and we're really judging that based on the quality of the questions, the quality of the answers that we're getting to the questions.

Speaker 2

30:50

From there we move to introductory phone calls where we'll kind of go over the job itself, give candidates a chance to ask questions about the job and then just to kind of make sure everybody's expectations are in the right place about what the role actually is.

Speaker 2

31:05

And then from there we'll move into interviews. So we'll do a skills interview which is just sort of your normal like how is your experience lining up with this job? Kind of interview. And then we'll do a second interview, typically with people who are outside of the department that you would be working in, so somebody, some people who you might not on a daily basis be interacting with as much, and then we'll talk a little bit more about work style and that's really focused around. You know, are you the right type of type of person for our remote work environment? And you know, we'll talk through sort of some of the habits that people have or the ways that people feel like they're the most productive, and just see if that's a good fit for us. And then, generally speaking, we'll also do at the last step, we'll do either a test project or we'll do some pair programming if it's for a development job.

Speaker 1

31:55

Sounds good Sounds, yeah, pretty intense process, but I think it's when I say intense, I suppose I mean thorough, I suppose you have to. You have to be thorough, I think, especially with with, I think, a remote business. I I think I sure I agree with that and you mentioned, um, a type of a type actually I'm going to ask you, obviously, some questions about. I'm going to take a step back actually and ask you questions about how people should present themselves, etc. But, um, just before I ask you that, uh, you mentioned something about the type of person, um, in your mind, um, what do you think are the, I suppose, the main traits, I suppose, or characteristics that uh, suit somebody working like you can either say, for meet Edgar or generally as a remote person?

Speaker 2

32:46

I definitely think in any remote company, there probably will be a bigger focus on your communication skills, so really really excellent communication skills, especially in writing. That's a big reason why that first step in our application process is a longer form sort of open-ended written job, like application form, um, and that's just really to see you know how well people are getting their ideas across in writing. So much of our work you know as much as we bake in video calls, calls and chats and meetings and things like that, so much of our work is happening in writing. So, whether it's via, like text, chat on Slack or in comments on Google Docs or you know, we also use Asana as a task sort of our task management system. So a lot of feedback will happen in the comments there, things like that. So people who work with us definitely have to have a really great handle on their written communication skills.

Speaker 2

33:49

I definitely also think there is, I mean, remote work. I don't think is right for everybody. I think that's just the way it is. Everybody has a different way of working. We've had people work with us who have found that, like you know, maybe I actually would prefer to work in an office environment. So I think there are some characteristics that I think are a little bit more amenable to working remotely, especially like the way you are motivated by your work, like if you need to feel like there's all these people next to me and we're all like together, working on the same thing, and you really need that to drive your work forward. Um, working remotely might not be a great fit.

Speaker 1

34:26

No, it sounds good. And again, um, similar to you know, I suppose the the traits that other other people like yourself have described and and they always highlight that written aspect of things, because obviously you you're not always going to be on a video. More more often than not you're gonna be on an email or an instant chat or something like that, so that that really makes sense. And I mean you're not always going to be on a video, more often than not you're going to be on an email or an instant chat or something like that, so that really makes sense. And your communications your degree was in communications, right? Am I right in saying?

Speaker 1

34:53

that it was Communications degree, and I think that's one of the reasons I really love the idea of speaking to you as part of this summit, because even before the interview, obviously in order to get the interview, you've got to really impress with your, with your communication, written communication being an important part of that. And so do you have any advice on how somebody might present themselves via, for example, social media? I mean, what, what kind of things do you look for?

Speaker 2

35:27

That's a good question, I would say. You know, the important thing to remember about social media is it doesn't need to be really stuffy or like you don't have to present yourself as a company or like as a business entity. Social media is something that, like you know, this is something that this is advice that we give to a lot of our customers, which is, you know, don't be a business talking on social media, you're a person talking about your business on social media.

Speaker 1

36:01

Yeah, I like that.

Building Relationships and Communication Strategies

Speaker 2

36:01

Yes, of course, so really, kind of focus on that, because that's the truth of what's happening, right. So you definitely want to make sure it's really clear that there's a person behind that account, a human being who has opinions and thoughts and emotions, and it's okay to have you know, it's okay to put that stuff out there on social media. So I definitely think you know I like one of the things I like to do whether it's on social or whether it's an email to somebody that I work with or something like that is I always try to read that back out loud, whatever I've written down, and if it sounds like something I would say out loud, then it's okay to send, and if it doesn't sound like something I would say out loud, then maybe I might want to rework it, just to make sure that we're getting the point across the way you know, the way a human being might speak to another human being.

Speaker 2

36:51

Makes sense Not using all those big convoluted words yeah, keeping the jargon at bay and keeping the text accessible and quick and easy to read. I think is really key.

Speaker 1

37:09

Yeah, I mean, I used to have that problem myself, I have to admit, and like you, I started to read the stuff out loud and sort of see if it just sounded like a conversation, almost obviously, when that made sense and that in a way, sarah, do you think that also applies to like email communications as well, in conversation?

Speaker 2

37:24

Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2

37:24

I mean, I think, of course, every business's culture is a little bit different, so in some businesses it might be okay to be a lot more casual, whereas in others you might want to be, you know, sort of a more professional version of yourself, which is also very fine to do.

Speaker 2

37:39

But yeah, I think that's really important because in email, um so when you're writing things out, I think a lot of people have a tendency to look at a short email and feel like they need to pad that out a little bit more, or maybe they'll do the opposite problem, where it's just really hard to keep a more complex idea concise and you might need to want much time. You're asking another person reasonably to be spending on your email and you could tell right away if, like, oh, I'm going to definitely need to trim this down, or maybe I need to put this in a bulleted list to make it a little bit easier to go through, so that the other person receiving the email doesn't have to sit there for 20 minutes trying to figure out what I'm trying to say. So, yeah, I think that's actually a really great technique no, I agree 100.

Speaker 1

38:28

And another thing I mean I mentioned at the top of this call um about the frequency of sort of email communications, um, the, I suppose the, um, what can I say? What word can I use the actual visuals as well? I guess too. I mean, how can potential job seekers use social media to make those actual, those real connections with people?

Speaker 2

38:58

I definitely think, you know, one of the best things that you can do to build good relationships on social media is just to find people whose ideas really resonate with you, um, and to reach out to them and just say hi and thanks for writing that thing that you wrote, or, you know, just to try to have a little bit more of a conversation. Um, I have definitely found that, you know, following businesses whose whose values resonate well with you, or maybe who are has, maybe who are making a product that you really love, just following some of those you know, social media accounts can be a really great way to like learn what is important to that company and learn what problem they're trying to solve for their users, and it can really help build a lot of context and understanding so that when they do, maybe post a job listing, it kind of gives you a little bit of a you know, a leg up and a little bit more to talk about with somebody who works at that company. It can be really useful.

Speaker 1

39:59

And then I mean again, totally agree, I think. And that's how, for me, I found most of my jobs, or at least the contacts I've made. For me I found most of my my jobs, or at least the contacts I've made. I've found something, that sort of um, something that I really like about that company, and I tend to commend them as well, about what they're doing as well, and sort of. And I think what you said at the top of the call as well is is not just coming from the aspect of um, of wanting something from them. It's more about you know wanting to sort of provide something or give. It's more about you know wanting to sort of provide something or give something of yourself to them. And I think another thing that's another question that I got asked by, by, by people before this call is about okay, you've made that initial contact, you've spoken, you've introduced yourself, you said hi. How can you then begin to like build that relationship without sort of being, uh, you know, irritating?

Speaker 2

40:56

um, I feel like it's. I mean, that's definitely a tough question, because I think a lot of people view the relationship building aspect as something that you have to be really strategic around. But, like I mean, the internet is like just another part of the way people live their lives and are communicating with each other, and so I really feel like building relationships happens online in a really similar way as it happens, you know, in real life.

Speaker 1

41:24

I think, it takes.

Speaker 2

41:26

Yeah, it takes a little bit of time. It takes a little bit of familiarity. I think a little bit there. It's not like a you know in real life, I think it takes. Yeah, it takes a little bit of time. It takes a little bit of familiarity. I think a little bit there. It's not like a you know magic wand that you can wave, or like a timer that you'll set and be like, oh, I have to like retweet these things in 20 minutes, but you know, just sort of being kind of human and looking for genuine points of connection with other people. And then, like you know, I guess my main thing is like looking for the people who, whose opinions or whose point of view you actually really like and respect.

Speaker 2

41:57

I think a lot of people view this as something that's really strategic, and you might just want to try to grab and reach out to people who are kind of um, you think maybe you're just supposed to reach out to those people, but yeah, no, I think that you can do a lot of really great and valuable relationship building if you're finding people whose opinions you genuinely connect with and really like and respect and can actually have a conversation about, because that's a part of it, you know.

Speaker 2

42:25

It's about being able to have that like natural, organic conversation. If you have no opinion on what somebody has posted, it's really hard to build a relationship on something you're not that interested in, or maybe you just like, really like it just doesn't. It doesn't connect with you in that way, um. So I would always favor, you know, reaching out to the people who you feel like, oh okay, like I. You know, like that idea is really interesting to me and I'd love to talk more about it and really view it that way, as opposed to like the right people or the right like strategic connection and it sounds like that.

Speaker 1

43:01

That's how you went about things in your own way. You're talking about following Laura's blog post. Were there any other sort of people that, any other sort of people that you look up to online, that you followed as well?

Speaker 2

43:18

I mean, I'm always kind of following a lot of people. Right now, in particular, I'm really interested in other companies who are also remote. I think it's something that is becoming a lot more popular. Over the course of the last, you know, probably like five years or so. You're really starting to see a lot more businesses choose to start and, you know, go remote. So I've been really interested in having conversations with people who are building cultures that are centered around that lately, and a lot of that has just been, you know, just sort of me following people's blog posts online or, you know, seeing what people are talking about or, um, you know, another thing that happens a lot is like some industries or some topics. They have a lot of really great twitter chats set up, um, so you can kind of jump in those and like see what people are talking about and, uh, and you know, meet people that way as well.

Speaker 1

44:08

Sounds good, sounds good to me and in terms of you, me, edgar, laura, what does the uh, what's in store for the future? Uh, for me, edgar, I know you're you're. You said you're working on Instagram integration. Is there anything else exciting that we should look out for in the future?

Speaker 2

44:27

Um, well, we really recently just launched a really cool feature that so you know, one of the problems that we've had, or one of the problems that a lot of our customers have had, is just sort of like the drag of having to write a lot of posts for their social media accounts.

Speaker 2

44:43

So even if you're you know you want to promote one blog post a lot of people, especially on Twitter, you want to be writing a lot of different tweets or different updates that point back to that post.

Social Media Marketing With Meet Edgar

Speaker 2

44:56

So a lot of people have felt and told us that they're really tired of that drag, or it just kind of feels like you're on this content creation treadmill that never ends. So we actually really recently added some features to Meet Edgar to help with that. We have a variations feature and an auto variations feature so you can actually plug your link into Meet Edgar now, hit that auto variations button and Edgar will write your post for you. It'll pull some good like pull quotes from your post and, you know, give you a lot more content to work with. Um helps vary vary things for your social media accounts and keep things a bit fresh and hopefully buys you some time so that you can actually be spending more of that time on engagement or building relationships or, you know, chatting with people, which is, you know, what we've been talking quite a bit about here.

Speaker 1

45:43

Sounds good to me. And what about you? What, what's what's in store for you? Any sounds good to me, and what about you? What, what's what's in store for?

Speaker 2

45:50

you any, any plans for yourself at all or um?

Speaker 1

45:52

I don't know.

Speaker 2

45:53

I am, we're, we're heading into the holidays now, so, um, I I definitely think you know for me, I've been thinking and talking to my team a lot about that work-life balance and figuring out good ways to encourage our team to like, shut down for the holidays and take a little breather, spend some time with your family and then hit the ground running for 2019. Um, so that's been, you know, really top of mind for me lately sounds good to me, sarah, and tell you what it's been.

Speaker 1

46:19

It's been eye-opening for me and I'm sure it's been eye-opening for everybody listening today because, as I said, the whole idea of communication is core and fundamental to you know, not just getting a role within a remote company or any company for that matter. It's core to actually humanity and building relationships. So I've learned a lot today, sarah, thank you for your time and we'll be keeping an eye out to see what Meet Edgar is doing and what you're doing for the future.

Speaker 2

46:51

Thank you.