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When interviewing remote business consultants, especially if you are not a business specialist yourself, look to measure each individual's previous job performance. Ask them specific questions about what they achieved in their past roles, what affect they had on the area they were hired to improve, and whether or not they met their targets or exceeded expectations.

Beyond this, ask your candidates about their failures, and where they feel they could improve. The best remote workers are self-critical and highly self-aware; both of these qualities are necessary to ensure consistently good work, as virtual employees need to be able to manage their work without constant input from managers and colleagues.

If you are still unsure of which areas to target questions to, there are many comprehensive guides that can help you to formulate questions to ask candidates during the interview process.

Knowing which remote business consultant to hire is crucial to making sure that your new virtual employee contributes positively to your business. To make sure you hire for the right role, spend some time evaluating your business to find out what your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses are, and then look to hire someone to negate those areas.

Alternatively, if you are hiring someone to make up for the skills you lack personally, spend some time thinking about the areas of running your business that you dislike or find difficult; you may find that you struggle managing your company’s accounts and tax returns, in which case a remote accountant would be able to relieve this from you. Similarly, if you find yourself becoming increasingly detached from the day-to-day running of your business, it may be pertinent to hire a business operations consultant to handle the intricacies of daily events.

Testing which candidate is the right hire for your business is crucial to making sure that your remote worker matches your company’s culture and integrates well with the rest of your team. To test whether your candidates would be a good fit, ask them about how they integrated with their previous team, and try to discover whether they were able to work collaboratively to solve problems.

One of the primary roles of a business consultant is to work with your other employees to solve the problems that your business faces. If your remote hire doesn’t work well in teams, and isn’t able to lead groups of your employees, then you will face challenges down the road that prevent your business from growing.

If you are still unsure about whether your candidate would be a good fit for your business, there are many guides and helpful articles that can help you to decide.

Managing remote employees is becoming increasingly easy as technology advances. Tools like Slack, Skype, Basecamp, and Asana, make it easy for you to communicate with and delegate tasks to employees around the world. Beyond this, make sure to keep clear channels of communication open at all times, and to convey projects in simple and easy to understand terms, and make it clear that your remote employees can contact you at any time for further input or help.

If you are looking to gain an in-depth understanding of what your remote business consultant does on a daily basis, look to use time tracking software like Hubstaff that can help you to track exactly what your hire does each hour. Remote employee time tracking software can help you to monitor what apps and websites your worker uses and visits each day, help you to understand your employee’s levels of activity, and help you to increase your organisation’s efficiency (by helping you to understand which tasks take the longest amount of time).