When You Begin Looking for Workers, Turn on the Remote

Vendors who bring treats to Sun Design, in Burke, Va., in hopes of cozying up to administrative director Sandy Harris often are in for a surprise. Harris isn’t just out of the office — she works in San Diego, three time zones away.

It’s the same in Orange County, Calif., when customers call Burgin Construction and hear either Shannon Sharesky or Tina Signorelli answer the phone. Both of those administrative assistants live in Florida.

Remodelers have long been accustomed to remote workers — all the money-making labor is working on-site at the customer’s home, after all — but Sun Design and Burgin Construction are taking the concept further. Thanks to ever-improving technologies such as cloud-based computing and Internet telephony, they’re showing how geography is nothing like near the fence limiting your hiring prospects that it once was.

Bob Gallagher, Sun Design’s president and chief operating officer, says that Harris’ move west after having been with the company for two years was made possible in part by Sun’s move north: to a second office in McLean, Va., last August. The interconnectivity required to produce seamless connections in branches just 14 miles apart can work just as well when a worker is 2,700 miles away, Gallagher found. So when Harris requested to move, Sun Design found no reason she should say goodbye to the company.

“A lot of the projects she was working on related to information technology or human resources, so we were at a place anyway where we needed to have an assistant administrator,” Gallagher says. (Sun Design has 50 staff and expects sales of about $11 million this year.) “[Assistant] Kely Ta does all the typical hands-on admin things, but we have orientations and it doesn’t matter if Kely is doing it or Sandy; Sandy just Webs in.

“It kind of blows people away when they call and Sandy answers,” Gallagher adds. “Even some of our vendors are surprised. The printer guy came in and was delivering edibles and asked, ‘Where is she?’ He eventually had them delivered [to San Diego].

“I was skeptical at first,” Gallagher says. “Now it’s clear to me that she has a plan and she gets her projects done. The upside is the efficiency. The downside is that there is a difference in having somebody in the office next to you. They don’t get to see how things are going all day, so if you’ve had a bad one and you’re negative, she thinks you’re negative toward her.”

Flex-Able

Burgin Construction vice president Rhonda Burgin regards Sharesky and Signorelli as virtual assistants who put in a combined 20 to 30 hours per week.

The two work as needed, performing tasks such as data entry, taking calls, blogging, and managing schedules. “It is easier for me to have a virtual assistant, since my schedule changes daily,” Burgin says. “I have no worries of them being in the office and me not being there.”

Burgin originally hired Sharesky via a company specializing in remote workers, then took her on directly when the service firm closed. Sharesky set up her own business and hired Signorelli.

That’s not the norm. Random interviews with remodelers nationwide indicate that personnel referrals remain the most popular hiring tool. But services such as Linked­In are getting increased use. told of a software company called Opower that hosts “Talent Tuesdays” in which current employees are served pizza while they search their personal LinkedIn networks to find potential workers.

Using Craigslist.org can give you a quick idea of what jobs are most in demand, and where. Search for “carpenter” on Craigslist’s Phoenix page and you’ll see just 35 want ads, while the same term shows up 140 times on job ads for the Jersey Shore. Denver’s Craigslist has 105 ads for a project manager vs. just 50 in Austin, Texas.

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