Before March 2020, if you told most HR leaders you were hiring remotely and letting people work from wherever they lived, the reaction was polite scepticism at best.
Location mattered. You hired locally, you brought people into the office, and that physical proximity was doing a lot of the culture-building work for you — whether you realised it or not.
At Compono, we had already made a different call.
We weren't forced into remote hiring by a pandemic. We chose it, deliberately, as both a hiring strategy and a retention strategy. We believed the right person for a role existed somewhere we probably weren't looking. So we stopped limiting where we looked.
What I noticed in 2020 wasn't relief that the rest of the market had validated our approach. It was something more uncomfortable. A lot of companies that suddenly went remote discovered they didn't actually have a culture, they had an office. The coffee catch-ups, the Friday drinks, the ambient sense of "we're all in this together" had been doing enormous amounts of invisible work. Strip that away, and what remained?
For us, the answer was clearer than it might have been, because we'd already had to answer that question before it became urgent.
When you hire someone who lives interstate or in a different time zone, you cannot rely on proximity to do the integration work. You have to be intentional about fit from the very first conversation. You have to know, with some confidence, whether this person is wired in a way that will work in your specific environment, not just whether their CV is impressive.
We hire for three things simultaneously: fit with the company, fit with the team, and fit with the role. Most hiring processes prioritise the third and gesture at the first two. When location isn't a filter, you can't afford that shortcut. The talent pool is bigger, which is the point, but so is the risk of a mismatch that nobody picks up until six months in.
What changed for us was that we started using behavioural data to assess the first two dimensions with the same rigour we applied to skills. Not gut feel dressed up as cultural instinct. Actual insight into how people are wired, how they communicate under pressure, what kind of team environment they thrive in.
The hires that came out of that process were better. Not marginally — meaningfully better. And they stayed longer, because the decision had been made with more than a good interview and a strong reference.
Our average staff tenure is 6.9 years. I'm proud of that number. In an industry where the conversation is almost entirely about how to stop people leaving, 6.9 years tells me we're getting something fundamentally right about who we hire and why they choose to stay. I don't think that happens by accident. I think it's a direct result of making fit — real fit, across the company, the team and the role — the centre of every hiring decision we make.
Right now I manage 52 people across 8 countries. For a single part-time CPO, that is — on certain days — a lot! Time zones that don't overlap. Cultural norms around communication that differ. The logistical reality of keeping a team connected when no two people share the same Monday morning.
What makes it work isn't a rigid framework or a tool that promises seamless collaboration. What makes it work is that every person on the team understands how we operate, what our vision is, what our values are and how we work together — and is genuinely comfortable doing it! Asynchronous communication isn't a compromise at Compono. It's the default. People write things down, they give context, they don't expect an immediate response and they don't interpret silence as disengagement. That's a cultural norm, and it has to be hired for — not assumed.
And I'll say this too, because the Head of People spends so much time thinking about everyone else that it's easy to forget to say it out loud - ‘This flexibility has mattered enormously to me personally!’
I am a mother of two. An 11-year-old boy finishing his last year of primary school, and an 8-year-old little girl who still wants to be walked to her classroom. Working the way we do at Compono has meant I've been there for shared school drop-offs and pickups, for assembly awards, for the big sports days. The moments that seem small on a calendar, but aren't small at all when you're standing there watching your kid look up to find you in the crowd.
I would not trade that for anything. And I think it matters that leaders talk about it, because flexibility isn't just a retention strategy on a spreadsheet. For a lot of people, it's the difference between a career that fits their life and one that costs them pieces of it.
This is exactly why assessing fit matters more, not less, when your team is distributed. You cannot fix a mismatch on communication style with a weekly standup. The person who needs high-touch, real-time feedback to feel secure won't thrive in an async-first environment, no matter how capable they are. Getting that wrong is expensive — in time, in energy, and in the exit conversation six months later where everyone nods politely and pretends it was about something else.
You are narrowing your pool and widening your risk at the same time. The candidates you're finding locally may look like a fit because they can come into the office. The ones you're not considering might be a better fit in every way that actually matters. And if your culture depends on physical proximity to function, that is not a strength. That is a fragility you haven't had to confront yet.
Remote and hybrid hiring doesn't remove the need for intentional culture-building. It makes that intentionality non-negotiable. Which, in my experience, is exactly where it should have been all along.
We didn't get everything right in those early years of hiring across locations. But the discipline it forced — understanding who people actually are before they walk in the door, or don't — made us a better hiring organisation. The pandemic just gave everyone else a compressed version of the lesson we'd been learning slowly.
The question now isn't whether you can hire remotely. Most companies have proved they can.
The question is whether you're hiring intentionally enough for it to actually work.
Tamara O'Sullivan is Chief People Officer at Compono where she has led people strategy across the full lifecycle of a high-growth startup across the last 9 years. Compono uses behavioural science and data to help organisations hire, develop and retain people who actually fit — not just on paper.