To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
I've been working on remote teams for almost 20 years. The key to success is overcommunicating.In other words--don't assume people have full context or share assumptions. Write emails that lay out assumptions explicitly and detail problems completely. As a manager I sometimes feel like a Habsburg bureaucrat buried in the Chancery offices sending painstaking messages to a far flung empire.  Come to think of it, remote work is not that different.