I hired two folks locally, then moved to an island thousands of miles away, then hired an ML and data science team of 3 more folks. My team also has to work in

I hired two folks locally, then moved to an island thousands of miles away, then hired an ML and data science team of 3 more folks. My team also has to work in a mixed group where a few folks were hired by another, very senior manager. He knows how to hire. The guy is a legend. Those hires I made from far away were much more carefully thought out and turned out to be much stronger. Equivalent to the ones the senior guy was hiring, if not stronger. I think it's because I couldn't delude myself into thinking "They're fine, I don't need to waste time interviewing. I can just groom them, get them to where they need to be." I had to, absolutely, consider these people as full time remote workers, several time zones away. They had to be crack engineers and crack communicators. And I had to enforce those standards from the get go. Watching everyone else go through the shift to remote work was fascinating. The pandemic caused us to change nothing.