If there seems to be a mismatch between the skills that your organisation requires for its growth and the skills that people in your own country’s labour market can offer, this is far from an unusual or exceptional problem to have.
According to management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, 87% of companies worldwide are aware that they either already have a skills gap or will have one within a few years. Recruiting talented people from beyond your own country’s borders could be one way to help fill this gap.
Furthermore, international hiring can bring a host of other benefits to the given company or organisation, including a greater diversity of backgrounds and perspectives across the employer’s workforce.
Recruiting from abroad can also help bring insights into other local business climates, whether elsewhere on the employer’s own continent, or further afield. Plus, hiring from overseas could help put in place strong foundations for your organisation’s global expansion.
The actions that will help you achieve success with global hiring
Whatever your exact reasons may be for seeking to recruit internationally, it might still take considerable time and effort to find the ideal (and available) candidate for your vacancy.
So, when you next seek out talent from another country or territory, it can be a good idea to adopt the following measures:
- Establishing what your team requires from its next recruit
By looking at your present team and the work you will need them to undertake over the coming months and years, you will be able to quickly identify where the presently available skills within your company fall short. Alternatively, you may have certain skills already in supply, but you might require more of those skills, or similar ones – in other words, more “pairs of hands”.
International hiring – particularly where the recruit is likely to be working remotely, rather than in the employer’s own office – tends to be best suited to roles that are difficult to fill, or where the holder of the role can easily work independently. Jobs in such areas as software development, marketing, and advertising are often good ones to focus on in this regard.
If the job that you need to hire for can’t be done from anywhere in the world, or is super collaborative in nature – therefore ideally needing the given employee to be in the same time zone as the rest of the team – it might be better to seek someone located nearby.
- Researching the regions you are interested in hiring from
You might be accustomed to hiring from within one country, or even one part of your country. This may cause you to underestimate the extent to which other parts of the world can differ when it comes to local job-market dynamics, candidates’ expectations, and cultural norms.
So, presuming you already have a few regions in mind, it will be crucial to research these parts of the world before you attempt to recruit from them.
Does the given region, for example, have a strong supply of the competent professionals that your company requires? Are there companies in the region in the same industry as yours, which could impact on the salary expectations that local candidates expect? Do you have any personal or professional contacts in the region who could advise you on such matters as the local job market or cultural differences?
- Deciding on the most suitable hiring solutions to use
Your exact approach here is likely to depend on how many people you are seeking to recruit from one country or region. If, for instance, you are only looking to take on a few people from a specific jurisdiction, it might be best that they serve your company as contractors.
Alternatively, you might have ambitions to recruit a bigger team of talented individuals from one country, but you may not yet be sure whether you wish to go through with the cost and complexity of setting up a local entity.
In the latter situation, an Employer of Record (EOR) could step in as the legal employer of your new personnel. If you take this path, the EOR could also assume responsibility for ensuring compliance with employment regulations in that territory.
Are you ready as an organisation to tap into the many opportunities presented by international hiring? If so, please don’t hesitate to contact Aspirock; we would be pleased to discuss how we could support your business’s expansion worldwide.