3 Tips About Global Recruitment You Can't Afford To Miss

Talent doesn't care about borders, but hiring strategies still do. Most businesses fight over a shrinking domestic talent pool, while an untapped talent pool at their disposal grows. It's not about if global recruiting works, it's about why most organizations do not engage in it.

This article is for you if you have ever seen talent that you know you could develop into a great asset of the business, but you have passed on hiring because you lost the talent to the competition that could afford to pay them more. This article may give you a different approach for looking at talent acquisition moving forward.

Why Global Recruitment Is No Longer An Option

In this scenario, an Austin-based fintech company took four months to find a senior backend engineer. Cost diverged, and so did time. A recruiter eventually was pressured to expand their search radius, and to Warsaw, Manila, and Nairobi. After three weeks, they had exclusive invitations to interview five top engineers, who were willing to work remotely, and would cost less than their local developer counterparts, and who were arguably more talented.

This happens more often than not.

Global recruitment was previously an afterthought, but now it is a fundamental pillar of a business that ignores it. They are, quite simply, fishing in a puddle when an ocean is right over there. Today's talent shortage narrative that is at the forefront of most Western staffing boards is not an actual talent shortage, rather it is about talent being scattered in geographies that recruiting efforts seldom penetrate.

The Price of Being Local

When companies only search locally, they pay hidden taxes. Leaving critical roles empty wastes productivity and lowers company morale. Employees become overworked and company knowledge walks out the door to never return. Recruiters who choose to only search in one metro area or in one country, are deliberately limiting their chances of hiring the perfect candidate for a role. Given the advancements of today's world such as video conferencing, remote work, and other digital means that minimize the need for travel, recruiters who limit their search to one area are needlessly limiting their chance of success.

How do leaders of successful companies change the game? Take a look for yourself.

Tip One: Using Targeted Sourcing to Increase Reach

A global team requires strategic planning. Posting a job and hoping global candidates will find it alone is a poor plan that will generate poor results.

To successfully recruit globally, sourcing is vital. It means knowing how to use job boards in different countries, leveraging diasporan networks, and partnering with local staffing agencies to navigate cultural and legal frameworks. It means using advanced search strings in LinkedIn to find the talent who is not actively looking for opportunities.

Start using schools and technology training programs, like coding bootcamps, in places that have rapidly developing programs, like Bangalore and São Paulo, to develop relationships before hiring there.

Technical education in these places has rapidly developed in quality and quantity, and they are no longer backup markets to hire from, but rather offer the highest quality candidates in the world.

A word of caution: sourcing internationally without a clear plan leads to total chaos. You need to know what geography you want to target before you begin sourcing. Know what time zones you need to be aligned with for operations, what regions may have the skills you want, and what countries may have good remote engagement laws. Spray and pray is not a successful strategy.

Building Employer Brand Across Borders

Your employer brand almost never carries over to other cultures. The employer value proposition that is highly appealing to applicants in Toronto will be completely devoid of appeal to applicants in Jakarta. Messages will therefore need to be adapted. They may be more interested in visa sponsorship, flexible hours, or competitive conversions in that order.

Candidates abroad are more experienced and will easily be able to spot a copied and pasted job post.

Tip Two: Understand the Logistics of Cross-Border Compliance

It is at this point that your interest turns into genuine interest. However, this is where most companies struggle the most. Sending an offer letter and waiting for a signed response is not how you hire someone in a new country. It is a series of tax and employment rules and laws with a horrible maze-like system that exists differently from country to country.

Misclassifying a worker as an independent contractor when a country's laws say they should be classified as an employee will result in a massive penalty, unpaid taxes, and a bad reputation. Lack of knowledge does not protect you from the law. Regulators do not care about your good intentions.

Part of the reason why organizations hire through EOR and PEO partnerships is because these partnerships take on the burden of compliance. These partnerships manage payroll and benefits administration as well as legal employment so that the organization is able to maintain complete oversight of the employee’s day-to-day work and performance management. Consider these partnerships a means for you to extend an offer to a potential employee in Ho Chi Minh City or Buenos Aires, without the need to create a legal entity in those countries.

Past the Legalities

Managing compliance is only part of the challenge. There is the issue of culture and negotiation. For example, some cultures are used to lengthy negotiations surrounding a salary offer, whereas in others, such negotiations are perceived as rude. Furthermore, payment schedules and the length of a contract are sometimes mandatory to be a 13-month payment or salary with specific severance, and these unexpected and abrupt changes are often disruptive to an unprepared employer.

Creating contracts that incorporate these expectations are better as a preventive measure, compared to dealing with the aftermath of a costly surprise.

Tip Three: Acreate Onboarding Process That Bridges Time Zones

The most important thing when hiring globally is ensuring your employees actually want to work at your company and are not just passing through. Unfortunately, many companies put in the resources and efforts to fly a talented employee across the globe, only to frustrate them with a poor onboarding process, thus driving them to want to put in their two week’s notice after working there for the standard 90 days.

The first week in a company should never include a 11 p.m. call to get new employees properly oriented.

Assign a same time zone Buddy/Mentor where possible. Construct a "welcome hub" digitally with everything the new hire may need like Organization charts, tools, login credentials, and communication etiquette, and so on, so that the new hire can access it at their convenience. Celebrate the true diversity your global recruitment brings.

Retention Is the Real Metric That Matters

Successful recruitment means a lot more than simply Improving Time to Hire. The benchmark should be retention after one year. An integrated International employee will become a strong advocate for your organization, referring candidates from their own networks.

If you do not integrate your International employees you will simply never escape the expensive, endless cycle of recruiting.

Take Action Today

The companies that move ahead of the competition are the ones with the best strategies for global recruitment. Those with the largest budgets are not the strategies that will help companies win the recruitment game.

If you do these three things you will see a tremendous change in your recruitment numbers.

Ready to see how global hiring can affect your workforce? Contact us at +91 729 102 4327.