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Expanding to a new country is an exciting venture that comes with unique challenges and opportunities. One of those challenges is global recruiting. As you consider how to hire global employees, you’ll need to develop dependable strategies for attracting qualified people. You’ll also need to know how to navigate the steps of the process while complying with your new country’s unique laws.
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Why create a global recruitment strategy?
Developing a global talent acquisition strategy is highly advantageous. At first, the process might seem challenging because it is uncharted territory for your company. However, taking the time to craft a thoughtful, informed strategy is an excellent investment in your company’s growth. It allows you to reap benefits like these:
- Expanding your business: As you expand, you may not have enough domestic employees to keep up with the growth, especially if the new jobs require relocation to an international locale. Having a concrete hiring strategy for your new location opens up a whole new labor market to help you gain qualified local talent and expand faster.
- Keeping up with the competition: If your competitors are also expanding internationally, you need a way to match their growth and prevent them from snapping up market share that could easily be yours. Developing a global recruitment strategy helps you tap into some of the most promising local talent to keep abreast of — or even outstrip – your competitors.
- Staying flexible: Each country requires different approaches to recruiting and hiring. A thoughtful global recruitment strategy helps you anticipate cultural variations and provide your company with the flexibility to meet diverse recruiting needs.
- Lowering expenses: The process of recruiting and hiring can be expensive. For example, companies in the United States spend about US$4,129 per new employee. Robust recruiting practices enable you to attract talented, loyal employees, helping to reduce the hiring costs associated with turnovers. These hires add value to your company and make those upfront costs worthwhile.
- Boosting diversity: If your company optimizes its overall hiring process only for your own country, the quality of your international hiring will be uneven, and employee diversity may suffer. A thought-out global recruitment strategy enables you to tailor your practices to each new country and maximize the benefits that come with team diversity. These benefits include an array of viewpoints, increased employee engagement, access to local contacts, and a genuine understanding of the new country’s culture.
Steps in the global recruitment process
Let’s walk through several essential stages of the international recruitment process.
As you consider these global recruiting steps, remember that you can gain many advantages by working with a professional global recruiting organization that can shoulder the logistical burden of recruiting. Its teams can also use their extensive country expertise and networks to advertise in the right places, use clear and appealing language in job postings, and attract a highly qualified applicant pool.
1. Understand the country
The first step is to research the factors that will affect your operations directly, such as local regulations, currency exchange rate, taxes, and labor laws.
Each country has its own laws governing recruiting and hiring candidates, so your company will need to learn and comply with them. For instance, some countries require companies to hire a certain percentage of candidates with disabilities. In Romania, employees with disabilities must make up at least 4 percent of the staff in large companies.
To prevent discrimination, many countries also have laws about what factors you may and may not consider in your hiring decisions. Once you’ve hired qualified employees, you’ll also need to abide by the relevant labor laws. You must provide the mandatory benefits and time off, comply with minimum wage laws, and ensure you can provide the requisite notice periods and severance if you decide to terminate employees down the road.
In some countries, especially those with robust social programs, payroll taxes can be significant because you contribute to social programs like health insurance programs and retirement pensions for each employee. Knowing the payroll tax rate in your new country, along with the various labor law requirements, can help you determine how many new employees you can afford to hire. For example, in the United Kingdom, employers typically contribute about 13.6 percent of an employee’s salary to social security programs through payroll taxes. In Germany, that figure is about 20.7 percent. In Australia, on the other hand, payroll taxes vary by state.
2. Engage in planning and due diligence
The more planning and research you can do before beginning active recruitment, the more value you can gain from your hiring processes. For instance, you’ll want to strategize to ensure your international recruitment process aligns seamlessly with your company’s business needs and goals. To boost alignment, you may want to develop a shared vocabulary for recruitment, seek input from all essential stakeholders, and ensure executive sponsorship across many departments in your company.
For example, your company may want to employ more people from your home country and send them abroad to perform the necessary work. Alternatively, local hiring managers might feel loyal to their processes and want to preserve them instead of switching to an overarching international strategy. In that case, a targeted global recruitment strategy might not be your first choice. However, if your company will require local support for its operations and prioritizes the cultural knowledge and diversity local hires can bring, a global recruitment strategy can be an excellent choice.
3. Understand your ideal candidate
Once you’ve done your research and strategized to ensure you reach your overall recruitment goals, you might find it helpful to break your desired candidate characteristics down into a few key areas:
- Skills: What abilities would your ideal candidate have? This person might have advanced coding skills, fluency in multiple languages, the ability to communicate clearly and effectively, or a talent for getting diverse groups to work together.
- Mindset: Mindset is often just as important as skill sets in your recruits, if not more important. Your company may find that it prioritizes a growth-oriented mindset, an independent outlook, or a collaborative approach more than specific skills.
- Experience: You should also determine whether your company needs highly experienced employees or is willing to invest in hires who are just getting started in the workforce. In certain positions, a few years of experience are critical, while others allow for more learning on the job.
4. Establish a location
Determine whether your international employees will work at a company location or remotely and what that arrangement will look like. If your company has physical offices in your new country, you may need to register your business at that address or get a permit for your operations.
If you plan to have your employees work remotely, figure out what that virtual location looks like as well. You might use a dedicated platform to facilitate work and conduct interviews on programs like Zoom or Google Meet.
5. Gather documents
Once you’re ready to begin the more detailed aspects of recruiting, you’ll need to create and collect the necessary documents so you have them in one place and can refer to them easily. For instance, if your country has regulations about specific quotas you must meet, such as hiring a certain percentage of domestic nationals, you should have those regulations readily accessible for reference. You should also gather copies of any laws that limit your actions during hiring, such as laws that restrict the types of questions you may ask in interviews.
At this point, you can craft documents such as advertisements and job postings, and you may gain advantages from making them available in more than one language. For example, in Peru, Spanish is the official language, and Quechua and Aymara also have official status in areas where their use is prevalent. The country is also home to more than 90 indigenous languages. You’ll want to research the languages used in your area and consider using them for your recruiting and hiring documents.
6. Create a job description
As you create documents for international recruiting and hiring, you should develop a job description that outlines the position’s responsibilities. Be sure to include details of the job duties and the desired qualifications for the position. To attract a competitive applicant pool, you’ll need to give candidates a way to assess how well the job fits their skill sets and interests. You’ll also need to be clear about what skills and experience are non-negotiable.
Remember that your job description must comply with your new country’s regulations. In many countries, it must contain non-discriminatory language. You should also ensure your job description abides by local laws governing disclosures, intellectual property, and user protection.
7. Screen candidates
Candidate screenings must also comply with applicable local regulations. As you review applications, be careful to comply with the relevant anti-discrimination laws and keep any employment quotas in mind.
You may decide to take advantage of platforms like LinkedIn for applicant screening. This is especially wise if you are reviewing candidates remotely and want to take advantage of functionalities that let you screen for the expertise and skills required in a role. Otherwise, you might conduct initial phone screenings before inviting applicants to full interviews. You’ll be able to speak briefly to your strongest candidates and get a sense of which ones best fit your company’s needs.
8. Interview
In general, you should conduct interviews either in your new country or remotely. Especially for first interviews, bringing candidates to your home country will likely be infeasible. If you must fly candidates internationally, you will want to pay for their travel expenses or offer reimbursements.
If you plan to interview remotely, pay particular attention to the scheduling. Scheduling interviews across several time zones can be tricky, so you’ll want to give your candidates the flexibility to select interview times that work for their schedules as well as yours.
As you conduct full interviews, tailor your questions to the job requirements and your company’s culture and needs. Keep the conversation business-focused and avoiding legally prohibited personal topics. Consider engaging translation services if you feel they can be helpful, and provide monetary amounts in the local currency to be sure your candidates understand what the position’s remuneration entails.
9. Determine compensation
Remember that your new employees’ compensation will include much more than the base salary. You’ll need to figure out each new employee’s benefits, paid time off, and bonuses as well.
Each country has specific labor laws that mandate:
- Minimum wages
- Paid vacation
- Sick days
- Government holidays
- Maternity and paternity leave
- Other forms of leave
- Health insurance
- Pension schemes
Some countries require a 13th-month bonus. You’ll need to research the regulations carefully to ensure your employees receive the compensation they are legally entitled to.
10. Offer the job
Once you’ve chosen a candidate and have received approval from your company, you’ll be ready to offer the job to that person. Be sure you’ve settled on the compensation and work schedule you plan to offer. You should also determine to what extent you are willing to be flexible with these terms if the candidate wishes to negotiate.
When you make a formal job offer, you may want to use the local language for improved clarity and understanding and to make your chosen candidate feel welcomed. You should also continue to give monetary amounts in the local currency.
Before extending a formal offer, you might consider conducting official pre-employment screening processes like background checks. However, some counties prohibit such checks to reduce the risk of discrimination. Be sure to look into the law in your country before you proceed.
11. Onboard new employees
Onboarding is a critical last step in the global recruiting process. Companies with a standard onboarding process often gain more productivity from their new hires, have better new hire retention, and more significantly increase the level of new hire engagement compared to companies without those processes.
Once you’ve made a formal offer and received your chosen candidates’ acceptance, you’ll need a convenient, informative, and professional way to onboard your new employees. You need to set your new hires up with payroll services and give them the technological access they need. You’ll also need to provide training, instruct them in your company’s culture, and make them feel like valued, respected parts of the team.
In some countries, your employees must sign a formal contract written in the local language. In that case, craft your contract carefully to comply with regulations.
Working with an Employer of Record (EOR) provides valuable assistance at this stage. A dependable EOR can streamline your hiring and onboarding while keeping your company compliant with the local laws.
Build international teams with support from Globalization Partners
As you expand into international markets, work with Globalization Partners for recruiting, hiring, and onboarding support. As a global EOR, we offer a comprehensive AI-driven solution that enables us to shoulder the logistical labor of team building. That way, you can save time and focus your attention on more urgent goals.
Download our global hiring eBook today, or request a proposal for our solutions. You can also take a tour of our platform to explore its features and benefits.
To know more about G-P Recruit, visit our website and let us know how we can help you find the best talent, in the right location, at the right cost.
