Finding just the right person to fill a vacant position isn’t an easy task, no matter where your company resides in the world. Expanding the pool of potential workers and hiring offshore might be the thing that helps you gain the skill sets needed to take your business to a new level.
The concerns of COVID-19 meant many employers turned to a work-from-home model. Once a brand adopts remote work, it’s much easier to expand its horizons and tap into employees around the globe. Even issues such as time zones become less of a concern when people set their own schedules.
Here is a look at why offshore recruiting is on the rise.
What is the meaning of offshore recruitment?
Offshore recruitment is simply hiring someone from a different country to fill open positions. For example, someone in an Asian-Pacific (APAC) country recruits a social media manager in the United States to help promote their new product in America.
A recent HR report showed around 80 per cent of APAC employers used offshore recruiting to achieve business goals. Some of the top markets for offshore recruiting strategies included Vietnam at 46 per cent, South Korea at 43 per cent and Thailand at 39 per cent. Most often, they hired workers in Information Technology, Customer Service and Research and Development.
What offshore recruiting can do
There are a few issues employers should be aware of with offshore recruiting before they jump on board:
- Complicated tax structures between some countries
- Higher wages in some areas
- Language barriers if the person doesn’t speak the same language
- Time zones and holding video conferences or other meetings
Although some things still make offshore recruiting a bit of a challenge, there are many benefits to hiring outside your typical employee pool.
The many benefits are why APAC employers turn to other countries to fill the gap.
Overcome labour shortages
Persistent supply chain issues and concerns over labour shortages have driven the economy in the last few quarters. The Consumer Price Index is at a 13-year high, but companies are still hiring as base growth rates remain up.
The reasons for the labour shortages since the pandemic started are myriad. However, if you find you can’t locate or afford local talent to fill positions, turning to a global pool of workers may help fill the gap.
Source higher talent
Those with the most knowledge of niche areas may not be local, so your business severely limits growth potential if you don’t open up your recruiting process to those in other areas.
Your city may have plenty of intelligent individuals. Still, they may not have had the training opportunities to expand into new technologies or set up a cybersecurity wall to protect a company’s most sensitive data.
Save money
When you recruit offshore, you might not hire people in other countries as full-time employees. Instead, you might employ them on a contract basis for a single job, pay them part-time as freelancers or in many different scenarios.
Doing so could help you save money because you won’t have the expenses of benefits, paid time off and other perks you’d offer your typical staff members.
Tap into revolutionary technologies
More and more employers are using artificial intelligence to help them find workers. Recruiters often spend hours trying to find the right person for a position, but computers have grown so smart that they can do the same work in a fraction of the time, scouring the internet for the best candidate for any job. Sometimes those people come from other countries, resulting in offshore recruiting efforts to find the best match for the job.
Cover all shifts
For companies that need customer service workers, tapping into a talent pool across the globe makes sense.
You’ll easily cover all shifts around the clock without forcing people to work overnight or other strange hours. You can also tap into the customer service platforms countries such as India and Malaysia have in place to handle calls and online chats.
Gain local knowledge
Another reason for turning to offshore recruiting is to gain local knowledge and insight from people in other countries. As your business expands, you may want to find more customer pools. If you have a marketing team in each country you want to reach, you benefit from their insight into what shoppers want.
Do you plan to have content and social media for each country where you sell your products? You’ll want it in the native language of that location. Although you can hire a writer or use a bot to create content, nothing will sound quite right until a native speaker of that location makes it.
Finding the perfect offshore recruit
Be transparent about your hiring practices, how long the position is for and any other details the candidate needs to know. If your churn rate is high, hiring and training offshore recruits could cost you more than local ones.
However, if you are open about the pay structure, benefits and challenges, you just might onboard new employees and keep them around for years to come.
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