A business’s successes and failures are largely defined by the resources they have access to, and one of the most crucial resources is the people working for the business, i.e., the workforce. The richer and more diverse a company’s talent pool, the better its chances of success in the long run. There are numerous benefits and advantages of hiring international talent, each of which strengthens the business in its own way.
In this article, we are considering every avenue of international hiring, including the use of an Employer of Record (EOR) such as Engage Anywhere and freelancers.
Larger Talent Pool
The most obvious advantage of hiring internationally is access to a larger talent pool. If you are restricted to a specific region, city, or even country, you can only leverage the talent within those boundaries. Larger countries may have access to an ample supply of potential candidates, but smaller countries may suffer from a smaller pool. However, if you are open to hiring global talent, you can virtually access skillsets from all corners of the world. The situation is ideal for remote positions, i.e., work that can be done outside of your offices, which is nowadays the case for a significant segment of the total white-collar job market. But international hiring can be a major strength even for manufacturing and other jobs requiring an employee to be present on the premises.
Better Depth of Expertise
Certain skillsets and expertise tend to concentrate in certain geographies. Countries differ from one another in things like universal high-school education, professional education, trades, manufacturing practices, and capabilities. All these differences tend to reflect in the broader workforce/talent from that country.
If you are limited to a country, most of the local talent you may have access to will suffer from the same set of inherent limitations. But you can overcome it by going international with your hiring. One example would be a company growing its electronic manufacturing capabilities by actively hiring engineers and other skilled workers, to places where electronics manufacturing is a massive industry.
Diverse Perspectives
Every employee brings multiple advantages to the business they are joining. This includes their skill set, expertise, work ethic, and perspective, and different perspectives can be a powerful asset for a business. If you are hiring internationally, your employees may bring different and unique ideas and work practices along with them, some of which may be more efficient and productive compared to what you have right now.
A different perspective can also help you solve persistent/ever-present problems your business faces because employees from different backgrounds may offer unique solutions.
Cost Management
Hiring international talent might seem like a costly endeavor, but only if you look at it from the cost perspective and do not take the benefits into account. If you do, the overall ROI might justify the cost. Hiring international talent can also help you at a lower cost, allowing you to tap into low-cost talent that matches or even exceeds local talent.
This happens because the expertise that might be rare in one part of the world and highly sought after, might be abundant somewhere else.
Hiring international workers, especially if they are working remotely, may lower the overall cost of employment because they do not require the use of your premises and other in-person resources, which significantly lower the overhead costs. It may also give you more flexibility when it comes to taxation.
International Presence
With an international workforce, your business gets to enjoy an international presence. Tapping into the consumer pool of a new market becomes much easier if you are already tapping into the talent pool of that market. This also helps you start a more organic presence in a country where you have local employees familiar with the culture and the market at large, thus initiating your entry.
Resilience
Hiring international talent makes your business more resilient. The talent you have access to becomes geographically diversified, so if there are problems in one of the regions you operate in, it may not affect your employees in a different region. This helps with business continuation, even during natural disasters and economic downfalls.
Flexibility
Building and managing an international workforce requires your business to become more flexible. You must establish communication protocols with multiple redundancies, distribute work duties across different time zones, and encourage distributed control rather than adopting a fixed hierarchy. These flexibilities, apart from adding to the resilience of the business, also help it become more agile and adaptive, more receptive to change.
Adopting Best Practices
Best practices across different business domains are always changing and one way to stay ahead of the curve is to adopt and embrace the new best practices. This is easier to do with an international workforce. Even if we take “changing best practices” out of the equation, an international team will simply have a richer and more comprehensive set of best practices at its disposal.
You can leverage it to adopt the practices best suited for your business. By hiring international talent, you can also remain ahead of the curve by accessing the talent from countries and regions from where these best practices originate.
Better Culture
Hiring international talent can help improve the culture within your company. It will break the cultural hegemony that’s prevalent in many businesses. By embracing people from different geographies and cultural backgrounds in the workforce, businesses can also get a better understanding of how to approach different cultures (as customers) and adopt business practices that are sensitive to these differences.
Building a diverse workforce can be a challenging endeavor without the right knowledge and support. When thinking about hiring international talent or independent contractors, Engage Anywhere has you covered. Engage Anywhere offer’s employer of record services in over 140 countries and our team will ensure that you navigate the regulations without falling into a legal abyss and reap the benefits of hiring international talent without taking unnecessary risk. Contact our team today and learn more about Engage Anywhere’s solutions.
