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Hiring remote talent globally is an increasingly popular way to bring a diverse set of skills and experiences to an organization.
Companies have discovered the many benefits of remote teams, such as cost savings, increased productivity, and access to a larger talent pool.
With the right strategies and tools, any organization can successfully tap into the global talent market and find the right people for their team.
In this guide, you will learn how to hire remote talent globally, from initial search to hiring and keeping talent.
Applying these simple techniques and tools will provide your hiring company access to an 8 billion people talentpool.
And the best thing is; remote employees are oftentimes the most cost and time efficient employees that you will employ.
In this guide you’ll read how to:
- Find remote talent
- Engage remote talent
- Hire remote talent
- Keep remote talent satisfied
1. Find remote talent
Best solution: use a talent search engine
There are several ways to find the right talent who’s willing to work remotely. Since working remotely, at least occasionally, is one of the top desired benefits nowadays of candidates and employees globally, you can assume that most talent (at least in the world of technology) prefers to work remotely at least some of their time.
When you start your search you want to at least include two search parameters in your search: skills and location.
Skills you include in your search are based on your job requirements list (for example certain tech or commercial skills).
Location is your preferred location as a hiring company that you would like the candidates to be based in. Location preferences can be influenced by many different factors, like local salary standards, legal requirements, preferred cultural backgrounds and talent density.
Because your search for talent can get quite specific, it’s recommended to use a talent finding solution that has a big reach of talent.
Here are some of the best solutions to use to find remote talent:
Use remote job boards and websites
Many job boards and websites specialize in connecting employers with remote workers.
Depending on the type of job you’re looking to fill, you can find specialized job boards and websites that cater to remote job seekers.
These are some of the most used remote job boards:
Find talent using a talent search engine for remote talent
Job boards can be a good solution to get connected to remote talent. But many times the quality of talent coming in through job boards are not the best of the best.
Passive candidates are typically the highest qualified candidates and you can find them using a talent search solution.
An example of a search engine for remote talent is HeroHunt.ai.
HeroHunt.ai finds 1 billion candidates worldwide and lets you engage with them through personalized messages.
HeroHunt.ai
This is the step that decides the quality of everything after it. Job boards give you the people who happened to be looking that week, which is why the section above says the best candidates are passive. HeroHunt.ai searches around a billion public profiles across LinkedIn, GitHub and the open web, so you can combine the exact two parameters this guide tells you to search on, skills and location, and restrict to the countries you can actually employ in. It then screens the shortlist with language models and drafts the personalized outreach that section 2 is about. The honest caveat: it finds, screens and contacts people, and that is all it does. It is not an applicant tracking system and it is not an Employer of Record, so you still need something to run the pipeline and something to make a cross border hire legal. Budget for those separately.
Leverage social media
Social media is a great way to find remote talent. Use hashtags and keywords to search for remote workers and engage in conversations with those who fit the criteria for the job.
Use platforms where (remote) candidates are typically discovering new job opportunities. That means the obvious like LinkedIn, but also the less obvious platforms like TikTok and Instagram where remote workers are engaging with their topics of interest.
2. Engage remote candidates
Best solution: use an outreach engine
Candidate engagement is the practice of interacting with potential candidates over several touchpoints during the recruiting cycle in order to build relationships and create a positive candidate experience. A great candidate experience is for a big part the result of great candidate engagement.
An important part of candidate engagement is the initial outreach to potential candidates that you have found with your talent search engine (see 1).
Candidates are best engaged with highly personalized messages that refer to their background, interests and skills.
Engaging global remote talent adds two additional points of attention: 1) you have to understand and make yourself understandable to talent with varying cultural backgrounds and language skills and 2) everything is remote, so you need to establish trust and understanding over (usually) email, chat and video call.
Communicating with different cultures
Engaging with candidates from countries that you are not very familiar with can introduce some awkward moments in the interactions that you have with them.
Do your research before engaging with candidates from a for you new country so you are aware of certain customs and behaviours that you can expect from different cultures.
This will make communication a lot more smooth since there's more mutual understanding and respect for each other's differences.
Also show interest while engaging with candidates from different cultures in their background and for example their home town. You'll learn a lot of new things and the candidates feel a lot more appreciated.
Establish trust
The key point here from an engagement perspective is to be very transparent about your intentions from the beginning. Make clear what your goal is (to hire a person for a certain role).
Also make your outreach highly personalized. This way the candidate knows you have been looking at their profile and they feel personally addressed.
3. Employ remote talent
Best solution: use an Employer of Record (EOR)
The challenge that most companies face who want to hire remote talent is that the hiring company doesn’t have an office in just any country.
That’s why a lot of hiring companies and recruiters assume that they can’t hire talent from other countries than the country they’re based out of.
But that’s not correct. With the help of a so-called Employer of Record (EOR) you can hire global talent legally without having an office in that country.
An Employer of Record (EOR) is a legal entity that is responsible for the hiring, managing, and paying of employees for a company. The company that contracts with an EOR, known as the “principal”, can outsource its human resource functions.
An EOR is responsible for the legal and financial obligations of an employer, including payroll, taxes, benefits, and compliance with employment laws and regulations.
The EOR model is becoming increasingly popular with companies that are expanding their workforce on a global scale. This model allows companies to hire workers in new countries without the need to build an infrastructure from the ground up. An EOR can provide access to local talent, manage the day-to-day HR functions, and ensure compliance with local regulations.
By contracting with an EOR, companies save the cost and the months of work of setting up a local legal entity, and they eliminate the need to manage a complex HR infrastructure. Additionally, the EOR is responsible for the financial and legal obligations of the employer, freeing up the company to focus on their core business. The EOR model is not without risks, however. It is important that companies thoroughly vet the EOR they are considering, as well as the employees they are hiring.
The EOR market is crowded but concentrated. Deel and Papaya Global are the two you will meet most often on global hiring shortlists, with Skuad a common option for teams that want a lower entry price. Deel publishes its EOR pricing openly, which is rare in this category: most providers route you to a sales call before they will name a number. That makes it the easiest one to sanity check yourself. Whichever you pick, compare them on the countries you actually hire in, on who holds the local entity (some EORs quietly subcontract to a third party, which is the risk the paragraph above is really about), and on how fast they can offboard someone if the hire does not work out.
Deel
This is the decision the whole guide builds to: you found the right person, they live somewhere you have no legal entity, and an EOR is what makes the hire legal. Deel is the most widely used option and covers 150+ countries. Know the real numbers before you commit. EOR employment starts at $599 per employee per month, roughly $7,200 a year per head on top of salary, so an EOR is cheap next to incorporating a local entity, not cheap in absolute terms. If the person genuinely is a contractor rather than an employee, Deel’s contractor plans start at $49 per contractor per month, about twelve times less, and Contractor of Record is $325 per month. The honest caveat is the one the paragraph above hints at: do not take the $49 route to save money on someone who is an employee in all but name. Misclassification is the exact liability you are paying an EOR to remove.
4. Keep remote employees satisfied
Best solution: use a benefits and wellbeing platform
Remote working has big advantages but also some particular things to keep in mind while keeping employees happy.
Because you don't always have the face to face time and more casual interactions, you might miss out on employees who are not satisfied.
Therefore you need to be more proactive in offering benefits and wellness programs to your remote employees to keep them happy.
With the help of a benefits management platform you can offer and track the use of employer benefits. These platforms typically combine engagement and recognition programs, health insurance and wellness plans, and reporting so you can see which benefits your remote team actually uses and which ones you are paying for and nobody touches.
The use of a platform obviously does not solve everything when it comes to employee satisfaction. You also need to listen to what your employees need and create an environment of trust so your remote team members articulate their issues and needs so you can offer a (partial) solution for them.
