Below, we’ll give you some valuable insights on offshore recruiting,
including what it is, the benefits,
and how to do it effectively.
It can be incredibly frustrating to watch open roles go unfilled, even with attractive pay and benefits. Or to hire the best employees you can find, only to watch with disappointment as they fail to meet their OKRs. For many SMBs, offshore recruitment is an increasingly attractive alternative.
Yet as with any type of hiring, you’ll face challenges with gathering a good applicant pool, screening candidates, and making crucial decisions about who to move forward with.
And offshore recruitment brings its own special set of hiring challenges. You’ll often get a massive number of applicants, but only a few will be suited to the role. There may be a language and communication barrier, even with the better candidates. Wildly different time zones can play havoc with interview scheduling. And you can’t bring people into your office to assess their skills first-hand.
Fill Jobs Faster, With High-Quality Candidates
Meet with our hiring coaches today to see how AI can slash 90% of the time from your hiring process. Start filling jobs faster right away, with 10x higher quality people.
What Is Offshore Recruitment?
Offshore recruiting is the process of hiring employees who live overseas. With offshore recruitment, U.S. companies hire people from developing countries, paying them a lower salary than a U.S. candidate. It’s an effective way to find affordable, talented workers and compete in a global marketplace.
In some cases, the term “offshore recruiting” is also used to mean hiring local talent for a company’s operations in a foreign country. But you don’t need to do business outside the U.S. to make use of offshore recruiting. Hiring offshore for roles like customer service, data processing, accounting, finance, or software development can make your business far more profitable.
The key challenge in offshore recruiting is finding the right balance between too many candidates and not enough.
Benefits of Offshore Recruiting
Offshore recruiting has a range of benefits for businesses. These include:
- Access to talent: With employees competing fiercely for top talent in the U.S., you’ll likely find it much easier to hire abroad. The unemployment rate in the U.S. in July 2023 was 3.5%. In India, it was 8%, so there are many more experienced offshore candidates available.
- Reduced costs: One of the biggest benefits to offshore recruiting is that you can hire highly qualified candidates at a much lower salary point. In the U.S., the average software developer makes $120,730. In the Philippines, it’s ₱457,180 — around $8,050, which matches their lower cost of living. Hiring just a handful of offshore employees could have a huge impact on your bottom line.
- Easier scalability: If your business is growing fast, offshore recruiting lets you quickly and easily scale up. Expanding into a new area? Offshore recruiting allows your human resources team to instantly tap into local language and market knowledge.
- 24-Hour operations: Need to staff your customer service desk round the clock? Want software developers on hand for overnight maintenance tasks? There’s no need to pay a premium for bleary-eyed U.S. workers to tackle the graveyard shift. Instead, hire inexpensive global talent to work during normal business hours in their home country.
- Financial incentives: Some countries offer tax breaks and other incentives to encourage companies to engage in offshore recruitment there. For instance, eligible foreign enterprises may be eligible for tax holidays in the Philippines.
How to Use Offshore Recruiting
Offshore recruiting can be a game-changer, but it can turn into a nightmare. Perhaps you’ve tried it before and you were flooded with hundreds of applications that turned out to be totally unsuitable, after countless hours invested in the screening process. Or maybe you weren’t sure where to begin, and you struggled to attract any candidates at all. Either way, you didn’t get the caliber of applicants you needed.
Here’s a straightforward offshore recruitment process to solve these issues.
Create a Job Ad
Your job ad needs to get talented offshore candidates enthused about the position. That means not simply listing responsibilities and required qualifications, but also selling your company. Why work remotely for you? What kind of workplace culture and benefits can you offer?
Writing a job ad can take hours, so let AI tackle the heavy lifting. You’ll be amazed at what ChatGPT can do here.
Here’s the process of creating a job ad using AI and smart prompts:
Post to Multiple Job Boards
You need to get your ad onto plenty of job boards if you want a good-sized applicant pool … and you need to pick the right ones for offshore recruiting. Indeed and LinkedIn are great options for any country. However, it’s also a good idea to check out country-specific boards like Onlinejobs.ph (for the Philippines), Naukri.com (for India), and Pracuj.pl (for Poland).
Here’s how to get the most from any job board:
Check References
You might be tempted to skip reference checks when you’re recruiting offshore. But references from past supervisors are a vital tool to predict future performance for offshore recruitment, too. Instead of trying to contact overseas referees by phone, use automated reference checking to make the process so much easier and more efficient.
To learn more about high-quality reference checking, watch our video:
Conduct One-Way Video Interviews
Phone screening is inefficient at the best of times. When you’re recruiting from overseas, with all the time zone, language, and technology barriers of an offshore location, phone screening doesn’t make sense. Use one-way video interviews instead. They’re much better for applicants and for you, as the applicant can record the video whenever it suits them. Then, you can watch at your convenience.
If you do need to use phone or live video interviews, use self-scheduling tools to make these much faster to arrange:
Screen Good-Fit Candidates
Once you’ve narrowed the field and you’ve got a set of impressive potential candidates, it’s time to quickly screen those — before scheduling a bunch of interviews.
Choose any or all of these types of pre-employment assessments, based on what your role requires.
Integrity Testing
Integrity testing is the most vital screening check to undertake — especially if your overseas employee will be handling any sensitive data or information. Integrity testing can reduce turnover by 37% and increase the odds of a good hire by 90%.
DISC Assessments
Concerned your overseas employees may not fit comfortably into your teams? DISC styles let you hire workers with the right mix of attributes. For instance, hiring conscientious workers for analytical tasks and extroverted and agreeable workers for interactive tasks. DISC assessments add confidence to your offshore recruitment efforts.
Skills Assessments
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.
Make Your Final Decision
With all these tools at hand, you can quickly assess and screen your applicants, before you interview the best-fit candidates. That way, you can be confident you’re recruiting offshore employees who’ll perform to the same high standards as your U.S. team.
Automatic Offshore Recruiting With Discovered
If you’re recruiting offshore, you need Discovered — Performance Hiring Software. Our software is perfect for offshore, nearshore, and volume recruiting, making it easy for you to quickly filter out poor-fit candidates. You can assign one-way video interviews, get candidates to take skills tests, and gather references — all with an absolute minimum of admin time, as the platform handles everything for you.
Here’s how it works. You use the inbuilt AI generation tool to craft an amazing job ad in just seconds. Then, with a couple clicks, you send that job ad to your chosen job boards — Discovered lets you connect to any job board in any country. The automated reference checking that’s built into Discovered contacts previous supervisors, following up as necessary, without you lifting a finger. You can even set up one-way video interviews, using our templates for just about any role.
Using this method, we found 637 candidates in just 18 days for one offshore recruitment drive. Overwhelming? Not with Discovered. All we needed to do was press play on the whole sequence, and the software handled the selection.
Schedule a demo to see how Discovered can automate your offshore recruitment process today.
