Hiring International Employees to a Tech Company: 5 Best Options

The recent pandemic triggered both remote work adoption and a trend for global hiring. However, despite all the benefits these approaches come with, switching to remote mode and hiring from a worldwide talent pool requires strong management and recruitment expertise. That’s why in this article, we suggest taking a look at five common hiring strategies to learn which one suits your company best and how to recruit top international employees in the most effective way. Without further ado, let’s get started.

Hire talent on your own

Hiring development talent on your own is the most obvious and intuitive strategy that seems especially attractive to the companies running their core and non-core business processes in-house. At a glance, such a tactic seems easy enough to follow. You have to hire a human resource manager,  come up with clear job requirements and launch a hiring campaign. In such a case, the opportunity to hire talent on your own comes with the following pros and cons. 

Pros

• You can fully control the hiring process. Any process that takes place under your roof is easier to control than a remote one. From such a perspective, you can easily communicate with your HR manager, stay updated on the campaign progress, and take part in the candidates’ interviewing.
• You can quickly adjust the hiring strategy in case the development course changes. Another benefit of hiring talent on your own is better flexibility, since you can quickly communicate the adjusted job requirements and switch to another hiring strategy. 

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Cons

• You have to hire an in-house HR manager with a strong understanding of the global labor market. The skill to hire from a global market, while accurately matching a candidate with the job requirement from the professional and personal perspectives, is pretty uncommon, so finding such an HR specialist can be challenging. 
• The costs of direct hiring are difficult to predict. An average cost per hire is $4,000, however, the actual costs are challenging to forecast accurately. In the case of hiring tech talent on your own, the cost per hire will consist of the cost to hire an HR manager and their salary, HR software subscription fees, the costs to run job advertising campaigns, plus onboarding expenses and the salary of a hired employee. 

Hire freelance developers

Hiring freelancers is another way of hiring international employees. Given the rise of remote work and the diversity of the freelance labor market, most companies eager to cut costs choose this tactic as the one to follow. Let’s take a deeper look at its advantages and possible pitfalls. 

Pros

• Choose from the global talent pool. For companies looking for international workers, hiring freelancers is one of the best ways to go, since in this case they can gather developers from all over the world and embrace cultural diversity. 
• Find a candidate with niche-specific expertise and relevant experience. The size and diversity of the freelance talent market allow you to hire a contractor with the perfect-fit background, plus hiring a contractor is easier than hiring an employee from the legal perspective. 

• The most cost-effective option. The salary range of a freelance worker depends on their education and skills, background, experience and location which allows for tailoring the average salary of the necessary specialist to the project’s budget. 

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Cons

• Choosing from 1.1 billion freelancers in the world can be overwhelming. According to the laws of marketing, the more choice options are available, the less probability of making the final decision. In the case of hiring global employees, finding the right fit among the rows of potentially suitable candidates can really be a challenge. 
• Managing freelance developers is challenging and requires strong leadership skills. Usually, international teams of freelance developers have to work out of time zones, so aligning their tasks and responsibilities, as well as establishing effective communication practices, while ensuring result delivery is a difficult task even for the project managers experienced with running the software development process in such a manner. 

Collaborate with an outsourcing vendor

Partnering with an outsourcing vendor is one of the most popular ways to hire remote developers. In this case, the development process is fully remote and outsourced to a third-party company, which has both human resources and the necessary equipment for software development. Such an approach stands for hiring for a service instead of hiring people and comes with the next pros and cons. 

Pros

• You can choose a vendor globally. The opportunity to choose from a global talent pool is still one of the benefits of hiring international employees with the help of a development vendor. The only difference is that in this case, you have to search for a company with the necessary talent under their roof instead of searching for people directly. 
• A dedicated team is as flexible as you need. There are three software development outsourcing contracts, but each of them allows for keeping your team as flexible as possible. Since you don’t hire them on your own but only use their services, you can adjust the size of your team at any moment you need it. 
• Software development outsourcing is money-saving. The salary gap between your homeland country and an outsourcing destination makes software development outsourcing one of the most cost-effective tactics to create software solutions. In addition, you can choose the engagement model, the developers’ seniority level, and location to optimize your budget as much as possible but still access the necessary tech talent. 

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Cons

• Choosing a vendor can be challenging. From such a perspective, this drawback of software development outsourcing overlaps with the one of hiring freelance developers or hiring tech talent on your own. Making the final choice is always difficult, especially when having so many choice opportunities. 
• There can be communication barriers and data security risks. Depending on the destination to outsource your software development, there can be communication barriers and mentality gaps. What’s more, there are certain data security risks in the case of the development process by the third-party vendor, so making the right choice with the destination and the vendor are the biggest issues the companies following this tactic face. 

Partner with a local recruitment agency

Partnering with local recruitment companies can be a good tactic for companies that are neither ready to hire talent on their own, nor outsource the development process completely. Compared to these strategies, getting in touch with a local hiring agency is some kind of a middle ground, so let’s review the pros and cons of this approach. 

Pros

• Easy to get in touch and communicate with. Finding such an agency can hardly be a problem in any developed country and big city, plus no time zone difference and the opportunity to communicate personally can make the international hiring process easier. 
• In the case of partnering with a reliable agency, the hiring process is likely to be pretty fast. No communication delays are also a plus for speeding up finding the right candidates, however, you have to choose the agency carefully, making sure the company has relevant experience in foreign worker recruitment. 

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Cons

• Such agencies are mostly focused on the local labor markets. That’s why finding a company with the necessary expertise and software to look for candidates globally can sometimes be a challenge. 
• You still have to choose the agency wisely. Like in the case of choosing a software development vendor, you still have to choose a local recruitment company carefully, paying attention to its reputation, researching the reviews and asking for recommendations in advance. 

Alternatively! As an alternative to collaborating with a local hiring company, you can also consider partnering with an employer of record. The main difference between a recruitment agency and an employer of record is that the latter also deals with payroll and taxes, in addition to recruiting and hiring. 

Partner with a global talent sourcing vendor like Bridge

In addition to local recruitment agencies, there are also global talent sourcing vendors whose core specialization is hiring remote international employees. Hiring remote tech talent with the help of a global talent provider is the smartest option to bet on, since it perfectly combines all the benefits essential for effective remote hiring. Here they are. 

Pros

• Choose from multiple locations. As a rule, global talent sourcing vendors offer hiring services in multiple locations, including the most promising ones to hire remote talent from. Bridge can also help you with sourcing top tech candidates from Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Chile), Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Romania), Portugal and the USA. 
• Leverage market-specific expertise. Global talent providers usually hire dedicated HR managers, who are well-versed in a specific labour market, to suggest the best-fit candidates and consult the customers on the location that will be most winning for their remote hiring goals. 
• Opt for data-driven and automated hiring. At Bridge, we automate 80% of the hiring process, which allows us to speed up the recruitment up to five times and still suggest the best-fit candidates from the chosen location. We rely on both automation tools and data-driven engines to combine the power of automation and Big Data analytics for each of the hiring campaigns we run for our customers. 

Cons

• You have to interview and manage your remote employees on your own. In contrast to hiring international workers according to the software development outsourcing model, candidates’ interviews and further project management are your sole responsibility. 

The most effective hiring strategies when partnering with a global recruitment company

Since hiring remote talent from a global recruitment company is the wisest strategy from the ones we have reviewed, let’s discover the possible collaboration models and find the one that fits your project best. 

Team augmentation

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Team augmentation or team extension is the way to scale your in-house team with remote developers. You are welcome to choose this tactic if you face a sudden work overload in your team or lack of specific talent. Partnering with a global hiring company like Bridge adds even more value in this case since it significantly speeds up the search for the necessary candidates, allows for choosing the developers experienced in working as a part of an extended team, and gives an opportunity to hire from the most promising location and still cut overhead costs and risks. 

Contact Bridge to extend your in-house team with the best-in-class development talent! 

IT recruitment

If you have to gather a development team from scratch, hiring them on your own or gathering a freelance team can take a lot of time and effort. From this perspective, opting for IT recruitment services is an attractive opportunity that also allows for hiring the best-fit talent at a lower cost. Bridge experts would be happy to help you with this task, leveraging the benefits of automated and data-driven recruitment.

What’s more, we have created a customer-only platform for candidates management and interviewing so that you can always stay updated on the progress of your hiring campaign, move the best-fitting candidates to the bottom of the hiring pipeline, and deal with payroll in a single place.

Drop a line to our hiring experts right now to discover more benefits of IT recruitment with Bridge! 

Sourcing-as-a-service

While all the software projects are different and unique in their own way, their current hiring goals can vary as well. Those companies which aren’t ready to run a full-scaled hiring campaign right now can consider sourcing-as-a-service. The essence of the service is that you can quickly get a list of vetted candidates selected from your top priority location and accurately tailored to your job requirements. As the next step, you can either proceed with interviewing them directly or get back to them in future. 

Switch to faster talent acquisition with our sourcing-as-a-service! 

Conclusion

Hiring international employees comes with many great opportunities, however, hiring great ones is still a challenge. Each of the global recruitment strategies also comes with its pros and cons, while the possible pitfalls are significant enough to turn a blind eye on. Partnering with a global talent sourcing vendor, in turn, decreases the hiring risks and costs, allowing for reaching out to the top talent globally and leveraging the benefits of automated and data-driven recruitment. 

Bridge would be happy to help you with gathering an international tech team – contact us now for guidance and support!