Are you shuddering at hiring someone offshore, and the massive task makes you retreat into your shell? You can relax and use this guide to help you understand how to make offshore hiring easy and effective for your business.
Many businesses continue to suffer because they do not diversify out of their usual local talent pool, and at a particular time, the quality of candidates begins to decline. To avoid this ordeal, hiring offshore is a viable and cost-effective solution. Here are concise steps on how to hire staff offshore:
Identify your needs and objectives:
As a business, you have specific goals in mind for how you want your business to perform. When deciding to hire offshore, you first need to determine the need for it. You will first enlist the responsibilities you will outsource, for example, billing, virtual assistance, and customer support. Then, you will decide what kind of people you need for the job and identify the objectives and skills you need them to have upon joining your workforce.
Select an offshore location:
A particularly challenging aspect when you hire offshore staff is to determine which location you will choose. The kind of people you need for your business will belong to many sites and backgrounds. Understand your need, select a place that suits you regarding budgeting and skills, and target that location – usually somewhere in South America, South or Central Asia.
Determine offshore hiring model:
Based on the kind of work you need to do; you will have to curate a team. When hiring staff offshore, first decide whether you need independent freelancers, a dedicated team, or specialists to take on specific tasks. Once you decide that, the hiring model will be easier to choose and carry forward.
Choose the right offshore hiring partner or platform:
Where to source the talent? When you hire talent offshore, you need to ask yourself, what quality of talent are you looking for? Based on those questions, you will look for options on outsourcing agencies, online platforms, or hiring directly from offshore locations. While the last option is tricky to get right, you can find help from offshore hiring experts like Remote Scouts to help you through it.
Do background checks on shortlisted candidates:
Once you have a list of candidates from your selected outsourcing platform, compile a list of qualified candidates for vetting and background checks. When you hire offshore employees, please ensure you put them through the sifter and remove the dead weight. Eliminate anyone who does not fit your initial criteria for a quality candidate in this process. You can employ recruitment techniques and take the help of your HR teams to have a qualitative and quantitative list of potential candidates.
Check language proficiency:
Once you have a list of thoroughly vetted candidates, you can begin to pin down the details. You will need to check on their language proficiency, how well they can speak English or your native language, their accent and tone of voice, and communication skills. For jobs like customer support and virtual assistance, people skills and communication are essential, and these two aspects must be thoroughly examined and assessed.
Budgeting and Compensation:
Now comes the fun part. One of the reasons people hire offshore staff is because they are a cost-effective alternative to hiring local staff. You can get quality candidates for half of the price in an offshore location than you would on your own. Once you have finalized the candidates, decide on the budget for offshore hiring, factor in the cost of setting up a remote operation, and discuss compensation for the employees.
You have the Ideal Candidate – Now What?
Now, you can start planning how to set up an offshore operation. For many businesses, finding the right person is essential, as it should be, but providing them with the right environment to work in is equally significant. Here are three ways to set up the ideal workspace for your offshore hire.
Establish communication and collaboration tools:
For any successful business, quality software and communication infrastructure are incredibly vital. You must ensure that your offshore location has the settings to facilitate a remote workspace with communication tools like video conferencing, workflow management tools, and the hardware required to support this system.
Ensure compliance and data security:
Once you set up an offshore system, your data is in the hands of strangers for the first few days or weeks of your operation. As anxiety-inducing as this process can be, you can easily ensure that you check yourself on the compliance regulations of that location and that you have a system in place to ensure data security protocols so that sensitive information is treated with integrity.
Quality control and monitoring:
You have an offshore setup, and you have followed the guidelines to establish an excellent team; what is next? You will be doing that for the rest of your days. A strong workforce is only as good as its last bad day. You will have hiccups along the way, and things will take time to settle down and develop value. Be patient but vigilant of the changes and troubleshoot problems as they come.
Keep a tight hold on the data processing and communications and ensure regular monitoring and quality assurance through strict protocols and SOP’s. Provide goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to your employees so they know what their objectives are and how they can achieve them. At the slightest hint of a problem, please communicate with your team and iron out the issues that come up as they do.
Adapting to Offshore Operations – A Rewarding Journey
Any business can grow at its own pace with the help and systems provided to it. However, a company can bloom and flourish with foresightedness and adaptability. Only the most successful companies have this combination, and you should strive to have the same.
You have the tools to build something great, which can become more significant by adding new blood to your family, trusting in offshore talent to provide that fresh perspective and new skills to your system, and regenerating it from where it stands. With more companies striving to come out on top, an offshore location is a suitable investment to scale your business across borders and imagine its success in new and exciting avenues.
