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Summary: Global talent acquisition helps businesses access skilled workers worldwide. Discover its benefits, challenges, and how to build a strong international team.
Through global talent acquisition, employers find workers in countries other than their own to provide the skills their company needs. The process involves attracting or sourcing talent, then hiring the candidates who best meet the organizations’ goals.
Why Do Companies Need Global Talent Acquisition?
Employers often find it difficult — if not impossible — to acquire the talent they need within their local area. This may be the case when a particular skill set is in high demand (such as in IT or digital marketing) or if the company requires specific talents that few people possess.
Allowing employees to work remotely solves this issue by meaning the company is no longer limited to its local area — and, as employers have recently discovered, it’s possible to carry out many jobs remotely without any negative impact on productivity. This also means it’s no longer necessary to only search for talent within the country where your business is based.
Benefits of Global Talent Acquisition
Even when it’s not essential to look abroad for employees, there are numerous benefits to global talent acquisition.
Access the Skills You Need
In many sectors, a talent shortage is limiting growth for employers. This is especially true for industries like medical science, engineering, and finance, where workers need to continuously up-skill to keep up with technological advancements. The only way to gain workers (and stay within budget) may be to use global talent acquisition.
Grow Your Workforce
In addition to using global talent acquisition as an opportunity to fill skills gaps, such a strategy may be a solution to free up time for other members of the team to carry out their core work — such as if the company then hands off less-specialized tasks to new workers. Looking abroad for workers to carry out these tasks may be more affordable than relying on your local talent pool.
Diversify Your Team
Finding workers around the globe naturally means your team becomes more diverse. This is useful for gaining more perspectives when coming up with creative solutions, problem-solving, and ensuring your offerings meet customers’ needs. You’re likely to find a diverse team is better at noticing potential risks, finding opportunities, and generating innovative ideas.
Operate Globally
Establishing a presence in other countries makes it easier to become an international company. For instance, you’ll have team members who understand a different culture, are multilingual, and are based in different time zones, which may even mean you’re able to provide services 24 hours a day.
If you know you want to expand into a particular market, it makes sense to start acquiring talent in that region. Your employees can ensure your marketing tactics will resonate with customers, your products are tailored for the region, and you avoid making cultural blunders.
Gain a Competitive Advantage
It’s important to always be one step ahead of your competitors — and using global talent acquisition achieves this in several ways. For example, your team won’t be overworked if you have enough employees, your workers will have useful insights to share, and you may be able to establish a presence in a market that your competitors are yet to enter.
Challenges of Global Talent Acquisition
Global talent acquisition requires far more considerations than domestic recruiting. In particular, you’ll need to overcome the following challenges to see success from your efforts.
Complying with Labor Laws
It’s crucial to learn and adhere to the regulations of the country where you’re hiring talent. This will include laws related to:
- Minimum wage and overtime
- Paid time off (including vacation time and parental leave)
- Sick leave
- Benefits
- Required contributions and taxes
- Terminations
- Visas and work permits (if an employee is not originally from the country or you want to relocate a worker)
Typically, it’s necessary to have a partner who is an expert in the employment laws in the country to ensure you remain compliant.
In addition, you’ll need to either have a legal entity in the country or use an employer of record (EOR) to hire employees on your behalf.
Ensuring Your Strategy Aligns with Your Future Goals
Since global talent acquisition is a major endeavor, it’s important to consider how it will fit into your strategy moving forward.
- Are you likely to continue to need the same skills?
- What markets look promising now and are likely to continue to provide opportunities in the future?
Cultural Differences
Although a diverse team is an advantage in many ways, it also poses challenges in terms of cultural differences. Training in cultural awareness is important, as is maintaining open communication to discuss any misunderstandings and ensure your team remains cohesive.
Logistics
Similarly, things like employees being based in different time zones and speaking multiple languages can be both a blessing and a curse, as this poses logistical challenges in terms of communication and coordination.
You need to think how you’ll use collaboration tools to keep everyone in contact and on the same page. If you decide you want an employee on your in-person team, you’ll also need to figure out the logistics for relocation.
Evaluating Applicants
As part of your global acquisition strategy, you may need to rethink how you evaluate job applicants because the criteria you use for local talent may be inappropriate.
For example, applicants may come from a wider range of backgrounds, meaning relying solely on qualifications or even experience to tell you if a person is a good fit may cause you to dismiss potentially excellent options.
Refine the evaluation process to look for desirable qualities.
Retention
Although retention is always an issue when hiring employees, it is especially significant in global talent acquisition due to the other challenges you face.
It’s important to make sure international employees feel understood and part of the team. Plus, even though it may be more cost effective to hire internationally than locally, it’s still important to offer a competitive salary and benefits package to avoid high turnover.
International Staffing vs. Global Talent Acquisition
Global talent acquisition is just one way to build a team of workers who are based around the world. Another option is international staffing. This differs from global talent acquisition in that it’s a short-term solution to quickly fill vacancies — there’s less emphasis on meeting your long-term business goals.
Traditionally, temporary staffing used local workers, but remote work has meant it’s possible to look globally for talent. This often leads to an even shorter time to hire due to access to a larger talent pool.
How to Optimize Your Global Talent Acquisition Strategy
To take advantage of the benefits of global talent, you first need to overcome the challenges. A major barrier in your way will be the need to have a legal entity in the countries where you want to hire. Not only is this time consuming to set up, it’s a big expense.
A simple solution is to partner with Remote People. Our hiring solutions include international staffing, recruitment, and support finding your company’s next leaders.
We act as your EOR, hiring talent on your behalf from more than 150 countries and keeping you compliant while you grow your global team. We’ll also speed up the hiring process by providing you with a shortlist of candidates to choose from in just five days. Request a free proposal to get started.