Addressing 5 tough questions in global hiring

If you work in the HR or Talent Acquisition team of a growing company, you probably know this best firsthand: the struggle for the best talent often faces a significant limitation: location. 🌎

Many companies do not want to limit themselves by only finding the best talent in their current location. They want to access diverse skills that can power innovation and maximize their growth.

With this approach they are now faced with operational & logistical questions:

1. 🌍 Going remote or staying local: Should we hire remotely to access diverse talent, or does our culture require a more traditional in-person approach?
2. 👷 Managing remote workers: How do we effectively manage a remote team, considering potential challenges in communication and maintaining our company culture?
3. 🏢 Opening new hubs: Is it worth setting up new offices in different locations to scale and diversify, and if so, how do we decide where?
4. 👩🏻‍⚖️ Legal and financial complexities: What are the legal and financial implications of hiring in new places, and how do we navigate these complexities?
5. 📑 Remote work principles: Should we offer remote, hybrid, or on-site options? Is it better to use platforms like Remote.com/Deel or establish new entities in different locations?

Working in HR and talent acquisition, I encounter these questions in EVERY SINGLE company. That’s why I needed some sort of systematic approach. I’ve also (many, many times) witnessed situations where a leadership member or hiring manager decided to hire someone in Italy, only to later discover that the person is not eligible to work as a contractor, so they need to part ways. This is already quite a painful process (hiring, firing, processing everything). Similarly, hiring an engineer from Norway led to the realization that the cost for an employment provider, such as Deel or Remote.com, was too high, making it more cost-effective to hire four senior engineers in Prague for the same price.

It’s crucial to remember that before starting any analysis, you need to sit down and discuss fundamental hiring principles with your leadership team. While delivering on your commitment to seeking diverse talent and hiring remotely, be especially mindful of the locations where you search for people. Many countries are not ready for global distributed remote work, and it often results in significant overhead when closing a candidate in a country where you have never hired before. To assess whether a person can work remotely and is a ‘remote fit,’ every remote worker must meet the must-have criteria that you can outline before making the hire. It’s sometimes bittersweet to see so many poor hiring decisions made just because people did not think twice before making illogical hires.

It’s just so unworthy and can mostly be easily prevented by thinking this through and having a systematic approach to global hiring that you can communicate across company.

Strategic global hiring: 7️⃣ Steps to analyze potential locations 🌎

Step 1️⃣ Define your objectives

Simply outline your business goals and identify the specific skills and expertise your startup requires. A very specific example: A startup that needs to accelerate product development and become a leader in AI-driven solutions for the healthcare sector.

• Business goal: Increase its market share in healthcare technology by developing AI solutions.
• Specific skills needed: ML & natural language processing, software developers, expertise in healthcare and data analytics.

Decide if you want to set up a new hub, hire remotely, or go for a mix of both. This decision should come from leadership during strategic discussions about the culture you want to establish. By the way, you should lead this discussion! Also, consider where you’ll be looking for specific data to analyze the talent pool — in European countries, LATAM, or elsewhere? It’s essential to think about and discuss this beforehand so you know which countries to include in your analysis, so you don’t have to go over the WHOLE world.

Step 2️⃣ Back yourself with data & tools

It’s easy and free to use platforms like LinkedIn and Seekout for the analysis of potential talent pools. Just go ahead and search. You can use Boolean search and other helpful tools to conduct title searches and estimate headcount. It doesn’t matter that it will be approximate; what’s important is to have some insights and overview. For the cultural aspects of this analysis I also recommend to use insights from the book The Culture Map by Erin Meyer.

Step 3️⃣ Salary benchmarking

You can refer to resources such as Figure, Pave, Hays, Robert Walters, and Payscale for accurate salary benchmarks. There are plenty of open repositories you can find on the internet. I saved it here, but this particular directory is quite old, so you may need to refresh it.

Salary.design

Airtable | Everyone's app platform

Step 4️⃣ Apply your own scalability metrics

You’ll need to come up with some scalability metrics — it consists of evaluation some factors to ensure the selected location aligns with your company goals. I often use these three:

• ⬆️ Talent pool size (Medium to High). I prioritize locations with a good pool of skilled candidates (e.g. ML engineers). I use LinkedIn Seekout to quantify the availability.
• ⬇️ Cost factors (Low to Medium). I target locations where the cost of living, salary ranges align with our budget, ensuring we can attract and retain top talent without overspending
• ⬇️ Complexity (Medium to High). Here I opt for countries with a stable political and economic environment to minimize disruptions to software development projects for example Israel or Ukraine would be countries with low stability. I also look for Medium to High Employment Law Complexity: Choose jurisdictions with transparent and straightforward employment laws to streamline HR operations.

Step 5️⃣ Employment difficulty metrics

You can also think of other factors like equity implementation, physical access, education index, and unemployment rates and then evaluate the difficulty of employment in the chosen location. A part of this is also the employment tax analysis, here you should learn about employment tax data to understand the financial implications of each location and then compare rates across potential hubs to make informed decisions. You can use a good resource such as is Papaya Countrypedia

Step 6️⃣ Compliance and remote platforms and tools

This is a big one. At Deepnote for example, we took some time to figure out whether to use remote platforms like Remote.com/Deel or set up a new office. We learned that if we’re not hiring more than 5 people in a country, it’s not worth the cost and hassle of setting up an office, especially in countries like the UK. But it depends on what you want for your business. If most of your customers are in the UK, it might be a good idea

Step 7️⃣ Finally, make informed recommendations

And hey, you truly play the most important part in this! This is your chance to introduce your data-backed recommendations for new talent hubs to your leadership team. And this one is a massively crucial decision. I’ve seen many companies not doing this analysis and closing very expensive hubs later on just because it did not make sense to hire low-quality talent in the other part of the world, especially when your brand was not that strong there and you did not have the team you needed to help with this.

Also before making recommendations to your leadership team, you are not alone here and you can always seek legal and HR expertise familiar with the chosen location, I just ping them on LinkedIn 💜. I also love to see companies implement pilot programs in selected locations to test feasibility and continually gather real-time data and feedback to refine their talent hub strategy.

The example of the analysis in practice

So, I picked six countries — Poland, Portugal, Hungary, Spain, France, Sweden where I am conducting this analysis for you to showcase how easy it can appear.

From this particular example, we can already make a recommendation that Poland offers a strong balance across all criteria, with high scalability and a favorable cost-benefit ratio. Portugal and Hungary could be considered for specific use cases, with Portugal having a lower employment law complexity. Spain, France, and Sweden may pose challenges in terms of scalability and cost optimization, making them less ideal for a software development talent hub. Please note that this recommendation is based on my own criteria matrix. If you wish to create your own, it is crucial to validate these findings with additional research and potentially visit the selected locations for a firsthand assessment. Every company has its own needs and dynamics, so adjustments should be made accordingly.

Final version to be shared in your hiring handbook (Notion)

You can use this one for your hiring managers, you can easily create a guide for hiring at your company, ensuring they do not interview or attempt to hire candidates from locations that are not recommended. This approach makes sense both financially and operationally, and it is a more worthy use of resources.

In wrapping up, I hope you finally realize that you and your team play a super crucial role in figuring out the best way to hire people globally. There are so many important questions like whether to hire remotely or locally and how to manage teams spread across different places. I hope you find this step-by-step approach helpful and that you’ll be encouraged to think about your business goals, use data to make decisions, and consider things like costs and complexity.

This post should remind you to not be afraid and have these important discussions with your leaders before jumping into the adhoc global hiring process. The article gives a clear 7-step plan, guiding HR teams to set goals, use data, check salary benchmarks, and think about how easy or hard it might be to hire in a specific place.