International hiring is giving companies the opportunity to pick the best talent from a vast and diverse talent pool. The benefits are immense and include increased innovation, productivity and company growth. To optimise your global recruitment process, you will need to be proactive and build a thoughtful hiring strategy.
One of the greatest hurdles for all recruiters is hiring bias. Companies everywhere continue to hire and reject candidates according to factors like gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity. Unfortunately, this problem also doesn’t disappear when hiring internationally.
We’ve outlined 6 important steps you can take to build an inclusive and sensitive international hiring strategy into your recruitment process.
Optimise Your Recruitment Channels
There are different ways to advertise jobs and some will work better in particular countries or contexts compared to others. For example, newspaper job advertisements may be useful in some countries, particularly as many newspapers are now online too.
You may also want to target people who specifically want to work for global companies or even work remotely. Consider posting jobs on LinkedIn or designated remote working sites like WeWorkRemotely, Flexjobs, or JustRemote. Make sure your job ads are relevant by sharing the right information, but are also written with the right candidate in mind. Think of the tone and style you are using and don’t forget to be aware of culturally sensitive language.
Be Mindful of Cultural Differences when Interviewing
Most countries will have different hiring dos and don’ts when it comes to hiring interviews. While you may not be able to adapt to all these differences in advance, be aware that your prospective hires may have specific expectations. Be open to these, do your research, and ask them directly if you are unsure.
Employer Brand & Values
Building a strong company identity and conveying this is crucial when you are putting together a global team. Throughout your hiring process, be clear about who you are and what your company has to offer in terms of products and services, but also as an employer.
Think carefully about how building a global team is part of your company’s identity. Communicate this through your job ads and during the hiring process. Clearly communicating your company’s values and what is important to you will allow potential candidates to develop a sense of connection to your business already at the recruitment stage.
Hire For Progressive Behaviours….And Offer Progressive Benefits
One of the key HR trends we encountered in 2020 was that companies are no longer only hiring for company fit. Instead, search for progressive behaviours that will allow your global talent to flourish in your company. They should want to develop themselves and be proactive in bringing ideas to the table, be they ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.
Moreover, when looking for progressive behaviours, be clear that you will also support them with progressive benefits. This can include such things as remote work allowances to build the perfect home office, learning and development support, company retreats, or flexible working hours.
Collaborative Hiring
One of the key ways to tackle hiring bias and to increase diversity in your recruitment process is to make hiring a collaborative project. This means including a variety of team members in the advertising, interviewing, and candidate selection stages. A collaborative hiring process ensures that different opinions and experiences of hiring bias are raised and tackled during the recruitment process.
Collaborative hiring can also help you avoid confirmation bias. This is when recruiters form and stick to an initial opinion of a candidate, rather than evaluating talent based on their own merit. Confirmation and hiring bias together could really make you lose out on the perks of having a global team. A collaborative hiring process can help mitigate this kind of human error so you can hire a more diverse range of candidates.
Compliant & Considerate Salaries
Think about how you want to compensate your international team members. Remote companies salary benchmark in different ways. For example, some companies pay employees according to where they are based or pay all employees according to the same pay scale. You will want to find the best salary benchmarking strategy to ensure fairness amongst all your global employees.
What you need to remember, though, is that you always have to pay compliantly. This means meeting minimum salary requirements as well as paying according to qualifications and skills as set out in local employment law.
International Hiring is Complex, But Doable
While the path to building an international team may seem encumbered with potential pitfalls, it is well worth your efforts. What’s more, once you have chosen the right candidate, our team can take over the rest.
Omnipresent is a global employer of record (EOR) dedicated to making international hiring possible for all companies. While global recruitment requires adapting your hiring process, we can help you with the bureaucracy of compliant global employment.
To set you up with your new team, you tell us which talent you’ve chosen and where they are based and we sort out the rest. Our services include:
- Compliant employment contracts
- Onboarding
- Offboarding
- Payroll
- Tailored Benefits Packages
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