International recruiting is becoming increasingly popular in practically every industry, and the last two years have contributed to that significantly. It brings lots of benefits to the table for both sides, and even though it also introduces some complications, those are typically not that hard to address with enough diligence. If you’re looking to bring some additional international workers to your company, there are some things you should consider first.

Have a Unified Recruitment Process for Everyone

Try to make the recruitment process as standardized as possible. This can be difficult when it comes to promoting your open positions internationally, especially with regards to language barriers and other obstacles. But it will also go a long way towards turning your company into an international workplace. 

If you start putting some extra effort into that area, it will be talked about sooner or later – people are going to notice, and your company will get a reputation for that. Ensuring that everyone goes through the exact same process when applying – or as close to that as possible – will go a long way.

Investigate Tax Implications on a Case-by-Case Basis

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that you already know of all tax and legal implications someone carries with them just because of their country of origin. You must always investigate each of those situations on an individual basis.

For example, hiring an overseas worker who also has a side gig as a freelancer can add an extra layer of complication when it comes to sorting out their taxes. You don’t want to find yourself in a position where you’re unexpectedly liable for additional contributions because you did not read a particular situation correctly.

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Try to Provide Multiple Contact Options

When hiring people from abroad, it’s common to run into communication issues due to time zone differences, the cost of long-distance calls, and various other factors that you might not think about straight away. Some cases are simple enough – check out OpenPhone’s guide for calling the US from Canada, for example. 

They’ve put together quite the detailed set of instructions for that, going over the process step by step. But it won’t always be that easy to get in touch with a potential candidate, due to circumstances that you might not anticipate. Always make sure to provide as many different contact options as you can to minimize any friction on that front.

Facilitating Relocation

While you aren’t expected to help your new employees with relocating by default, it can certainly go a long way towards improving people’s opinion of your company and making you an even more attractive place to work. This isn’t even as complicated or expensive as you might assume in some cases.

It’s also something that can easily be streamlined, even when it comes to people from different countries. Having a standardized process that you can just follow step by step will make this very easy, and you’ll usually just have to deal with some minor adjustments here and there in individual cases.

Remember that even if you do decide to offer this, you don’t have to automatically do it for everyone. It can be a nice perk for more experienced candidates, and something that can draw a lot of attention to your company compared to its competitors when you start posting new openings. 

Make sure to give the process a test run or two though! Finding out that you’ve missed some important points once you’re already in the middle of relocating an actual employee can be both uncomfortable for both sides and embarrassing for you.

Recruiting Overseas

We touched on this above, and it’s an important point to focus on if you want to make your recruitment process as smooth as possible when making it internationally open. You’ll obviously want to promote those open positions through various local channels in each country you’re targeting, and this can be more challenging than you might assume. 

There are various issues specific to each country and each particular site or recruiting service that you want to use, so make sure that you give yourself enough time to explore those peculiarities in detail before committing any significant number of resources to a specific region.

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Ideally, you should consult experts familiar with local recruiting laws and politics, and make sure that they’re someone you can trust. This can have some huge implications on your company’s success in the long term, so don’t underestimate the importance of this factor. 

Dealing with Cultural Differences

Cultural differences are the elephant in the room that people rarely want to address, but that only leads to more issues in pretty much every case. You have to get on top of these problems before they’ve even begun, and this is not as difficult as you might think. As long as you have some standardized policies, a well-defined code of conduct and ensure that those rules are actually being enforced and followed by everyone, that’s all you need to lay a good foundation.

The rest comes down to listening to everyone’s concerns as they are brought up and doing your best to address issues with the biggest potential to impact the business as a whole. Of course, remember that these are people you’re dealing with in the end. When something comes up on this front, it usually involves lots of emotions and personal opinions, so you should try to approach it as sensitively as possible.

If you do this right, it can do a lot for your company, and improve your performance on the market significantly. But there are various potential mistakes you have to watch out for and making one wrong step can sometimes spell disaster.

You have to tread very carefully here in the beginning. Once you’ve sorted out these initial issues though, it should be very easy to keep the momentum going and keep expanding your workforce with quality candidates from abroad. You never know, you might even find yourself opening a whole new office overseas at some point!