What Is Offshore Recruitment and How Does It Work?

Finding the right candidate offshore need not be a difficult or risky task, even if you find yourself in uncharted waters. How to make sure that the offshore recruitment process works out well? With an offshore recruitment services agency, you can be assured of cost-effectiveness, good quality hires and a global reach for your company.

What Is Offshore Recruitment?

Offshore recruitment is the process of hiring people from another country for your business. The recruitment could happen through a remote team from your company situated in the other country or through a recruitment and staffing service partner.

Most people opt for offshore recruitment services offered by a third party because of the benefits they bring and the convenience they offer. In this blog, we will look at the benefits of offshore recruitment services, how they work, and how you can pick the best service provider.

Key Benefits of Offshore Recruitment

Offshore recruitment services offer several benefits over regular onshore recruitment services.

1. Cost-Effective

Offshore recruitment services are more cost-effective than onshore. They cost less and they guarantee a better fit most of the time the first time itself, so there is no additional cost of rehiring for the role.

2. Knowledge of the Local Market

An offshore recruitment agency will also have better knowledge of the local market, allowing them to recruit the right people more easily and in a cost-effective manner. Their offshore recruitment process will be very well-defined and error-free.

3. Highly Skilled Talent

With the help of an offshore recruitment agency, you can hire highly skilled talent in very little time. This is because the offshore recruitment agency will have a robust talent pipeline and accommodate quality offshore talent on tap, ready to be recruited when required.

4. Technology Utilization

Offshore recruitment agencies utilize technology better than your business because they would have a better idea of what technologies would benefit the recruitment process. Such utilization will also be handled by stakeholders who have a good idea of how offshore recruitment works.

5. High Quality of Support

The offshore recruitment agency will offer support 24×7 to accommodate any doubts you may have about the offshore recruitment process. The offshore recruitment agency will also assign a relationship manager who will work with you to meet your needs.

6. Boost in Reputation

When your recruitment activities align well with your goals, it will also boost your reputation. The reputation boost will help your business recruit the right talent too in the future as more candidates will be drawn to the company.

Types of Offshore Recruitment Services

1. Industry-specific Staffing

Recruiting talent in a specific industry like retail, automotive, FinTech in a specific geography.

2. Global Offshore Recruitment

Identifying and attracting candidates in a specific industry across the world.

3. Offshore Candidate Sourcing

Identifying and attracting the right candidates for the designated roles across industries in specific geography.

4. Offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)

A company outsources the entire recruitment process or parts of it to a third party.

How Offshore Recruitment Works

1. Initial Consultation

We provide an initial consultation where we discuss the staffing needs with the client. We identify skill gaps in the company and give the client greater clarity on how they must approach staffing.

2. Job Role Planning

We understand based on the skill gaps what job roles would be most relevant and how they must be structured. We create candidate personas that help us shortlist the best talent.

3. Resource Planning

We begin our resource planning phase where we try and understand what resources would be required for the jobs and the roles that we created in the second step. We also decide who the stakeholders would be.

4. Sourcing

In this step, we create job descriptions based on the previous two steps and then post them on multiple channels both online and offline, maintaining contact with those who apply for the jobs we have created.

5. Screening and Interviewing

We look at the profiles we have received and conduct ATS and assessment-based screening to narrow a thousand down to 10 or so profiles. From these, we suggest profiles suitable for interviewing and forward them to the client.

6. Offer Extension and Discussion

We extend an offer to the candidate, after acceptance of which we move to the onboarding stage. If the candidate is unhappy with the offer, then renegotiation and further discussion is possible.

7. Onboarding

Our onboarding services involve presenting the right contracts, providing access to the right documentation, explaining how the candidate can get support if necessary, and providing guidelines for the workplace.

8. Background Checks

The candidate’s background will be verified through appropriate references and the same will be updated under their profile for future reference.

9. Ongoing Support

We will provide ongoing support to the candidate and the client throughout the hiring process and for issues pertaining to payroll and compliance, if need be, in the future.

What are the Challenges in Offshore Recruitment?

1. Cultural Barriers

Many times, in offshore recruitment, cultural barriers pose the biggest challenge. Your new offshore recruits cannot sometimes work with your office employees because of language and cultural differences, which is where an offshore mentor can help during onboarding.

2. Miscommunication or Lack of Communication

Because of miscommunication or lack of communication between your recruitment teams and your offshore recruits, sometimes wrong expectations are set. This can affect how offshore recruits function in the future and consequently how they interact with the rest of the team.

3. Poor Scheduling of Interviews

This is another problem you would need to tackle early on. When interviews are not scheduled in the right manner and with the right people, it can lead to wrong choices and unexpected results.

4. Lack of Interest and Cooperation

Sometimes offshore candidates will not be willing to cooperate with you in the offshore recruitment process, simply because they do not find value in the company. You need to up your employer branding game to make sure this doesn’t happen.

5. Poor Quality of Work

Sometimes the assignments you give, be they technical or behavioral, lead to results that you don’t like. This is generally because of lack of communication or incorrect sourcing, both of which can be corrected by a reputable offshore recruitment agency.

How to Choose the Right Offshore Recruitment Partner?

There are several things that you must look at when you are trying to find the ideal offshore recruitment partner.

1. Strong Knowledge of Industry and Job Market

It begins with the knowledge they already have about the industry and the job market and how much research they are willing to do in it to succeed.

2. Great Online Presence

They must have a great online presence, since this is about hiring candidates offshore, so you get as wide a reach as you can get.

3. Glowing Reviews from Clients

They must have positive feedback and glowing reviews from their previous clients. This is an indication that they satisfy most of the criteria that people look for in an offshore recruitment agency.

4. Bringing Technology to Recruitment

They must be no stranger to technology. They must be able to integrate machine intelligence and human touch to the right extent to improve process efficiency and pass the gains on to the clients.

5. Scalable Solutions

Lastly, offshore recruitment agencies must offer scalable solutions, enabling companies to not only hire more when they need but scale back when required, without it leading to issues in compliance.

Are You Looking for an Offshore Recruitment Agency?

Despite how well we described the working and best practices for Offshore RPO, you may not be confident you can manage your recruitment process by yourself. You may even be confused who to pick among the many recruitment agencies.

Alp Consulting, with its experience of over two decades in recruitment and staffing, can help you manage parts or the entirety of offshore RPO, ensuring that you get the most value. We have already helped several Fortune 500 clients bring cost-effectiveness and speed to recruitment. We believe we can help you and are waiting to hear from you.

FAQs

1. How does offshore recruitment differ from local recruitment?

In offshore recruitment, you hire candidates from another country whereas in local recruitment, you hire candidates from the same country. In offshore recruitment, you generally hire from a global candidate base whereas in local recruitment, the talent pool is a lot smaller.

2. What are the benefits of offshore recruitment for businesses?

Offshore recruitment enables businesses to be more cost-effective, find specialists, improve their diversity and hire very quickly too, contrary to popular belief, especially if the offshore recruitment agency is a pioneer.

3. What industries commonly use offshore recruitment services?

The industries that commonly use offshore recruitment services are IT, FinTech, healthcare, and e-commerce for both their tech and support functions generally. Sales and marketing teams are also located offshore.

4. How does offshore recruitment save costs for companies?

Offshore recruitment helps cut costs in a big way for companies. Not only are the initial costs of hiring reduced, but subsequent hiring costs are also less, as the right people are recruited, and rehiring is not necessary anymore.

5. How can companies select the right offshore recruitment partner?

To select the right offshore recruitment partner, follow all the steps cited in the section above and look at your budget, the service level agreements that you must enter, and the support options that they provide you.