How to deliver global consistency when hiring remote talent

Introduction

Employers wish to plunge abroad to expand business by hiring employees and remote contractors. In reality, however, hiring international and remote workers is a complex process that international employers may find overwhelming. Your at-home hiring strategy may not be well-suited to address the possible challenges of managing a remote workforce.

Moreover, hiring abroad is about more than just ensuring your new employees and contractors start working and delivering for you. Instead, it's about what employees and contractors experience during the onboarding process and under your company's existing policies. Equally important is whether you have a standardized onboarding process to ensure you onboard employees and remote workers consistently.

Hiring, onboarding, and paying remote workers and employees are only part of several processes you need to do to engage your new workforce. You must also maintain a balance between remote and on-premise employees, so everyone feels at home.

Understanding remote hiring complexities in an international context is crucial for your business's success and growth in your newly chosen market.

This guide helps you understand how to deliver a globally consistent experience when hiring and onboarding international employees and remote workers.

Draft clear policies

Policies are often notorious among corporate strategists. Typically developed in haste to be dismissed in practice, an organizational policy is only a nice word to promote a positive corporate image. Organizations need some baseline against which actions are assessed, changed, or maintained.  

In an international hiring world, having a solid and transparent policy to inform hiring decisions is indispensable to standardize — and assess — whether international employers are doing well or not. In short, a clear policy for international hiring offers process consistency so hiring managers can hire effectively, quickly, and compliantly.

As an international employer, you need consistency across your operations to ensure everything goes according to plan. If you plan to hire international employees and contractors in or out of your jurisdiction, you need clear policies to guide your hiring actions.

Getting started might be challenging since you may need to learn labor laws and hiring practices in your chosen market. If you want to go solo drafting clear policies to hire international employees and contractors, you need to:

• Set standards to source, hire, and onboard international employees and contractors to avoid non-compliance and quality missteps.
• Develop all time zone meeting policies to avoid missing some remote contractors ⁠— alienating as is for your remote workforce.
• Develop communication policies for communicating across time zones to enable a seamless experience across your operations.

Your hiring and employment policies depend on many factors, including size, operations, and workforce distribution. That said, flexibility is always advised so you can adapt to rapidly changing labor regulations, employee and contractor work-life needs, and growing competition.

Alternatively, you may reach out to international employer of record (EOR) services such as Squad to help you standardize your global hiring process of remote talent. An established EOR is a sure asset that can ensure you get maximized returns on your international hiring decisions. Moreover, established EORs know best how to access global talent networks that save hiring and onboarding costs while keeping your company compliant with local labor laws.

Either way, having clear policies to hire international employees and remote contractors ensures you are on track to have an engaging employee experience for your hires with rewarding outcomes for all.

Offer the same experience

The meaning of work is changing for good. Instead of a work-to-get-paid concept, work is now shifting from a physical experience into an abstract one. Workers, more so skilled ones, are currently looking for more meaningful experiences at work to join in and stay with a certain employer.

Moreover, as work becomes more remote, what workers experience at work ⁠— remotely ⁠— has changed dramatically from working in an office. This new normal should inform hiring policies and practices employers use to hire a combination of on-premise employees and remote contractors.

In short, work is becoming more about experience and less about paperwork formalities. Designations such as "happy," "engaged," "productive," and "family" are usually used to refer to a set of experiences employees and contractors have at work. However employee and contractor experiences might be described, one principle should hold: a seamless employee and contractor experience across all departments, operations, etc., to engage and retain your hires.

The experiences employees vs. remote contractors have while working for one employer are already commonplace. Actual, pre-pandemic conditions ⁠— such as statutory benefits for employees but not for remote contractors ⁠— have frequently made remote workers feel more alienated. However, remote workers feel even more alienated post-pandemic, not only because of a benefits gap (in favor of employees) but also for feeling less secure and "miles away" from employees working on-premise.

That is why you need to close these actual or perceived gaps between employees and remote contractors by providing a seamless, standard, and engaging experience for all. Take communication as an example.

Typically, on-premise employees encounter and communicate with co-workers and managers more compared to remote workers. Having a direct (not necessarily a face-to-face) relationship with co-workers and higher-ups creates bonds between all and ensures day-to-day and unusual business matters are communicated more effectively, quickly, and with less friction.

Conversely, remote workers ⁠— far removed physically and globally distributed ⁠— experience a lack of communication with on-premise co-workers. This creates a situation where some of your workforce feel appreciated more while others feel alienated, if not ignored, from critical decision-making processes. This can also lead to feeling as if the work culture is psychologically punishing.

Having a carefully designed communication policy as part of a more comprehensive employee engagement strategy ensures no one is, or feels, left behind.

Provide a standardized onboarding experience

For many employers, the onboarding process happens ad hoc and is usually experienced differently among newly hired employees and remote contractors. Moreover, flashy announcements such as "hiring season" create false and often negative expectations among prospective.

Part of an engaging hiring experience is, however, a standardized onboarding process. Usually, international employers want to hire and onboard employees and contractors as soon as possible. Understandable as is, onboarding done quickly but carelessly damages your workforce, perhaps permanently, particularly for remote contractors.

Talented and highly skilled remote workers expect onboarding experiences similar to onboarding for big employer brands. Dismiss remote contractors as "temporary" or, worse, redundant, and you put your best-in-market talent at the competition. Treat all employees and remote workers as belonging to one class.  

Instead, as an international employer, you should create a clear policy (inclusive of all) to standardize the onboarding experience. To do so, you may need to ask questions such as:

• How do newly hired employees and remote contractors fit into my hiring strategy?
• Which skills do I need most, and from which category of workers: employees or remote contractors?
• What makes my newly hired employees and remote workers happy?
• How frequently do my employees (old and new) need to meet and communicate with my remote contractors (old and new)?
• Do I need to use special software to standardize the onboarding experience for my newly hired and remote workers?
• Do I have enough in-house expertise to standardize the onboarding experience for all? Or do I need to use a service provider?

The answer to how you should standardize the onboarding experience for your newly hired employees and remote contractors has yet to have a magical recipe. Combining an automated and human-managed onboarding experience is also something you learn by practice and not a matter of prescription.

You can choose to partner with an established EOR to help you set a solid policy to create a standardized experience policy for all.

Deliver an exceptional work experience for your global team with Skuad

Skuad is a global employment and payroll platform that delivers global consistency when hiring remote contractors and full-time employees. By handling the hiring process, Skuad helps you:

• Onboard employees and contractors seamlessly.
• Automate the onboarding process and save resources and costs on unnecessary onboarding procedures for some jurisdictions.
• Create clear policies informing employee-to-contractor, contractor-to-employee, and employee-/contractor-manager communication and meetings.
• Streamline your onboarding process such as to create similar, favorable onboarding experiences.

Take no chances onboarding your employees and remote contractors, and let our experts help you deliver a consistent and standardized onboarding experience informed by well-designed and industry-defining onboarding policies.