The employment of foreign workers often requires several more steps than hiring domestically. It’s one reason why many companies choose to avoid considering candidates outside their home country. But a staff recruitment agency can help ease the stress of hiring abroad and speed up the process to eliminate some of those steps to get workers in your position faster.
Let’s review the process for employing foreign workers with and without the help of staffing agencies to highlight the differences.
Process of Employment of Foreign Workers without a Staffing Agency
To hire foreign workers, you’ll need to complete several crucial steps. Here’s a look at the process when you use your own recruiters and resources.
1. Apply for Necessary Certifications
Each country outlines requirements for hiring foreign workers. Review your local department of labor guidelines or the regulations for your country and municipality to see what steps you must take. This process is simpler in some countries than it is in others.
2. Open Applications
Now that you’ve completed the necessary paperwork, you’re ready to open your job for applications. You can outline what countries you have permission to hire from if you have limitations or time zone requirements for remote workers.
3. Review Applications
Go through your applications to look for qualified workers. This can be a tedious task as you decide whether a worker has the necessary skills or how much you’ll need to invest in training.
4. Interview Top Candidates
Schedule interviews for applicants you believe are qualified to talk to them and learn about their experience and skill set. Depending on the complexity of the job, you might need to go through several rounds of interviews to ensure you’re choosing the right candidate. Some complex jobs also require a test or some form of knowledge assessment to ensure the candidate is not overstating what their skills truly are.
5. Select the Best Worker for the Job
Make a job offer to the foreign worker who best meets the job criteria. Now comes the paperwork part of the hiring process where you send an employment contract or offer letter with all details about the position, including pay rates, expectations and benefits.
6. Apply for Work Visas
Once you hire foreign workers, you’ll need to apply for a work visa if they will be traveling to your business location to work. Remote employees do not need a work visa, which can speed up the process of hiring the best talent no matter where they are located. In some rare cases, you might select a candidate who already has a work visa for your country, which can make this process move faster and reduce your administrative burden.
7. Ensure Tax Law Compliance
Paying foreign workers can cause some complexities and you’ll have different requirements if the employee relocates than you will if you work with remote workers. Spend some time studying payroll taxes for your country and that of the employee if they remain remote to avoid costly mistakes and penalties.
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Employment of Foreign Workers with a Staff Recruitment Agency
Now that you know what the process of hiring foreign workers will look like without expert assistance, let’s review the process when working with a staff recruitment agency to see how it reduces the steps and simplifies onboarding foreign workers quickly.
1. Meet with Your Staffing Agency
You’ll schedule some time to discuss the job requirements and what you’re looking for in a candidate. These interactions generally don’t take long and require minimal commitment.
The agency might use these details to write the job description or they might request that you build an outline of the job description, depending on the staffing agency you select.
If the agency writes the job description, you’ll get a chance to approve of the description before the agency begins recruiting for the job.
2. Review a Short List of Applicants
The staffing agency will allow you to skip the process of reviewing resumes and completing rounds of interviews and skip ahead to reviewing applicants that the staffing agency presents.
This normally includes candidates who are part of the agency’s talent pool and pre-vetted so that the agency knows their work ethic.
Instead of hundreds of applicants, you’ll see the best of the best who applied for the job and likely already went through initial interviews with the staffing agency.
3. Interview Best Applicants
Depending on the job, you might skip this part and trust that your staffing agency has reviewed applicants carefully and only supplied you with qualified individuals. So it depends on your preferences how involved you are with this step and how long it takes. You might choose to still interview applicants to check for how well they will fit your company culture assuming that the staffing agency is confident in their skills.
4. Communicate Your Candidate Selection to the Agency
Tell the staffing agency which candidate you’ve selected and begin the process of bringing them on board. You can skip the process of applying for work visas and checking compliance with payroll tax laws. Your staffing agency will handle those steps, especially if you’ve chosen for them to be the employer of record for your new hire.
Many staffing agencies even help with training workers for the job skills necessary to do the job. This frees up time for you to train the employee on your company culture and policies instead of the job skills.
Pros and Cons of Working with Staffing Agencies
Hiring foreign workers on your own to fill important roles within your business is time-consuming. It involves several more steps than it does to hire using staffing agencies. Here’s a look at some of the pros and cons of hiring using an agency.
Pros
- Access to talented workers: The best employee for the job might be located in another country. Expand your talent pool outside your country for a better chance to find a high-quality candidate.
- Cost savings: Hiring from abroad can help you get a great candidate at a lower rate. The cost of living can vary greatly from one country to another, meaning you can still pay your foreign worker a great wage for their area while saving on hiring from your area.
- Diversity: Hiring from abroad can bring diversity to your team. They’ll bring unique perspectives to aid in creating a diverse team with new thoughts and ideas.
- Opportunities to expand: If your goal is to expand your company into new marketplaces, having employees ready to go in those areas can make that process simpler.
Cons
- Language barriers: Depending on where you hire from, you might speak a different language than your new candidate. That can lead to language barriers or misunderstandings.
- Legal risks: The employment of foreign workers can lead to challenges with legalities if you don’t know what you’re doing or haven’t done the required paperwork or read up on local laws for the country you’re hiring from. But working with an agency can eliminate this con.
If you’re ready to experience the ease of hiring international workers using a staffing agency, get in touch with the Association of Recruitment Agencies. European employers find that working with ARA provides high-quality candidates from Moldova who have the skills necessary to work within their business.
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