How to hire someone from another country

Expand your recruitment efforts.

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Expanding your recruitment efforts to include workers from other countries can enrich your workplace diversity while offering access to a vast international talent pool. Though there are many benefits of hiring international employees, onboarding talent from around the globe can also be complicated and time-consuming.  

You have a few options if you’re looking to hire from another country. To get the most out of the process, it's essential to choose the right international hiring option for your company’s needs and goals. Let’s break them down. 

Interested in hiring internationally, but not sure how? Get started with our free guide!

3 options for hiring talent from another country

1. Hire directly

The first option for hiring someone from another country may seem the simplest on the surface—hiring them directly. With the rise of remote employment, this is certainly something many companies are considering. 

Hiring directly in a foreign country will require your company to set up its own entity abroad, known as a local subsidiary. The process of opening a local subsidiary will take a substantial amount of time and can easily become very costly. Once you complete this process, however, your company will be able to legally hire employees in that country. Keep in mind that local subsidiaries only allow you to hire employees from the country where they’re located. You’ll need an additional subsidiary for each country where you want to hire an employee if you’re hiring directly.

Given these restrictions and costs, you may wonder why any company would go the route of hiring international employees directly through local subsidiaries. The answer is that this approach is optimal in certain circumstances, generally if one or more of the following apply:

  • The company has plans to expand hiring only to a single foreign country.
  • It has sufficient time, resources, and legal counsel to invest in opening a local subsidiary.
  • Company leadership is interested in developing brand awareness and/or a strong presence in a foreign country.
  • The company has a deep understanding of the country’s labor laws and tax requirements.

Companies that are unfamiliar with the labor and tax regulations in the country where their new potential hires live are unlikely to benefit most from hiring them directly, for example. They would likely struggle with paying international employees overseas and other complications that arise from these direct foreign hires. Luckily, other methods for hiring someone from another country may be more applicable. 

2. Work with a local agency

If hiring foreign employees directly doesn’t sound like the right choice for your organization, another option is to work with a local agency in the country where your potential hire lives. Unfortunately, much like hiring directly, going through a local agency for each international hire can be a lot of work. You’ll need to connect with a local employment agency in each country where you wish to hire a worker. 

The advantage of choosing this option is that the local agency will do much of the grunt work of filling your open job listing for you. The agency can locate skilled employees in the area that would fit the position and handle some of the onboarding process. They will also act as experts on the local employment laws and tax regulations, so your company doesn’t need to devote time to managing those details. 

Working with a local agency is ideal for companies looking to hire international employees in a limited number of countries without internally addressing all the new compliance concerns. If instead, your company wants to hire people from many different foreign countries, the last option is probably the best way to go.

3. Use a global employment platform

When your company uses a global employment platform to hire international employees, there are almost no limitations on where you can hire from. Unlike hiring directly or going through local agencies, global employment platforms offer a single solution regardless of how many countries you want to recruit employees from. They offer the greatest flexibility, too. If you want to hire in the United Kingdom today and hire in Canada the next day, the same global employment platform can often facilitate both hiring processes. 

Global employment platforms either set up entities in various countries, leverage local partners across the world, or both. In any case, they make the problem of how to hire someone from another country simple for the hiring company. The global employment platform you choose can take care of hiring, onboarding, and payroll for any new international employees you want to add to your team. With the help of the platform’s insider knowledge of local tax, labor, and payroll laws, you won’t have to waste valuable time focusing on compliance. 

If you want to truly go global with your hiring process, a global employment platform is the way to go. Oyster is one global employment platform that’s changing hiring by enabling you to onboard team members from countries worldwide.

Find out more about how Oyster’s global employment platform can transform your hiring process and help make hiring workers in other countries a breeze.  

About Oyster

Oyster is a global employment platform designed to enable visionary HR leaders to find, engage, pay, manage, develop, and take care of a thriving distributed workforce. Oyster lets growing companies give valued international team members the experience they deserve, without the usual headaches and expense.

Oyster enables hiring anywhere in the world—with reliable, compliant payroll, and great local benefits and perks.

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