3 Invaluable Tips for Hiring Team Members from Around the World

Hiring employees from all around the world has many advantages. There’s a lot to gain from it, like endless opportunities and different cultural backgrounds, to name a few. Over the past two years, remote hiring really took off (for obvious reasons that I won’t reiterate), but its management is still very much on the messy side.

If you’re thinking about hiring remote team members but are apprehensive for any reason, here are my tips for hiring from around the world.

Get real with yourself

Hiring team members from around the world, remotely, isn’t a walk in the park. There are a few things you need to be aware of before you dip your toes.

First, the cultural, legal, and communication challenges—those will be different in every country, and you’ll need to find ways to adapt to them or find smart ways to work around them. The same goes for each country’s unique employment and labor laws—you need to keep those in mind or otherwise face legal repercussions.

Are you willing to deal with all the complications that might arise? Are the benefits more important to you than the drawbacks? If you answered ‘yes’ to both questions, you’re likely to be ready to start looking for your ideal team. You can simplify the entire process while making sure you are legally compliant with the local labor laws by partnering up with a reputable employer of record.

But the real question is, what are those benefits? Is there really so much to gain hiring internationally?

Hire the best talent

When you let go of the limits that come with hiring in one country, your opportunities for hiring the best talent become almost infinite.

Beyond skills, what really matters to us is the culture fit.

For us, we wanted to focus on the best talent around the world without any restrictions, and hiring internationally—plus working remotely—reduces the uprooting costs for our employees. Not to mention unnecessary real estate costs when all we really need is a decent internet connection.

We created our dream team right from home. Hiring internationally means that you get to create your own team filled with the best team members the world has to offer. No more settling for what’s within your local radius. You can aim for the stars.

Our process is simple. I don’t have any legendary methods to share—we simply rely on AngelList and LinkedIn and have met incredible talent within day one of posting that job description.

I like to meet the applicants first myself, being involved from the beginning—be it for the important roles such as the Director of Communications to the newest intern. It’s important to me and that’s why I always do the first interview. It really matters that there is a culture fit for future employees: our work mentality and the mentality of startups and skills in general.

To ensure this, I have direct conversations with them and can gauge their initial reactions to whatever I have to say. It’s really eye-opening and saves a lot of time for myself and my other employees.

Expand in new ways

Having team members from all around the world naturally brings in more diversity, with new injections of cultural viewpoints and nuances, helping you expand your mindset and appeal to a global audience.

An international team also will help expand your market in the long run. Growth can happen in different ways, but one that will ultimately benefit you is your market expansion—add new more people, build hubs slowly and hire new and exciting talent.

But that is not to say that there are no challenges. In terms of the diversity that’s brought to the table when hiring internationally, you need to be aware that it is hard to expect them to walk in the same direction sometimes. Working from home has not been the norm until only recently, and there will be team members who don’t know how to behave in remote work, how to lead conversations, and how to interface.

We’ve had our ups and downs but we try to maintain an adventurous and interactive spirit. There’s been a boost through the pandemic and it works all right.

We try to keep the “workplace” fun, adventurous and interactive, and the sense of continuity. That’s why we have a monthly call where we all discuss what’s going on and how we can still improve and support each other.