Hiring in 2025 is fiercely competitive, with talent shortages, economic volatility, and roles rapidly being reshaped by AI.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 63% of employers worldwide identified skill gaps in the labor market as the biggest barrier to business transformation.
On top of these pressures, the push for cost savings has more companies looking overseas to find their next strategic hire.
Fortunately, the rise of remote work means you can now hire anywhere. However, diving into the global talent pool can feel overwhelming. Following this step-by-step process, with tips on everything from planning to recruiting and onboarding, will help simplify the process.
Key takeaways:
- Companies hire internationally for many reasons, including to find skilled workers, build more diverse teams, and tap into cost-effective markets.
- Hiring international employees introduces compliance and misclassification risks, which differ from country to country.
- Creating and following a cohesive plan can streamline hiring, reduce risk, and enable companies to expand into new markets confidently.
Why Hire Internationally? The Advantages & Challenges
Sourcing overseas offers many benefits, but also introduces several challenges.
Advantages:
- Access to top skills: Global hiring can fill gaps in your local market, such as workers with in-demand AI, data, or engineering skills.
- Cost optimization: Hiring in competitive labor markets helps reduce salary and employee benefits expenses.
- Diversity: Cultural diversity drives innovation and strengthens problem-solving.
- Market expansion: Hiring in a new market can provide valuable cultural insights and a deeper customer connection.
- Scalability: Remote hiring grants flexibility to scale your business up or down.
Challenges:
- Compliance: Employment laws and local regulations vary by country, and staying on top of them is key to reducing risk and avoiding legal issues.
- Legal entity requirements: Depending on your hiring model, you may be required to open a legal entity, which is time-intensive, expensive, and complicated. Otherwise, you risk creating a permanent establishment.
- Misclassification: Treating international contractors as full-time employees without providing legally mandated benefits is a common misstep leading to back pay, fines, and reputational damage.
- Cultural/time zone barriers: Managing foreign employees across different time zones and cultural differences requires careful handling, defined processes, and clear communication.
Global hiring can yield significant benefits, but success depends on starting with a well-thought-out plan to navigate the challenges.
Step 1: Define Your Hiring Goals
Before you begin the search for candidates, ensure your team is on the same page about hiring goals.
Are you looking to fill critical skill gaps? Expanding your business to a new market? Offshoring particular roles to cut costs?
These goals should be at the forefront of every hiring decision.
Next, choose the global employment model — employee or contractor — that best fits your goals and business plan.
- Contractors offer flexibility, lower overhead, and faster onboarding, but they come with higher misclassification risk and might not be as engaged as employees.
- Employees provide stability, stronger IP protection, and greater alignment with company culture, but require compliance with local labor law, which typically includes mandatory statutory benefits, which increases costs.
It’s essential to understand each approach's trade-offs before deciding which is the best fit for your business.
Step 2: Choose the Right Country
Once you decide if you want to hire an employee or a contractor, it’s time to decide where to source candidates.
Thanks to various factors, from corporate investments to higher education options, some regions are emerging as hotbeds for particular industries.
For example, Singapore ranks #1 globally for overall AI talent, and the Philippines is one of the top spots to find customer service staff.
There are many factors to weigh when deciding where to hire, such as:
- Talent availability: Focus on regions with a high concentration of people with the specialized skills you seek. For example, India, Eastern Europe, and Latin America are known as top markets for tech roles.
- Time zones and collaboration: Decide how important a candidate’s time zone will be for collaborating with your team. Do you require some core hour overlap, or would asynchronous communication be OK?
- Language skills: Depending on the role, you may want to focus on regions where candidates are fluent in your business language.
- Labor laws: Ensure you understand the labor laws where you’re hiring. These rules cover everything from minimum wages and working hours to benefits and termination, and staying compliant helps you avoid costly legal issues.
- Cultural fit and work norms: Candidates may have different expectations around overtime, holidays, communication, and daily work routines, which can influence how well they integrate with your team.
- Employment costs: Understand how a particular country’s salary and statutory benefits can impact costs. For example, in Brazil, employers must pay employees a 13th-month salary, and you’ll need to plan for this additional cost.
Step 3: Budgeting (It’s More Than Just Salary)
When planning your hiring budget, factor in the cost of living and candidate expectations in the region you’re hiring in. A competitive salary in one country may be far above (or below) the average in another.
And salary is just one piece of the puzzle. The full cost of hiring includes salary, statutory benefits, additional perks, bonuses, taxes, and other related expenses.
You may also need to factor in exchange rate fluctuations and foreign transaction fees, which can add up over time.
Companies are also responsible for additional costs, such as payroll taxes and mandatory contributions that differ significantly across regions:
- Payroll taxes: In France, employer social contributions are roughly 45% of gross salary, compared to about 7.65% in the U.S.
- Mandatory benefits: In Mexico, employers must provide healthcare coverage, while in Germany, workplace pension contributions are compulsory.
- Leave entitlements: In the European Union, employees are entitled to at least 20 days of paid vacation annually, while the U.S. has no federally mandated minimum.
Paint a realistic picture of your hiring budget by creating a cost model where you’re looking to hire, accounting for base salary, employer taxes, legally required benefits, voluntary perks, and administrative overhead. This upfront work will help you avoid costly surprises later.
Step 4: Craft Your International Recruitment Strategy
With your hiring budget finalized, it’s time to determine your recruitment strategy.
First, write detailed job descriptions to ensure the right candidates find and apply to your role. Avoid jargon and write with clear, inclusive language. Include information such as compensation, role scope, and key qualifications to make your job posting more effective.
Translate your job descriptions into the local language, and specify the work location, such as in-office, remote, or hybrid.
Next, decide how you’ll source talent. Global job boards like LinkedIn or Indeed are popular options. In addition, regional platforms, like JobStreet (which serves Southeast Asia) or SEEK (popular in Australia and New Zealand), can help you find region-specific candidates.
Consider also working with local recruiters or universities to help identify potential candidates.
Strive to ensure your interviewing criteria and approach are consistent and fair across countries and cultures to remove any potential for bias.
Finally, ensure your hiring process considers time zones when scheduling interviews or offers asynchronous video interviews to avoid scheduling issues altogether.
Step 5: Build a Global Employer Brand That Attracts Talent
Job seekers typically do their due diligence before joining a new company. They check out the company website, review the mission statement, seek out reviews — anything that paints a picture of the employer brand and reputation.
In fact, 82% of job seekers consider employer brand and reputation before applying to a job, and over half (53%) of job seekers cited poor or diminishing employer brand and reputation as one of the reasons for leaving a previous job.
Creating a consistent and transparent employer brand improves trust with potential job seekers and increases application rates. It helps applicants decide if their values align with your company’s, and whether they’d fit within your team culture and expectations.
Showcase your employer brand by highlighting:
- Clear mission statement and company values
- Inclusive language for diverse audiences
- International growth and collaboration initiatives
- Investments in training, charitable giving, and learning opportunities.
- Remote-friendly culture and practices
This messaging should be prominent on the About and Careers pages on your website, in addition to job boards and social platforms, like LinkedIn.
A strong company brand can expand your candidate pool and attract top talent from anywhere in the world.
Step 6: Choose Your Hiring Model
With your goals and recruitment strategy in place, it’s time to decide which hiring model makes the most sense for your business.
It will largely depend on your growth goals, risk tolerance, and how quickly you need to get someone on board.
Popular models for hiring global workers include:
Direct employment, which involves setting up a local entity in the country where you’re hiring, is time-consuming, complicated, and expensive. It gives employers the highest level of control but comes with a heavy investment in legal, tax, HR, and payroll infrastructure.
Direct employment makes the most sense if you plan to hire a large number of employees in that region or have a long-term business strategy there, to justify the significant investment needed.
Alternatively, an Employer of Record (EOR) enables you to quickly hire workers worldwide, without the need to set up an expensive legal entity.
The EOR becomes the legal employer for your global workers, assuming all legal liabilities and helping your company avoid costly compliance risks. EOR services, like RemoFirst, manage everything from contracts to payroll, benefits to taxes — all in compliance with local employment laws.
If you’re testing new markets or hiring a few workers in different countries, an EOR is a more efficient, low-risk, and compliant path forward.
Even better? You can largely skip our next two steps, as the EOR will handle the majority of legal compliance and payroll requirements.
Step 7: Understand Compliance and Legal Requirements
Employment laws and regulatory frameworks constantly evolve, and getting it wrong exposes your company to fines, lawsuits, and reputational damage.
Protect your business by treating compliance as an ongoing responsibility, not a one-time task. Constantly monitor labor law updates, tax changes, and new privacy rules in each jurisdiction where you employ workers, and update contracts and processes accordingly.
Key compliance and legal focus areas include:
Employment Contracts
Contractual requirements differ by country, but employment contracts typically include probation and notice periods, job descriptions, working hours, statutory benefits, and termination and severance processes.
Many countries require that contracts be written in the employee’s local language. For example, if you’re hiring a worker in Serbia, a contract written only in English may not be enforceable unless it’s also translated into Serbian.
Worker Classification
Misclassifying an employee as an independent contractor is one of the most common compliance mistakes. If found guilty, misclassification can result in back pay for benefits, social security contributions, and fines.
Governments are cracking down on worker misclassification to protect contractors from being treated as employees, but losing out on statutory benefits and protections.
For example, U.S. companies have faced multi-million-dollar settlements for misclassifying contractors, while in Mexico, businesses can be liable for employees’ benefits and severance, plus daily fines for each misclassified worker.
Data Privacy and Security
Data privacy is a constantly evolving requirement.
Hiring employees abroad means handling their personal data under different privacy frameworks, like:
- GDPR (European Union) – Strict requirements around data collection, transfer, and storage; a widely recognized framework that other countries often model their laws on
- LGPD (Brazil) – Similar to GDPR, with strong consent requirements
- CCPA (California) – Grants employees rights over their personal data
Employers must follow the data privacy regulations wherever they hire, and build secure systems and policies to ensure sensitive employee data is protected and compliantly handled.
Partnering with local compliance experts or an EOR will help you stay ahead of evolving regulations and safeguard your business against risk.
Step 8: Set Up Payroll and Benefits
Managing international payroll can be tricky. For one, paying employees in their local currency is usually preferred, but it means juggling different currencies, fluctuating exchange rates, and transfer fees.
Pay cycles also differ by country. For example, biweekly pay is common in the U.S., but most of Europe uses a monthly cycle.
In addition, employers must comply with local tax withholding, social security contributions, and reporting requirements, which vary widely and change frequently.
Most countries require employers to provide and/or contribute toward mandatory benefits, such as health insurance, pensions, paid vacation, and parental leave. These must be implemented when hiring a new employee, alongside any additional perks you may offer, like wellness stipends or professional development allowances.
Step 9: Onboard Your New Employee
You’ve made it this far — finding and hiring the first international employee to join your team. Now, it’s time to get them settled in. A smooth onboarding process will set your new hire up for success and enable them to begin contributing to your team more quickly.
Start by sending all contracts, tools, IT, software logins, and account access before their first day, so they can hit the ground running.
Begin the new team member’s day by welcoming them, ensuring their technology is ready to go, and introducing them to the rest of the team.
Provide your new employee with essential resources, like the company handbook, internal policies, and work-related documentation, to help them get up to speed.
Schedule regular check-ins and rotate meeting times around time zones, so your latest hire feels included and part of the team.
Finally, set long-term objectives. A 30-60-90 day roadmap establishes clear goals and expectations, giving the employee a clear path forward to be successful.
Step 10: Create a Retention Strategy
What comes next, after onboarding? Creating effective strategies to retain the employee you’ve just invested time and energy in hiring.
Talent retention starts with understanding what motivates your team. Regular check-ins, clear career paths, and opportunities for skill development help employees feel valued and engaged. Competitive compensation and benefits are important, but so are recognition, work-life balance, and a positive company culture.
Another key factor is inclusion: making sure international employees feel connected to the broader team, regardless of location. Encourage team collaboration across time zones, celebrate achievements publicly, and provide channels for feedback.
Finally, track retention metrics and listen to your employees. Exit interviews, surveys, and performance discussions can highlight potential issues early, helping you adapt your strategy and keep your best international talent for the long term.
Hire Your International Team With RemoFirst
Expanding your team internationally can yield many benefits, but it also comes with challenges. RemoFirst handles the heavy lifting, making international hiring straightforward and stress-free.
From compliant employment contracts and global payroll in local currency to benefits administration and onboarding, RemoFirst ensures every hire is managed smoothly.
Schedule a demo today and see how RemoFirst can help you confidently grow your global team.
