How to make the most out of global hiring

Sofia El Ouardy

Hiring globally can help a company unlock new markets, build a culturally diverse team have greater time zone coverage, and retain top talent by avoiding the ultra-competitive tech hubs. This diversity brings a wealth of benefits and opportunities to the organization.

1. Test new waters

Get to know potential new markets for your product

Hiring internationally can help you grow new markets. Especially when your product is already present in the country you’re hiring from. Your new hires understand the user and can bring a unique perspective on your product, how locals use it, and new features you can implement.

This is all the more useful if your employees are users of the product themselves, i.e: Uber, Spotify, Developer software etc. Your remote employees will become your product’s advocate, inviting new users from their friends, previous colleagues, and social media networks. A simple way to understand new markets, before investing in heavy R&D.

2. Greater time zone coverage

Productivity around the clock

Team collaboration across time zones is an amazing opportunity to double productivity and reduce the risks of engineering crises.

With an engineering team working on different time zones, you can stay productive around the clock. Projects are always moving forwards. Engineering teams at Google, HubSpot, and Shopify all rely heavily on the advantages offered by working across time zones.

24/7 reliability in case of incidents

There is always someone to take care of emergencies at any given time. Server down, a bug that is blocking users or any technical emergency can be taken care of on the spot, compared to waiting up to 14 hours when the whole team is working in the same time zone.

Working different hours of a 24-hour cycle means taking turns behind the wheel, with at least one engineer available at all times. Of course, working across time zones can be challenging when it comes to communication and async collaboration, but if it holds great power when managed correctly.

3. Cultural Diversity

Having a culturally diverse team brings different perspectives, knowledge, and experiences to the table, allowing the team to identify risks more effectively and come up with innovative ideas. This diversity also enriches the workspace culture for all employees. By hiring engineers globally, you reinforce your team with:

Different perspectives
Identifying risks more effectively
Diverse knowledge and experiences
Coming up with innovative ideas
Rich workspace culture for all employees

4. Retention: Keep out of ultra-competitive tech hubs

Employer competition

It’s no secret, hiring in tech hubs like Silicon Valley, New York, and Paris, means you’re fighting for software engineering talent against giants like Google, Apple, Salesforce, adobe, and the likes. These companies have next to limitless resources. With the tech talent shortage, they spare no expenses to hire the best engineers and keep their best-performing employees engaged and happy. Perks, benefits, salaries, you name it, they provide it. Hiring locally in these tech hubs or close to them means, even if you find the perfect hire, they accept the offer and get started, they’re already thinking about their next job and what they need to add to their resume.

Job Hop culture

The pressure of competing with local talent for employees is very high for software engineers located in big tech hubs. They need to polish their resume, work with new technologies all the time, add big company names to their record of employers, and so on.

The local talent is so busy keeping up with trends, they don’t care as much about your own product and company as a fully committed employee would. This is one of the reasons big tech hubs face the highest churn rates for tech talent. 80% of tech workers in the US were considering changing jobs in 2021. Work culture and job-seeking trends vary from one location to the other, and you can benefit from it by hiring from countries where retention is typically higher than your typical big tech hub like San Francisco or New York.

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