With competition rising in most vertical industries, businesses around the world are facing significant challenges related to talent shortages, leading them to cast a wider net in the search for qualified, experienced professionals.
In the United States alone, the talent shortage has more than tripled in the last ten years, with 69% of employers struggling to fill job vacancies in early 2020, as opposed to 14% in 2010, according to a study by ManpowerGroup. This domestic drought is hitting almost every industry, with IT, engineering, accounting and finance, construction, and customer support representing the most in-demand skills.
The good news is that virtual employment is now part of the status quo, opening the floodgates to an unlimited source of untapped talent. Around the world, there are millions of highly-skilled, well-educated professionals that can fill any vacancies and provide immediate value to your business, provided, of course, that you’re open to virtual employment and know where to look.
Here are three great reasons to start exploring the world and hunting down the perfect candidates for your vacant positions.
Worldwide Teams Strengthen Diversity
There are already hundreds of studies that prove the value of diversity in the workplace, so we’re not going to lecture you about the benefits. However, we do want to stress that strengthening diversity is far more impactful when you hire people on a global basis, not just those in your home country.
The United States, for example, is a giant melting pot of different cultures, ethnicities, beliefs, and preferences, but most people experience life through the lens of being an American citizen. When you expand your search outside the country’s borders, you augment your diverse teams with unique perspectives that are not easily found domestically.
Global colleagues will challenge your ideas in ways you may never have imagined, leading to more innovation, greater problem-solving capabilities, and, ultimately, a significant uptick in brand exposure around the world as your new colleagues gush about their new employers in their home countries.
You Can Find People for Highly Specific Jobs
When organizations need candidates with specific skill sets or qualifications, the search for talent becomes increasingly more difficult. In the technology world, for instance, there’s a severe lack of qualified, experienced artificial intelligence engineers and data scientists, despite huge demand, so job vacancies go unfilled indefinitely, leading to companies lagging behind their competition.
By taking a global approach to recruitment, organizations can find well-educated candidates in any country then quickly integrate them into their teams remotely. Outside their own borders, companies can target talent with specific technological specializations, even focus on countries that prioritize education in specific areas, allowing them to pick up cost-competitive employees for roles that are notoriously difficult to fill.
There are Several Cost Benefits to Enjoy
Hiring, training, and retaining employees at home is an expensive process, with the average cost-per-hire in the United States hovering around $4,000. This price includes things like advertising costs, recruiting software, recruitment events, and agency fees, all of which are necessary for such a competitive market.
By hiring global candidates in their home countries, we’ve found that companies can create savings of up to 50% through reduced legal fees, lower market-rate salaries, and the absence of relocation costs. Of course, cost isn’t everything, but with the financial burden of hiring domestic talent increasing every year, organizations can really start to benefit from exploring the alternatives in 2021.
How to Start the Search: Don’t Go Alone
For organizations looking to hire global talent, we suggest partnering with an experienced, value-driven staffing services provider with immediate access to candidates.
Here at Zventus, we pride ourselves on our ability to quickly and easily recruit qualified candidates in up to 180 countries, giving businesses the power to leverage cost-competitive, world-class talent in any location.
Our services also go beyond virtual staffing. If companies wish to relocate their virtual employees to North America, we can bring them to Canada or Mexico, set them up in satellite locations in the same time zone, and allow organizations to circumvent the challenges of acquiring and retaining United States work visas like H-1B.
For organizations looking to expand to global markets, we can also identify ideal locations and recruit local candidates to replicate our clients’ best-performing teams, onboarding remote employees in as little as two days—an attractive alternative to the costly process of exporting talent.
When all is said and done, if companies limit themselves to domestic recruitment, the opportunities to find the perfect candidate are few and far between. But as soon as the business can open itself up to a global talent search, the choices are endless.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
Angel Alban is President of Zventus, a leader with 25 years of top 10 mortgage industry experience in strategy, operations, and technology. Zventus provides management consulting, strategic staffing solutions, and managed services that give organizations the power to overcome any business challenges.
If you’d like to learn more about our global staffing solutions or the benefits of virtual recruitment, get in touch by contacting us here.