Top 5 offshore employment agencies for your business

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Offshore employment agencies can help you save a lot of time and hassle recruiting offshore employees. 

These agencies not only source and screen the best talent but also interview candidates on your behalf.

Moreover, since they’re familiar with the procedures and labor laws in your chosen offshore destination, they can help you meet your legal obligations as an employer. 

However, you may have to put up with some long-term challenges to your business while managing these agencies. 

So is an offshore employment agency the right choice for your business? 

In this article, we’ll explain how offshore employment agencies work, as well as the benefits and challenges of working with them. We’ll also discuss ways to choose the right agency and explore five offshore recruitment agencies to consider.

Table of Contents

• How do offshore employment agencies work?
• 5 important benefits of hiring an offshore employment agency
• 2 potential challenges of hiring an offshore employment agency
• How to choose the right offshore agency for your business
• The 5 best offshore employment agencies to consider for your business

Let’s get started!

How do offshore employment agencies work?

If you want to hire a foreign team, an offshore employment agency can make the recruitment process a lot smoother.

These agencies are well-versed in the region and specialize in offshore recruitment.

So what’s the process these agencies follow?

Once you decide on an offshore employment agency, you’ll need to brief them on the candidate or team you’re looking for along with job specifications. They take over the rest of the process on your behalf. 

Additionally, you can select and customize any stage of the recruitment process. Right from sourcing, screening, interviewing, and onboarding, to managing the administrative work for offshore jobs, you can delegate all tasks to the offshore team.

You can then handle the business-critical processes like final interviews yourself. 

Now, let’s look at the five key benefits of offshore employment agencies. 

5 important benefits of hiring an offshore employment agency

Offshoring your recruitment can benefit your business in several ways. Let’s take a closer look at some of them: 

1. Expert support

Your offshore employment agency is well equipped and familiar with hiring offshore teams from a particular region. These agencies understand the region’s job market better than a foreign employer would. 

Employment agencies also know where to find the best candidates and job seekers for various roles and stay up to date with the offshore region’s labor laws and regulations. 

An offshore recruiter will have the right network to source good candidates. As a result, companies can benefit from the agency’s expertise in the field and can attract better, more qualified candidates at a much faster pace. 

2. Access to a global talent pool

Offshoring destinations like India, the Philippines, and Malaysia have a large population and a wide range of talented professionals. Unlike the United Kingdom, USA, or other developed countries, these regions do not face a labor shortage and welcome job opportunities from foreign businesses. 

So why do you need to hire an offshore recruiter? 

Firstly, your offshore recruiter probably has prior experience in hiring from these locations and is better equipped to recruit candidates in that region. 

To top it off, offshore recruitment agencies offer specialized services according to your needs. For instance, an agency may be an expert in hiring for on-site engineering or drilling roles and know the job market well. 

An in-house team, on the other hand, won’t be able to filter candidates as efficiently due to the virtual nature of their hiring processes. 

3. Quicker turnaround time

If you’re looking to hire multiple candidates or build a diverse team, you’ll likely want to hire across multiple locations. To do this yourself or with your local in-house team would be labor-intensive and take ages to find the best candidates. 

In that case, outsourcing to an offshore recruiter in the same location as the team you’re looking to recruit is a great idea. Since they’re in the same time zone, they can avoid communication delays and recruit the best candidates for you in the quickest time.

4. Tax incentives and benefits

Offshoring has several tax benefits that employers can avail of by transferring their in-house processes to another country. 

For example, Dubai has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world at up to 55%, followed by Brazil (34%), France (31%), and Japan (30.6%). 

But when these countries outsource their business processes to offshore countries with lower tax rates, they can claim foreign taxes paid on their home country’s tax returns. 

For example, if a company in Dubai hires an offshore employment agency based in India for recruiting their offshore team, the employer could pay less in corporate taxes.

Additionally, many developing countries also offer tax exemptions, simple tax policies, and financial incentives to attract Foreign Direct Investment to their home country. 

5. More capacity to focus on core activities

Recruiting and staffing take up a lot of company time and resources. So when you outsource this function to an offshore recruitment company, your in-office team has more bandwidth to focus on other core activities.

For instance, your HR team can focus on payroll and invoicing or other activities that are best done in your home country. 

Additionally, employment agencies are skilled at what they do. So they can source the best personnel for your company, while you focus on core activities to maximize profits and enhance company growth. 

Now that we know how an offshore recruitment agency can help with your staffing needs, let’s cover a few potential obstacles you may encounter. 

2 potential challenges of hiring an offshore employment agency

Here are a few obstacles you may need to overcome when engaging the services of an offshore employment agency: 

1. Insufficient communication

As with any offshore company, clients may often face communication issues with their employment agencies. 

For instance, your offshore vendor may be located in a different time zone than you, resulting in communication delays. If the position you’re recruiting for is urgent, these communication delays can be problematic. And in some cases, it may delay the hiring process. 

That’s why it’s critical to clearly define your requirements and implement a solid communication plan at the start. For example, your team can always practice asynchronous collaboration (when people work together on their own time and not in real-time).

2. Reduced authority over the offshore project

Many times, the difference in time zones and the distance can make it difficult for recruiters to effectively collaborate with the onshore team. 

Since you’re basically hiring candidates with little to no supervision when offshoring staffing processes, it’s important to ensure that you set the right standards to screen and qualify candidates with great attention to detail. 

So how do you do that? 

You can start by involving the onshore project manager or team leads in the hiring process to effectively collaborate with your offshore team in real-time. 

For example, you can initially have your project management team conduct the final interview of candidates to ensure that your onshore team’s goals are compatible with the new recruits. 

They can then provide their feedback about the recruitment processes – the things that worked or didn’t work out about the candidates. This can help the offshore team understand the actual needs and make adjustments accordingly.

Keeping that in mind, how do you shortlist the right agency to offshore your recruitment and staffing needs? Let’s take a look.

How to choose the right offshore agency for your business

Since your offshore recruiters will be representing your company in the recruitment process, it’s important to work with one that reflects your business ideals. 

Here’s how you can find the ideal offshore staffing company for your business:

1. Define your expectations

Your first step when offshoring an employment process should be to define your expectations for the potential recruitment agency. Start by creating a written proposal that outlines any specific goals, metrics, KPIs (Key Performance Metrics), or other requirements you may have. 

Consider highlighting the following points: 

• A strategic roadmap (outlining your customized preferences for how you want to hire candidates).
• Any timeline limits you may have for your outsourced process.
• Important details about your ideal candidate (their skill level, required experience, etc).
• Any monetary budgets you may want to discuss with your outsourcing partner. 

2. Focus more on demonstrable experience

Once you’ve clarified your own expectations, it’s time to look for potential companies to offshore employment processes. There are several ways you can shortlist employment agencies. 

It’s a good idea to rely on the agency’s past offshore project hiring testimonials. 

Here’s a list of questions to keep in mind when seeking a potential offshore employment agency: 

• How many years of expertise do they have?
• Do they have any experience in working with a company from your background/region? 
• What hiring processes do they have in place? 
• How do they tackle obstacles or difficulties? 

Moreover, observe their ability to deliver various kinds of projects, any past failures or successes, etc. 

3. Research about the cultural fit

When outsourcing employment to an offshore agency, you’re going to face certain cultural barriers in terms of their work processes and general attitude towards work. 

As a result, it’s imperative that you research your offshoring recruitment partner’s hiring processes and understand how flexible they are.

Choose a partner you can trust to manage all your company workflows with due diligence. 

4. Prioritize long-term goals and strategies

Offshoring is a big business decision. You’re basically expanding your team and welcoming people from different locations to your company. If you plan on signing a long-term contract you’ll need to think of the bigger picture. 

Here are some potential questions you can ask your offshore partner: 

• Do they offer any flexibility in terms of their contract (pricing, scalability, etc) in the long term? 
• In case of a dispute, how will they proceed to come to an agreement with you?
• What are their plans as a company in the long run? What does their 2-year, 5-year, or 10-year mission look like? 
• Finally, does your offshoring partner share the same vision as you and are they willing to expand with your goals? 

Look at the broader picture and be transparent about your goals. 

Next, let’s take a look at some of the best offshore employment agencies for your company: 

The 5 best offshore employment agencies to consider for your business

Here are some of the leading offshore recruitment agencies you should consider for your business: 

1. Select Offshore Recruitment

Based in Billericay, UK, Select Offshore offers several personalized consultancy and subsidiary services. With over 35 years of experience, it has specialist teams across Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, America, and Saudi Arabia to attract top-quality candidates for all your recruitment needs. 

The company guarantees 24-7 support globally and offers services like permanent hiring, contract recruitment, project support solutions, etc. Select Offshore specializes in the following industries: 

• Renewables.
• Marine & Heavy Lifting.
• Subsea & ROV.
• Oil & Gas.
• Diving.
• Survey & Inspection, etc.

2. Alliance Recruitment Agency

Alliance Recruitment is a leading agency based in India that offers staffing and manpower recruitment solutions. With over 8000 clients across 25+ countries and 10+ years of experience, Alliance is a great choice for companies looking to hire in various industries, including: 

• Engineering.
• Retail.
• Legal.
• Sales and Marketing.
• Media & Advertising.
• Medical and Hospital, etc. 

3. Airswift

Based in Houston, Texas and with offices in Europe, Asia, Africa, Middle East, and America, Airswift is a global recruitment agency. The company offers staffing support in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) industries and for construction businesses. Their services include: 

• Talent Acquisition.
• Global Employment & Mobility.
• Workforce & HR Consulting.
• RPO & Managed Services.
• Technical Services, etc.

4. NES Fircroft

NES Fircroft is a leading talent acquisition and recruitment agency that is based in Altrincham, England with offices in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. The company has over four decades of experience in providing top talent to the renewable energy industry. 

NES Fircroft deals with staffing services and specializes in the human resource management for:

• Automotive and Manufacturing.
• Marine service sector (oil and gas).
• Mining sector.
• Drilling roles (subsea engineer, ROV technician, offshore wind farm specialist, etc).

5. Collar Search

Collar Search is an offshore staffing and workforce management services firm based in New Delhi, India, and catering to businesses across the world. They specialize in offshore IT and HR recruitment services. 

Collar Search offers end-to-end support for staffing, with 24-hour assistance and strategic recruitment processes. Their services include: 

• Offshore staffing.
• HR recruitment.
• IT outsourcing and offshoring. 
• Healthcare staffing, etc.

Here is a longer list of the leading offshore recruitment agencies.

Final thoughts 

Offshore recruitment is a great option for small businesses or companies looking to reduce their workloads by outsourcing staffing solutions to a specialist. 

In fact, several companies choose to offshore their recruitment processes to benefit from affordable services, a wider talent pool, and attractive tax gains. 

So if you’re looking for a good offshore employment agency for your business, don’t forget to follow this guide to help you make the most out of your offshoring experience!