Angela Hausman, PhD March 24, 2021 Having a business that is growing and expanding is both exciting and daunting at the same time. You face a lot of responsibility with many aspects of your business in flux, which creates uncertainty and risk. Part of this responsibility includes hiring a diverse workforce to support you in the process of achieving your company’s goals.
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Hiring staff is a grueling challenge because hiring the right people pushes others toward their best performance in the expanding company and meets customer demands. Meanwhile, the wrong team can create conflict and chaos that may sink the ship. One way to ensure you’re hiring a diverse, insightful, and innovative team is to search for international talent to join your company, especially as an international or multinational company.
Hiring internationally comes with a different set of rules and complications. Here are 3 tips for hiring international staff!
Hiring a diverse workforce
Let’s face it; hiring a diverse workforce provides many advantages to your organization, as you can see below.
Image courtesy of Talent Lyft
First, hiring a diverse workforce means adding new voices and perspectives to your firm.
A 2017 study by the Boston Consulting Group found diversity is a key driver of innovation, resulting in 19% higher revenues. One explanation for this result is that diverse employees are more in tune with the changes in customer needs due to different backgrounds and experiences, resulting in different approaches to challenges.
A diverse workforce also improves financial performance because they are able to apply creative thinking due to having survived in a competitive environment with diverse collaborators.
Hiring a diverse workforce also results in higher levels of employee engagement and reduced employee turnover based on a study by Deloitte. It also means that, when you do search for new employees, job seekers have a more favorable attitude towards your company. That favorable attitude translates to your customers and society in general.
Give them flexibility
One of the few positive outcomes of the coronavirus pandemic is that we, as a society, learned that working from home is entirely possible and, in many cases both more efficient and cost-effective. In fact, many businesses don’t plan to ever return to a situation where everyone comes to the office every day. I constantly hear of a new company planning for perpetual virtual work to reduce the cost of office space and lower payroll by avoiding high cost-of-living subsidies to workers in cities like New York and Los Angeles.
Remote work now opens up additional opportunities for hiring talent from countries outside the US. If their roles allow, it’s possible to hire international workers without requiring a move to the United States, which means leaving family, friends, and everything the worker knows. International workers may still want to move to the US and work with you there, but they might want the option of remaining in-country and working from home. Offering flexibility not only makes foreign workers more likely to apply for the role, but it can also save your company money too.
Research visa sponsorship.
Certain work visas in the US, like O-1 visas, are required for workers employed by a US company, regardless of their location. These visas require that the hiring company sponsors the worker and justifies their employment over U.S. citizens. This means that, if you offer a position to someone from outside the US, they must apply for and obtain an O-1 or similar visa that allows them to work in the US for as long as the role you have offered lasts.
A visa not only allows a person you want to hire easy access into the US, but it makes the process uncomplicated, shoring your business up against any legal issues that could otherwise arise.
Support them emotionally through their move
One thing that companies forget about is supporting colleagues with specific requirements. Whether it is a disability, a difficult family situation, mental health issues, or any other specific personal aspect, supporting your employees through their personal lives is important Not only for the employee’s well-being but for your success, as well. Employees suffering from stressful home lives face additional problems at work that impact their ability to give you their best performance.
Hiring international employees, especially if it means bringing them to the US, is an extremely stressful event. Even if the worker remains in their home country, working for an employer outside of their own country, with different cultures and rules, is stressful. When you hire an international worker to come and be a part of your company, it is crucial that you support them through their move and beyond, as stress can accumulate over time whether they choose to come and live in the US or not. As a business leader, you have a responsibility towards your employees to help them settle into the company, so supporting them through the process of entering the US, living in an entirely new place for the first time, is essential.
Final Thoughts
If you want to expand your business worldwide, hiring talent from all over the world, you should use this guide to help you achieve this goal. Making sure to support overseas hires is a super important step in expanding your business.
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