6 Reasons to Choose Offshore Staffing Apart From Saving Money

With the continued interconnectedness of the world, hiring talent globally is becoming a more common practice by businesses, big and small.

While cost savings are one of the major drivers of the increased interest in talent acquisition strategies like offshore staffing, you might need more convincing before you add offshore talent as a part of your recruitment pipeline. 

To help you make a more informed decision, here are six other reasons (aside from saving money) why businesses hire offshore talent.

What is Offshore Staffing?

Before knowing the benefits of offshore staffing, understand first what offshore staffing is.

Offshoring is a process that involves running a portion of your business operations outside the country of your business.

While offshoring is often mistaken for outsourcing, there are differences between offshoring and outsourcing, primarily of which is the level of control over the operations. With offshoring, you still are in charge of the execution and management. You’ve simply moved the base of operations elsewhere.

Given this definition, when you get offshore staffing services, that means you will build your remote team overseas. You can initiate that process yourself with your in-house recruitment team. But to save time, money, and effort, you can alternatively look into offshore staffing agencies from the country you want to establish operations in.

6 Benefits of Hiring Offshore Talent Apart From Cost Savings

Here are the benefits that your business can gain from adopting offshore staffing solutions.

1. Cost Efficiency

Saving money is a lot different from cost efficiency. For example, you can save money by purchasing sub-standard raw materials for your products, but that can lead to poor quality results and dissatisfied customers.

When you hire offshore staff, you shouldn’t get poor work quality as a consequence of those cost reductions. Since you’re building the offshore team yourself, perhaps with the help of a reputable offshore staffing agency, you should be able to hire competent workers through a recruitment process customized to your business needs. That way, you can use your recruitment and staffing budget most efficiently.

This cost benefit is especially helpful for small to medium-sized businesses with limited funds that want to maximize value for money. 

If you’re one such business, you can also use tools like an Offshore Employee Cost Calculator to get estimates of how much offshore staffing costs versus hiring an employee from your country. The labor cost-saving estimates can guide you to better staffing decisions based on your business’ current growth stage and financial status.

2. Access to a Large, Diverse Talent Pool

Many industries worldwide are dealing with a talent shortage. Even businesses in fast-paced industries like tech are suffering from talent scarcity, leading to slower business growth. These shortages can be from a strong demand for a job role in your area, a rapid growth in the industry, or simply a lack of qualified candidates.

No matter what the reasons may be for low talent availability, you can offset that hurdle in talent acquisition by hiring offshore workers.

Since offshore staffing can come from anywhere, that means you have access to professionals and experts from around the world, regardless of their availability in your area.

The challenge at this point, though, is wading through the applications since there are a lot of candidates who will reach out to you if you advertise your job opening directly.

One approach that has worked for many other businesses is by working with offshore support companies from the countries you’re planning on recruiting from. They can then do the candidate outreach for you.

With this approach, you access a larger, more diverse talent pool without the hassle of filtering through thousands of applications potentially in a language and culture you’re not familiar with, either.

3. Risk Reduction

According to a 2023 Deloitte survey on Global Shared Services and Outsourcing, risk reduction is one of the top five objectives that Global Business Services (GBS) organizations achieved. Thus, it continues to be one of the reasons why businesses are investing more in offshoring talent.

If you’re unfamiliar with offshore staffing, then you might think that it’s a risky approach to talent acquisition. However, offshoring is a better way to get managerial control over your overseas teams than other ways of working with global talent, like outsourcing.

Since offshoring involves transferring entire segments of business operations abroad, you should establish work codes and operational processes for your team abroad. By doing that, you can extend the quality of work that your in-house employees are producing to your offshore employees’ results.

If you want to avoid common operational risks that might occur when you have a poor offshoring strategy, you need to ensure that you codify your work processes to reduce offshore risks. That makes it easier to streamline operations and make it consistent between your local team and your offshore staff.

4. Increased Operational Efficiency

One of the concerns with offshore workers is the timing and scheduling issues. However, if you know how to take advantage of that, it can be the key to increase operational efficiency.

For example, if you’re based in the US or Europe and you hire remote workers from the Philippines, your offshore staff can operate during the hours when your local team isn’t. 

If you work in Australia, your offshore staff can supplement your local team because their timezone is close to yours.

5. Driving Business Value

A disengaged employee can lead to a lower business value.

According to 2023 McKinsey and Company research, the lack of meaningful work is one of the top drivers of disengagement in employees. If your core team doesn’t feel like they’re doing meaningful tasks relevant to their core competencies, they can disengage from the business, which reduces your business value.

Luckily, one of the benefits of offshore staffing is that you can delegate tasks outside of your team’s core competencies to your offshore staff. Your core team can then focus on higher-value tasks while your offshore staff can reduce their workload, especially tasks that they don’t find most meaningful to them. That leads to a lower attrition rate among your local employees, which then drives your business value forward.

6. Developing Capabilities of a Custom Team

Offshoring helps you establish a strong team away from your main base of operations. It gives you more control over the quality of work of your team. You can even invest in your offshore employees’ skills and develop them from the ground up.

Since you’re building your offshore team through procedures and performance management systems that you’ve pre-established, your offshore workers can develop their skills faster until they more consistently perform in the quality befitting your standards.

Final Thoughts

While cost savings are a compelling reason to consider offshoring, there are more advantages to offshoring to consider. The benefits of offshore staffing encompass an increase in both business efficiency and value while reducing operational risks. Given these benefits, it can be an effective solution to your talent sourcing and management needs.