Opening a new office overseas can look deceptively straightforward on a project plan.
Find premises. Establish the entity. Relocate some existing employees. Recruit the additional people you need. Open the doors.
The recruitment part can be considerably more complicated.
A company may have spent decades building its reputation in its home market. Candidates know the organisation. Existing employees recommend it. Hiring managers understand what people earn. HR knows which benefits matter. Recruitment teams know where the talent is.
Cross a border and much of that advantage can disappear overnight.
We saw exactly this when Faststream supported a global shipping company opening a new office in the UK.
The company was already a successful international employer and was highly recognised in its existing markets. In the UK, it was entering a talent market where its employer reputation was far less established.
It needed to recruit an entire group of people for its new operation while simultaneously answering some important questions.
What should we pay?
What benefits will candidates expect?
How common is hybrid working?
Who are we competing against for talent?
Where are the people we need?
And why should those people join a company they may know very little about?
These aren't just recruitment questions, but important market-entry must-knows.
Your employer brand doesn't always travel with you
One of the easiest assumptions to make when entering a new country is that corporate reputation will translate automatically.
Sometimes it does.
Often it doesn't.
A business can be one of the best-known employers in its sector in one country and have comparatively little recognition amongst candidates somewhere else.
That changes recruitment.
Instead of simply presenting an opportunity to an audience that already understands your organisation, you first have to explain who you are, why you're investing in the market and what joining the business could offer.
Recruitment therefore becomes partly an employer-branding exercise.
For this particular office launch, recruitment marketing and EVP positioning formed part of the campaign, helping introduce the employer to a wider pool of relevant UK professionals. The project notes specifically identify building awareness and bringing the employer proposition to the forefront of the London market as part of the support provided.
Local market intelligence matters before the first job goes live
Salary is an obvious question when entering a new employment market.
It isn't the only one.
Candidates evaluate the complete proposition: base salary, bonus, healthcare, annual leave, flexibility, hybrid working and numerous other factors.
The original recruitment programme therefore included insight into salary, benefits, working styles, candidate preferences and competitor activity alongside the actual hiring.
That intelligence can influence everything from job descriptions to budgets.
Discovering halfway through a recruitment campaign that your salary is below market or your working arrangements are significantly less attractive than competing employers' costs time.
Understanding that before you recruit is considerably more useful.
Nine vacancies shouldn't necessarily mean nine recruitment assignments
There is also a commercial question.
If you're building an office and recruiting multiple people within a defined period, treating every vacancy as a separate contingent recruitment assignment may not be the most effective model.
For our client, Faststream created a project-based recruitment partnership covering the whole programme.
Nine people were ultimately recruited during the six-month project.
And the commercial model produced one particularly significant result:
The client saved an average of 34% on recruitment costs compared with using a standard contingent recruitment model.
For businesses hiring several people as part of an office launch, expansion or transformation programme, recruitment can therefore be considered at project level rather than vacancy level.
That creates opportunities to centralise recruitment, provide consistency for candidates and hiring managers, build better market intelligence and potentially reduce overall costs.
Your existing team has another job to do
There is another factor that is easy to overlook.
Opening an international office creates a huge workload.
Senior leaders and HR teams may simultaneously be dealing with property, legal structures, technology, relocation, payroll, benefits, employment legislation and operational planning.
Adding responsibility for sourcing and managing multiple recruitment processes in an unfamiliar talent market can quickly stretch internal resources.
In our client's case, one of the outcomes they valued was simply having that burden taken away from their team overseas.
An outsourced recruitment partner can effectively become the local talent function while the permanent organisation is being established.
Think about recruitment before you enter the market
The companies best positioned to recruit successfully into a new country are unlikely to start with a list of vacancies.
They start by understanding the market.
Who is available?
What will they cost?
What will they expect?
Who else wants them?
How will candidates perceive our brand?
How long will recruitment realistically take?
And what recruitment model makes commercial sense for the number of people we're hiring?
Answering those questions early can remove a great deal of uncertainty from an international office launch.
For one global shipping company entering the UK, that approach helped build a nine-person team, supported the successful launch of its new office and reduced average recruitment costs by 34%.
See the full case study
See how Faststream supported a global shipping company opening its first UK office, recruiting nine professionals in six months and delivering an average 34% saving on recruitment costs.
Planning a new office or expansion into a new country?
Talk to Faststream about how a project-based recruitment partnership can help you build your team, understand the local talent market and reduce the complexity of hiring at scale.
