What should be your hiring strategy in South-East Asia

Introduction

Is your business ready to hire in South-East Asia?

Before we talk about what should be your hiring strategy, let's get back to the basics and understand the South-East Asian market. If you have experience with this market, you might be already aware that South-East Asia is one of the rapidly growing job markets.

Over the past few years, it has become the hub for innovation, technological transformation, the global hub of manufacturing and trade, and the world’s fastest-growing consumer markets. This region has a diverse talent pool and is known to have the world's largest cutting-edge talent ecosystem.

Among all the industries, manufacturing, retails, transportation, and telecommunications have seen the most rapid growth. South-East Asia has also seen a lot of spurts in startups. It has given rise to several unicorns with a combined market value of $34 billion. It is also estimated to produce ten more new unicorns by 2024.

Hiring strategy in South-East Asia

Giving a brief job market scenario in South-East Asia, the future looks promising, and it makes a lot of sense to hire and expand in this region. Here are some best practices that you should consider while working on a hiring strategy.

Best practices for hiring in South-East Asia

• Build your employer brand: Building a strong employer brand helps you connect well with prospective candidates. It appeals to their emotion when you showcase your brand’s vision, mission, and values.
• Create a positive candidate experience: Right from approaching a candidate to offering a job, build a positive and engaging candidate experience. Develop a transparent assessment process, and leverage different recruitment technologies. Also, build attractive career websites and demonstrate integrity and professionalism at every step of your hiring process.
• Adapt according to the local market: Tweak your global recruitment strategies and process according to the local market. For example, consider tweaking your recruitment campaigns according to the local language and style adaptations.
• Leverage social media: Leverage social media channels and mobile channels to connect with potential employees in the local language.
• Develop a robust communication system: Powerful communication is the key to build your employer brand. Use real-time and efficient communication processes to attract top talent.
• Embrace the local culture: Throughout the recruitment process, demonstrate appreciation and respect for the local culture.
• Bring the human touch: Humanize your entire recruitment strategy. Remember, you're not just hiring a few resources, but human beings. Evoke the emotion so that the potential candidates can resonate with you.
• Leveraging Employer of Record: When you hire employees, you need to take care of all the costs and liabilities. But you might not want to deal with all these hassles, especially when you're hiring in a new region. In such a scenario, using an Employer of Record is a good idea.

What is an Employer of Record?

An Employer of Record is an organization that takes care of all the liabilities for taxation purposes while the employees work at a different company.

How is it different from a staffing agency?

An Employer of Record often works with a staffing agency, although the purpose of the two is entirely different. While an Employer of Record serves as an employer for tax liabilities, a staffing agency helps you find the right resource. Depending on your requirement, you register with a specialized staffing agency to help you match the suitable candidates who suit your company's requirements.

On the other hand, an Employer of Record takes care of all the personnel functions like payroll processing, employment contracts and paperworks. It also handles unemployment insurance, terminating employees, maintaining a certificate of insurance, tax deposits, filing, etc.

Benefits of using an Employer of Record

There are many benefits of using an employer or record. These are –

1. It allows you to free up your time so that the human resources can work on other essential people matters. While the Employer of Record takes care of employee benefits, payrolls, compliance issues, etc., you can channelize your focus on making more strategic decisions.
2. It allows you to ramp up your employee base quickly. You can bypass all the taxation hassles which are taken care of by the Employer of Record.
3. Since all the legal matters related to hiring are taken care of by the Employer of Record; it enables the client companies to quickly access the market while staying compliant with the local regulations. This is especially beneficial for companies that do not have a legal entity in the desired country of hiring.
4. You can easily avoid the hassle of finding local lawyers, HR experts, and tax consultants in the country of operations.
5. An Employer of Record lets you establish a global team in no time that, too, without local HR and administration hassle.

When to consider an Employer of Record

• An Employer of Record works best for you if you want to build a remote team but not ready to set up a separate entity in the desired country.
• If you're looking to outsource employment as an expansion strategy.
• If your HR department is not aware of the foreign country's employment law where you intend to set up a team.

Checklist to find the right Employer of Record

So, you have decided to use an employer or record for hiring in South-East Asia. But how do you know which one works best for you?

• Not every Employer of Record operates in all the countries. So, check if your Employer of Record is active in the countries where you want to hire. For example, if you're looking at hiring in South-East Asia, Skuad is happy to assist you.
• Check the contract. Does it ensure to protect you from a data breach, intellectual property infringement, etc.?
• Do your due diligence. Understand how the Employer of Record approaches employment laws in the countries you want to hire.

Over to you!

If you're looking at hiring in South-East Asia, then considering an Employer of Record is always a great idea. However, be mindful while choosing one because they will be dealing with tax, compliance, and other legal matters critical to your brand reputation.