Hiring IT Teams Overseas: Myths and Realities

Over the past few years, all of us have witnessed the tremendous growth of IT technologies and opportunities in this area. Due to globalization, hiring IT specialists overseas has become extremely popular. Open Upwork, Facebook or LinkedIn, post a vacancy, and you will receive a great deal of resumes from software developers from countries all over the world. Today many computer specialists have the opportunity to work in other countries without leaving their own home or apartment. But is everything as great as it seems at first glance? Let’s try to understand from the perspective of employees, as well as from the perspective of those who hire these people. What are the myths and where are the realities? Unfortunately, this coin has two sides. What is the motivation behind hiring people from overseas? Initially, the following reasons were obvious:

1. The ability to find highly motivated, qualified, and talented specialists from anywhere in the world. The IT labor market overseas is very appealing and competitive. In countries of Eastern Europe almost every software engineer strives to work in IT companies abroad.

2. You can hire high-class specialists from other cities and even countries for a much lower salary due to lower costs of living in those areas. This is also beneficial to many companies as having remote workers reduces office space rent costs. Software developers outside the US and Europe generally charge less, but their skill level is just as high as their US counterparts. And even if a developer from another country is not as qualified as a specialist from the employer’s hometown, he can be additionally trained for a lower cost. Such employees are highly motivated to work and improve the quality of their performance.

3. An increase in labor efficiency. Reducing commuting time, and other cost factors, you can significantly increase the efficiency of your daily work from home. Today the IT development industry is undergoing cardinal changes, work has become distributed, and various Agile frameworks are constantly developing. Delegating work to the teams overseas, local teams can focus more on some bigger tasks and projects. Teams understand now, more than ever before, the value of communication and the importance of self-organization, which only increases a company’s productivity.

4. It is convenient for employers to hire freelance workers and contractors, as the company generally does not need to provide paid leave or benefits for these employees.

5. Companies employ people overseas because they want foreigners bring a new worldview and fresh energy to their team. When people from different countries and cultures are on the team, they are more creative in solving problems, finding nontraditional solutions, and bring new life to the team. Another special value of employees from abroad is their knowledge of the market situation in different countries, foreign language proficiency and an expanded network of contacts.

However, is everything as smooth, nice and efficient as we have described
above? What are the realities and risks?

1. There can be a great pool of talent in the vastness of social media and the
internet, but recruiting these talented teams overseas is not always an intuitive process.

2. Employees from different countries, time zones, and with different
backgrounds – all in one team. The employer will need a lot of patience to organize
such distributed work. Some additional management practices and control systems will
be required.

3. To achieve transparency may be difficult at first because trust has to be
gained. Remote developers will have to work much harder in order to gain the
employer’s credibility and respect and be a good team player, and this process is
certain to take much time. Moreover, the quality of communication may worsen.
Inevitably the process of work will need some restructuring.

4. Is it easy to fire a freelance worker? A contractor might be offered a more
interesting project or pay, and he himself can easily resign which might leave your
company in a bit of a bind.

5. Unfortunately, not all foreign developers have a high level of education,
proper work experience and profound knowledge of English. Their knowledge of foreign languages leaves much to be desired. Without a good command of English communication and understanding, there is a potential to cause a great barrier between building good trusting relationships with the team and effective interaction with customers. It is important to learn how to communicate easily, answer questions openly and fully, and communicate with potential clients in a professional and polite manner.

To sum up, it should be mentioned that distributed work in a remote mode system will certainly make any company much more flexible and resilient to new challenges and potential force majeure. Today, IT companies are completely free in their choice to choose the approach and the path that suits them best. At Viaduct we are quite aware of all the above problems that online work entails, but we see more advantages rather than disadvantages of such work, and we are ready to work in different time zones, providing transparent management and tracking systems, in order to make our customers and team members feel comfortable and satisfied.