How To Hire International Employees

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Summary: International employees are employees that aren’t American citizens. In this context, it can refer to someone who works at a satellite office in a different country, someone who works remotely from a different country, or someone who ends up relocating to the United States.

International employees can be preferable in a number of circumstances. Many businesses will hire international employees when expanding into new territories or in order to globalize their brand. Having international employees also increases the diversity of your organization, which has numerous positive effects on both culture and productivity.

Key Takeaways:

An international employee is typically used to refer to someone who works for a U.S. person or business that isn’t a U.S. citizen.
International employees are most beneficial when you’re expanding into new markets, trying to globalize your brand, increasing the diversity of your organization, or wanting to widen the talent pool.
Hiring an international employee is a much more involved process than hiring an American employee. You’ll need to prepare for the hire, be aware of the laws surrounding it, as well as get the necessary certifications.
Getting an international employee on your team will likely take months or even years from start to finish. It’s best to be committed to it and start preparing as soon as possible.

What Does it Mean to Hire International Employees?

The term international employee can have several different meanings depending on the context. In some cases, it can refer to expatriate employees, but in most business contexts, it’s another term for foreign workers. A foreign worker is someone who isn’t a citizen of the United States but works for a U.S. employer – be they a person or a corporation.

An international employee can end up coming to the United States to work via a temporary work visa or a permanent work visa – also known as a green card. Someone is also considered an international worker if they work for an American company in their home country, for example, for a foreign branch of a large U.S. corporation.

What Are the Benefits of Hiring International Employees?

While there’s a lot more paperwork involved, hiring international employees can have various benefits for your business. Of course, this will vary depending on what country you’re hiring in and the exact nature of your business, but many of these benefits are largely universal.

Benefits of hiring an international employee include:

Help with expanding into new markets. If you’re planning to expand into a foreign market, then having workers who live there and are familiar with the culture and way of doing business can be a huge boon.

Not only will they help to make sure that your advertising campaign will actually appeal to your potential customers, but they’ll know about their nation’s culture and laws. This can be a matter of the types of business permits you need, as well as social or structural pitfalls to avoid.
Global branding. Branching out into a new market transforms your company into an international one. Once that happens, you need to start thinking about your company’s brand on a global scale. Branding and taglines that work in America may not have appeal elsewhere.

Having international employees can help you globalize your brand. This is both in the sense of expanding its reach and in making sure it appeals to more than just an American market.
Wider talent pool. Including non-U.S. citizens in your search greatly expands your talent pool. This is true whether or not you sponsor them to come work in the United States or want them to keep working in their home country.
Multilingualism. While it isn’t guaranteed that an internal employee will speak more than one language – for instance, if you hire someone from Australia, New Zealand, or the UK – there’s a higher chance that an international hire will be multilingual than an American one.

Having employees that speak other languages is a major positive, especially if you want to do business in a country that primarily speaks a different language than English.
Increasing diversity. Hiring an international employee adds more diversity to your business. Diversity has many different benefits, and more diverse companies generally perform better. Adding different perspectives aids in problem-solving, reaching more diverse audiences, and general acceptance of differences.
Lower costs. Not every international employee is going to be less expensive to employ than one that’s an American citizen. But a lot of businesses will employ people outside of the United States as a way to cut costs. That’s why so much manufacturing is done overseas.
Productivity around the clock. If you have an office in New York and another one in Sydney, then there’s almost always going to be someone awake and working. The more different time zones you have employees in, the more work is done in “off” hours. It prevents you from having to pay a shift differential to have work done through the night.
Better reach for specialized skill sets. While you can get all manner of specialized employees in the United States, extremely specialized skill sets are rare. There are also other types of experiences that different nations will be more likely to have.

For example, while American researchers recently had a breakthrough in fusion energy, other countries are approaching it differently. While it’s too soon to say which approach is better – or if fusion will be viable – the different approaches and areas of expertise can be extremely valuable.
Enhancing problem-solving skills. Diversity increases teams’ ability to solve problems. Having people from completely different backgrounds will give them a different approach to problems and will lead to more discussion and the ability to consider the problem and the solution from different angles.

How to Go About Hiring International Employees

The exact process of hiring an international employee will depend on where you’re hiring them from and whether or not you want them to become a U.S. resident or not. However, there are some general steps that you can take in order to smooth the process.

Here are some general guidelines for starting the process of hiring an international employee:

Consider your options. If you decide that hiring an international employee is what’s best for your company, then you need to consider the possibilities. With instant communications, there are more options for having international workers working for your business.
- Remote work. It’s possible to have a non-U.S. resident work for a U.S. employer if they work remotely. That means that they won’t need a resident visa, though you likely still need to fill out paperwork to hire someone who isn’t in the U.S. Taxes are also a lot more complex this way.
- Work from an international location. While working remotely may also be an “international location,” many large businesses will have satellite offices in other countries. In that case, your international employees can work at those locations with other people from the same country.
  
  While this model is often used for overseas manufacturing and textiles, there are other businesses that do it – such as movie production, video game developers, and car manufacturers.
- Relocation. Offering to relocate an international worker to the United States is another option. If that’s the option you prefer, then it’s best to make it clear in the job posting and offer information on what will be available to them upon relocation. It’s also important to prepare your team to help with assimilation.
Know the legal rules. There’s a lot of red tape, laws, and tax information that you’ll have to wade through in order to hire someone who isn’t a U.S. citizen. The rules and requirements will also vary depending on whether you plan to have them relocate or keep working from their home country.
Start prepping early. Unlike hiring someone in the United States, hiring an international worker takes time. You will likely need to spend months – if not years – on prep work, waiting for information to be processed, finding the right person, and getting approval. That means that you want to start the process as early as possible.
Obtain a certification from the Department of Labor (DOL). One of the legal steps you’ll need to take is to get a certification from the DOL. Exactly what type of certification will be required will depend on the nature of the position. In most cases, there are multiple certifications that have to be obtained.
Request the necessary visa. Once you have the certification from the DOL, you’ll need to request the necessary visa from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). There are several different types of visas that you can get, depending on the circumstances.