You’ve probably heard of companies having team members and full teams overseas. But what’s an overseas team? More importantly, what is overseas recruitment?

As a recruitment service, overseas hiring is one of the many widely-outsourced types of HR services.

The recruitment process for overseas hiring differs slightly from the process of hiring employees locally. In addition, hiring employees from other countries offers several benefits that can help your business grow.

In this article, we’ll clarify what overseas recruitment is, how it works, and the industries using this type of hiring.

What is overseas recruitment?

Overseas recruitment, also known as overseas hiring, is the process of hiring employees from another country and bringing them to your home country.

For example, if you’re a hospital in Saudi Arabia, bringing nurses from Egypt and Morocco is considered overseas recruitment.

You should not confuse overseas recruitment with offshoring. There are several differences.

What is offshoring?

Offshoring is when a company moves one or more of its service-related teams and functions to a different country. This is usually done to reduce costs while maintaining hiring needs and service efficiency.

Many companies today use call center outsourcing and call center offshoring to reduce the cost of their customer support team.

Overseas recruitment vs offshoring

A US-based company will need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire a team of Americans in the United States.

Alternatively, if it hires a team of fluent English speakers in Egypt, it will reduce the cost of its manpower and operations. This company can also expand its services and offerings while keeping its operating costs low.

Meanwhile, if that company hires Egyptians (or any other nationality) in the United States, it would be conducting overseas recruitment.

Top fields for overseas recruitment

Based on our decades-long experience in Tawzef, we’ve found that some industries require hiring candidates from overseas over others.

The top industries or areas where companies turn to overseas recruitment are:

1)    Healthcare

The healthcare industry is one where mass recruitment is common. Hospitals and medical centers across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) need to fill various positions.

The best way to do so is to refer to an overseas recruitment company, like Tawzef, to help you hire nurses, doctors, and medical technicians.

Due to the large number of graduates, Egyptians tend to occupy many of these positions. GCC countries are among the top countries that seek to recruit nurses from overseas.

2)    Oil and gas

The oil and gas industry continues to be a thriving industry in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and GCC regions.

There are different types and levels of jobs within the industry. And because it’s a large industry, companies often have to hire dozens, if not hundreds, of employees.

This counts as mass recruitment or overseas recruitment. The majority of hires tend to be engineers with background and experience in the oil and gas industry.

Egyptian engineers are among the most-skilled in this area.

3)    Software development

In the past few years, the demand for programmers, developers, and software engineers has increased. There are hundreds of software developers in countries like Egypt, India, and Pakistan and too few in Europe and the United States.

However, the problem with hiring developers is that companies need skilled and creative software engineers and developers, which aren’t easy to come by.

While there are hundreds of graduates each year, acquiring the skills needed to be hired takes time and effort.

Moreover, the pandemic has prompted companies to consider hiring these skilled developers in their home countries. And in this case it will be offshoring not overseas recruitment.

Why hire candidates from Egypt

In this section, we’ll focus on the benefits of hiring Egyptian workers and candidates.

1)    Large talent pool

For decades, Egypt has been the most populated Arab country. But it’s not just about a large population.

Egypt’s public–and now private–universities ensure that candidates graduate with a variety of skills, including soft and technical skills.

This is evident in the top areas where companies turn to overseas recruitment like doctors and engineers.

2)    Creative with better experiences 

Working in Egypt often presents many obstacles in almost every field.

This can be in engineering, marketing, software development, among other fields.

Accordingly, employees and managers constantly have to find ways to overcome these obstacles to improve their work and results.

This makes them the better choice because not only can they get creative, but also have stronger experiences than employees from other countries.

3)    Lower cost and better technical skills

Despite surging inflation and a higher US dollar, the cost of living in Egypt remains much lower than that of GCC countries.

This means that the cost of hiring an Egyptian worker is going to be much less than that of hiring a GCC native.

This is especially the case where technical expertise is required. By hiring experienced and technically-efficient lower-cost workers, such as engineering project managers, GCC companies can hire more people and manage more projects.

What kinds of services can you get when hiring overseas

Let’s say you want to hire people from overseas, from Egypt or from somewhere else, how are you going to hire these candidates? What kinds of services can you find?

First, it’s best if you resort to an experienced and established overseas recruitment agency like Tawzef.

Second, you’ll need to decide which of the following overseas recruitment services you need.

1.   Hiring only 

This is a basic recruitment service. Here, the recruitment agency will be in charge of putting out the hiring call, gathering CVs, and ensuring that candidates meet your criteria.

After that the agency will provide you with this list of candidates so you can interview them either in-person or online.

Once you’ve decided who you’d like to hire, the recruitment agency takes care of the necessary paperwork including work permits and visas.

2.   Hiring and payroll

This is a more advanced service than simply hiring overseas candidates. In addition to the above, the overseas recruitment company becomes responsible for calculating the payroll for your overseas hires.

Alternatively, you may choose to outsource your entire payroll to the HR company.

3.   Manpower outsourcing 

More advanced than options 1 & 2, manpower outsourcing involves several hiring services. It begins with hiring your overseas team, managing their payroll, bank accounts, relevant government paperwork, and paying them.

It can also include hiring your local team members as well along with the rest of the services mentioned.

This takes away a sizable headache away from your accounting and HR teams.

4.   Consultancy services 

Lastly is the HR consultancy service. This is an all-encompassing service that serves both your local teams and your overseas hiring needs.

HR consultancy services can include creating an HR strategy to ensure that your entire business runs smoothly. It involves creating a strategy that puts a framework for your full-time and part-time local, remote, and offshored employees.

It also entails creating salary structures for your local employees, overseas hires, and international hires.

HR consultancy firms also offer services like business process outsourcing, creating a GAP analysis, an HR management system, among other services.

Find all your overseas hiring needs with Tawzef

Tawzef is an HR agency that provides various HR outsourcing services such as recruitment, payroll, manpower outsourcing, among others.

Tawzef is a licensed overseas recruitment company (license no. 671), which means we can deploy Egyptian employees to work in GCC countries.

Over the past 15+ years, the Tawzef team has been helping companies and institutions from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and others with overseas recruitment.

We’ve been helping companies with their HR and hiring needs across many industries including healthcare, software development, oil and gas, telecommunications, engineering and contracting, and others.

We’ve also helped GCC firms hire across all employee levels. From blue collars to the way to C-suite executives across industries. In the last 5 years alone, Tawzef has deployed over 6,000 employees to the GCC.

So, if you’re looking for a well-versed overseas recruitment company with experience hiring and managing employees, you’ve come to the right place. Get in touch with Tawzef and help you find the right hires to grow your organization and increase its efficiency.