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January 28, 2026 
11 min read
Skilled talent is harder to find than ever. In fact, 63% of employers identify skill gaps as the most significant barrier to business transformation through 2030.
The solution may be closer than you think — just not in your zip code. Global talent recruitment often delivers higher-quality talent at lower cost than domestic recruiting and opens new markets.
Yes, it comes with challenges, from different compliance standards to cultural differences. Still, expanding globally has become critical for enterprise growth. It introduces talent competitions, expanded remote work, and new market-entry opportunities.
Ready to expand your talent pool beyond borders? This guide covers best practices, strategies, technology recommendations, and real-world examples. You’ll be able to start hiring anywhere in the world.
Global recruitment involves sourcing, attracting, and hiring candidates from international labor markets. This can be done remotely or in person, depending on your needs.
Unlike local hiring, global talent acquisition requires more upfront planning. You’ll have to understand varying labor regulations and navigate cultural nuances.
Despite these hurdles, 56% U.S. businesses consider expanding internally to:
These gains are especially enticing if you’re rapidly growing and exceeding domestic market capacity. An innovative global recruitment strategy ensures you have the right team, with local knowledge, to drive engagement and build your international presence.
Whether workers are remote, in-person, or relocating, international recruitment presents unique hurdles:
To understand what these challenges might look like in practice, consider a hire in Japan as an example.
The time difference alone — 13-17 hours’ difference from the U.S. mainland — means American and Japanese workers are on opposite schedules.
Japanese culture also values collective achievement, so résumés and interviews often highlight team accomplishments rather than individual contributions. This is vastly different from American recruitment norms.
Knowing this in advance lets you plan for asynchronous interviews and adjust evaluation criteria to accommodate the time and cultural differences.
Expleo, a global technology services provider, struggled to streamline global talent acquisition processes. With iCIMS Applicant Tracking, Expleo streamlined hiring across global locations, standardized reporting and optimized recruiting efforts, and built a global candidate database.
“iCIMS has transformed our recruitment process, allowing us to work more efficiently and make data-driven decisions that benefit the entire organization.”
— Global talent acquisition system manager, Expleo
Learn more about Expleo’s success with iCIMS.
Once you’ve acknowledged the challenges to international recruiting, follow these steps to get started.
Start by identifying the business problem you need to solve with a global workforce: Entering new markets? Addressing seasonal peaks? Accessing specialized skills?
Once you understand your business goal, you’ll be able to research target countries with the workers you need.
For example: Your goal is to provide 24/7 customer support without midnight shifts or shift differentials. You can look at countries with business hours that are the opposite of yours and where compensation is competitive, like the Philippines or India.
Your employer value proposition (EVP) equals the pay, benefits, career development opportunities, and company culture you offer employees. These must compete with local businesses and international competitors.
For example, a U.S. worker might love 100% company-paid health benefits. But, this won’t impress U.K. workers with universal healthcare. Instead, you might offer financial wellness coaching or additional vacation time to attract and retain workers.
While your EVP should adapt locally, it must still reflect your core employer branding strategy and ethos. Hexagon PPM, for instance, uses iCIMS’ career site software to highlight region-specific EVPs through different portals.
Once you’ve built a decent pool of candidates, you need to organize them. Otherwise, you risk slower hiring processes or a mismatch in location, skill, and readiness.
Match candidates to the right roles with skill segments. Then, organize candidates based on experience level and location. Recruiters will be able to better choose the right talent for the right role.
The result? Faster and more successful hiring with the geographical coverage you need.
Labor laws vary wildly between countries. Beyond statutory pay and benefits, there are also different holidays, termination standards, anti-discrimination laws, and worker classifications.
Research these in advance. Work with human resources (HR) and legal teams to develop country-specific benefits packages, handbooks, and performance processes. Or, partner with an EOR to handle employment liability.
Cultural competence means recognizing differences among team members and navigating them with empathy. When you’re hiring internationally for the first time, train staff on the importance of encouraging positive global collaboration.
You should also train recruiters to recognize different cultural hiring practices, from interview processes to résumé formats. Understanding these creates better experiences for both recruiters and candidates.
Use global recruiting software to centralize processes, control costs, and strengthen compliance with international data security and privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
iCIMS Talent Cloud, for example, includes an applicant tracking system (ATS) and candidate relationship management (CRM). Combined with your career site, you can manage interviews across time zones and support candidate engagement.
Even with different recruitment stages by country, iCIMS creates a global talent pool you can segment by location, skill, engagement, and hiring readiness. This means a macro view of talent availability to plan and scale your business globally.
Track your recruitment performance using reports and analytics to identify wins and areas for improvement. Common recruitment metrics to monitor include time to fill by location, cost per hire, source effectiveness, and quality of hire.
For example, if your goal is to improve workforce diversity, use diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) dashboards that track minority hires. If your goal is to address skill gaps, track regional offer acceptance rates to reveal how attractive your EVP is across countries.
After analyzing what matters, iterate to continually improve your processes.
The three P’s — planning, process, and people — form a framework for building high-performing teams. When you’re scaling internationally, each pillar requires a different approach than domestic hiring.
Keeping the 3 P’s in mind helps you create a repeatable system that addresses the core concerns of international hiring. Use this breakdown to understand what it entails.
| What it means | Example use case | Your strategy | |
| Planning | Understanding global labor needs and aligning them with business goals. | Researching the top three countries to hire global workers. | Leverage databases from the World Economic Forum, World Bank, and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to analyze worldwide market and employment trends. |
| Process | Creating consistent, efficient, and compliant policies and workflows across countries. | Centralizing applicant information on one platform for easy access across global recruitment teams. | Use an all-in-one recruitment platform like iCIMS Talent Cloud to organize and source talent globally. |
| People | Preparing recruitment stakeholders and employees for interacting with an international workforce. | Training staff on cultural competency and employer brand advocacy. | Create employee brand ambassadors by allowing them to showcase authentic day-in-the-life videos on your career site. |
The best strategies depend on your goals and industry, but most start with standardizing processes and creating compelling, scalable employer branding.
Your recruitment funnel should follow recognizable stages that you can tweak for regional, departmental, role, or level differences. Maintaining similar workflows across locations improves collaboration, increases efficiency, and aligns recruitment performance expectations.
For example, Expleo, a global services provider, leveraged iCIMS’ ATS to reduce the number of local hiring workflows by 94%, enabling it to track global hiring metrics and make targeted improvements.
Develop an attractive, localized EVP, and communicate it effectively in recruitment marketing campaigns. This goes beyond translating your career site into multiple languages. It’s also about messaging that connects with candidates.
For instance, you might adapt your social media outreach campaigns depending on the country. In the U.S., LinkedIn is popular. But in China and Japan, use WeChat and LINE as your go-to platforms for reaching high-quality candidates.
Employee referral programs work universally. Employees vouch for the capabilities of referred candidates, shortening their time to productivity.
In turn, referred employees trust their referrer’s recommendations, which is especially helpful for cross-border hires unfamiliar with your company.
Keep these best practices in mind when hiring internationally:
If you’ve hired abroad, you know its benefits and its logistical headaches. Different labor regulations. Multiple time zones. Complex compliance.
What you need is a scalable strategy and enterprise-grade technology.
iCIMS’s all-in-one platform supports every stage of global talent recruitment:
Plus, iCIMS integrates with global HR systems like ADP and UKG for seamless data flow and compliance.
Ready to scale globally with confidence? Schedule a free 15-minute demo.
Gazmend Kalicovic is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for iCIMS, responsible for the global go-to-market strategy of the iCIMS Talent Cloud Platform, including iCIMS’ integration, trust and security capabilities. He is focused on leading iCIMS’ position as the world’s most connected and trusted talent platform.
Prior to iCIMS, Gazmend held strategic product and marketing positions at Brother International, where he led go-to-market strategy for Brother’s document capture solutions, and Billtrust, where he led strategy and execution for Billtrust’s invoicing and payment products. Gazmend holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and history from Rutgers University.
