The COVID-19 pandemic, scary as it was, showed us that we don’t have to be in the same physical space to work together. This opened a door for new recruitment possibilities, allowing businesses to source skilled and qualified talent from other geographical areas, build relatively competent teams, and get the job done.
However, offshore recruitment—a term describing recruitment from areas that are geographically farther away—brought its own set of challenges, such as operating in conflicting time zones, teams working odd hours, project delays despite round-the-clock development, and various cultural challenges of working with people from other areas of the world.
And that’s where nearshore recruitment, a practice of sourcing skilled and qualified talent from neighboring countries, comes in. It provides nearly identical benefits as offshore recruitment but with considerably fewer detriments, which is particularly important for companies that rely on remote work.
What is Nearshore Recruitment?
Nearshore recruitment refers to an organization’s talent scouting and sourcing strategy, which relies on sourcing talent from nearby or adjacent geographical locations. This allows businesses to reap the numerous benefits of offshore talent sourcing—which are mostly related to the cost—without having to deal with various challenges, such as different time zones, cultural differences, and language barriers.
For example, many US tech companies have well-established operations in Mexico, which produces a significant number of engineering graduates each year. Paired with competitive labor costs, roughly the same time zones, and easy travel access, nearshoring from Mexico facilitates easy and cost-effective coordination and collaboration between various teams.
So, the main idea behind nearshore recruitment is benefiting from the best of both worlds: the cost savings of outsourcing your work to competitively priced yet competent talent and the benefits of cultural, temporal, and logistical advantages of proximity.
How Nearshore Recruitment Benefits Your Business
Nearshore recruitment has its own set of benefits regardless of what industry you’re working in and whether you’re hiring and onboarding individual talent, like hiring a software engineer or outsourcing the customer support section of your business.
So, let’s start with the most obvious advantage, which is the cost reduction. Nearshoring is often more cost-effective than hiring domestic talent, especially if the neighboring country has a lower cost of living and wage scale. This leads to significant savings in terms of salaries, benefits, and infrastructure.
Furthermore, unlike offshoring to distant countries like China and India, the geographical proximity facilitated by nearshore recruitment ensures that the hired talent is more likely to share cultural similarities and time zones with your business’ primary location. This provides a slew of additional benefits on its own, as it allows for better communication and collaboration between teams.
This is particularly important for tech and software development companies that require closer collaboration during product development and build phases, as it makes it easier to brainstorm, test, provide feedback, and address any issues that might appear during cycles.
Nearshoring doesn’t apply to talent acquisition alone. Outsourcing part production in manufacturing industries can also benefit from outsourcing, as it cuts down on pr