The Benefits of Hiring Overseas Contractors

Struggling to recruit to your roles? Many people have found it difficult this year. But have you considered hiring overseas contractors?

This can work well for more specialised, skilled roles that are common to all organisations, like designers or web developers, and will hugely increase your pool of candidates. Although it won’t be a solution for every role—jobs that require face-to-face contact with beneficiaries in the UK, or lots of training or management, for example.

Here at CharityJob, we employ a number of overseas contractors, which has fitted well with the current recruitment market and our hybrid/remote working policy.

We asked Ciarán Kennedy, our Chief Technology Officer, about his experience of employing and managing overseas contractors:

“We couldn’t find the staff we needed in the UK, so we decided to spread the net wider. Many of the skilled workers we needed moved back to their home countries during Covid and now want more flexibility. People want to work for UK companies, so we found that overseas workers responded to our adverts.

“Obviously contractors aren’t employees, so things don’t work in quite the same way. We pay them a daily rate rather than an annual salary, so we had to look at what the going rates were in their countries.

“We have a comprehensive contractor agreement in place with each of them, which states the minimum number of days they will work for us per month. This allows for them to have some time off, but without them disappearing for weeks on end. They then invoice us for the numbers of days they’ve worked at the end of each month.

“They control the hours they work, which in reality means they may stagger the start or end of their working day, but for the most part we find they’re available in core work hours so they can keep on top of their deadlines and collaborate with colleagues.

Advantages and disadvantages

“As they never come to the UK for work, there are no requirements for visas and it’s up to them to sort out paying their own tax. We don’t need to offer the benefits that employees get or pay for their training (although they can expense things back to us by mutual agreement).

“I’ve found hiring overseas contractors reduces my workload as a manager, as there’s no need for annual appraisals. Our contractors tend to be very proactive and we rarely need to give additional UK-context on things, but if we do then this is just part of the normal onboarding process we have for anyone working for us.

“One of the downsides is that they only have to give five days’ notice if they no longer want to work with us, and it will obviously take longer than that to replace them. However, in reality as pay rates tend to be better than in their home countries, we find that contractors will give more notice, and our turnover among them has actually been lower than among our employees.

“Communication can also be more difficult—technology issues, people talking over each other on video calls, awkward silences and it being harder to get to know colleagues personally—but no more so than with our hybrid and remote employees in the UK.

“For us, employing overseas contractors has allowed us to fill some key roles that have been difficult to recruit for and keep some important projects going, so it’s definitely been a huge advantage.”

Francesco Bria, Product Manager at CharityJob, told us how he finds being a contractor living in Italy:

“I chose to be a contractor as I wanted the flexibility of being able to live and work wherever I want. I don’t feel at all disadvantaged by working outside of the UK as most of my colleagues work remotely at least some of the time anyway. I still feel very invested in my work and care about the organisation.

“I do have less job security, but that isn’t a huge concern for me as I know jobs like mine are in demand. I also miss seeing people in real life, and technology can be an issue sometimes. But that’s exactly the same as it would be working remotely within the UK.

“I think it really depends how an organisation approaches remote work. They have a huge role to play in how their workers feel. Communication is an important thing for me. Those of us who work remotely recently had trouble hearing in a team meeting over video call, so CharityJob purchased a new AV system for the office to make sure we’re fully included. If you want to make it work, it will work.”

Things to consider when hiring overseas contractors

There are a number of factors to take into account if you decide to hire an overseas contractor. For example, you need to allow them autonomy over how their work is completed, including the hours they work. HRMC has a tool on their site you can use to determine the difference between an employee and a contractor.

And there are other things to consider, such as data protection and, without an overriding agreement in place, contractors would have intellectual property rights over their work. You also need to consider the employment laws in the contractor’s country of residence. We therefore recommend entering into a contractor agreement that considers the local laws of each country and seeking independent legal advice for this.

Every charity is different, and what’s right for one organisation, or even one role, may not be right for another. But for specialised, hard-to-fill jobs, hiring overseas contractors might just be the answer.

Have a role you think this could work for? Give your account manager a call on 020 8939 8430 to find out more.