Onshore vs Offshore Hiring in a Hybrid World
Which is better: onshore versus offshore hiring? This is an important consideration in today's hybrid world. To answer this question, Scaling Tech's Debbie Madden has brought in Joe Burgess: someone who's tried both approaches in recent months.
Joe Burgess started his career as a software developer and teacher at Flatiron School, after which he transitioned into leading teams of data scientists, engineers, designers, and education professionals to build the education product at Flatiron – and then deliver it to tens of thousands of students.
Joe then co-founded Ribbon Education where he now focuses on education and sales. Building startup teams is second nature to Joe, but as he found out with some of his offshore hire experimentation, mistakes can be made.
This episode is a lesson in, among many things, defining the requirements of the job. Understand those requirements clearly so that a team can communicate at a certain level so that you can attain a certain work level.
And as simple as it sounds, for Joe hiring early on via Upwork, the ability of his tech hires to understand English proved to be a stumbling block.
Most startups can ill afford the resources to teach someone the job, and walking that fine line between finding someone who is suitably qualified to build you a CRM platform and giving a young coder an opportunity is well-considered and elucidated by Joe and Debbie.
How can you go about hiring junior offshore talent? Is timezone important? How do you create the right work culture with a hybrid team? Answers to these questions and more in this week's educational episode of Scaling Tech.
"When you're a brand new startup (and we're just getting going), it's really hard to allocate the resources to teach someone how to do something." - Joe Burgess
- Joe's early experiences hiring offshore via Upwork
- What are the requirements of the job? Defining those clearly
- The overlap between teaching and management
- The challenges of hiring junior offshore talent
- How to tackle timezone issues
- Understanding your employment law options when hiring offshore
- How to create the right hybrid work culture
Let's collaborate.
