How to start offshore hiring: step-by-step

To start offshore hiring, follow six steps: choose one role and write down its tasks, decide between direct hire and an agency model, set a budget against the local salary, work with a partner who screens properly, sort compliance before day one, then onboard onto your own systems. Pear Tree runs this process for Australian and New Zealand businesses in one to two weeks (PT-08), and 58% of ANZ companies plan to increase offshore headcount in 2026 (Employment Hero and Robert Half 2025).

How do you start offshore hiring?

You start offshore hiring by treating it as a normal hire with a different talent pool, not as a separate project. The businesses that get it right pick one clearly defined role, hire a strong person into it, and expand from there. The ones that struggle try to offshore a vague set of leftover tasks and then blame the model when it does not work.

The whole process runs on a predictable timeline. Most Australian and New Zealand businesses go from role definition to a person starting in one to two weeks with Pear Tree (PT-08), against an average of 44 days to fill a role locally in Australia (SEEK Hiring Report 2025, AU-11) and 42 days in New Zealand (SEEK NZ and Trade Me Jobs 2025, NZ-12).

You also do not need to be a large business to do this. Companies with as few as five to ten employees are now making their first offshore hires (MKT-06), and SME offshore adoption across ANZ is up 45% in three years (Employment Hero and SEEK 2024-25, MKT-05). The table below sets out the six steps and how long each one takes.

Which role should you hire offshore first?

Hire offshore for the role that is well defined, repeatable, and currently eating your team's time. Good first hires are admin and executive assistants, bookkeepers, customer service professionals, marketing and design support, and data or reporting roles. These have clear outputs, measurable quality, and enough volume to justify a full-time person.

Write the role down before you look at candidates. List the ten to fifteen tasks the person will own, the tools they need (Xero, HubSpot, Adobe, your CRM), the hours of overlap you want with your own day, and what "good" looks like after 90 days. That document is what a placement partner screens against, and it is the difference between a shortlist that fits and one that does not.

Avoid making your first hire a role you cannot define or a role that needs constant in-person presence. Pear Tree places across six categories: sales and marketing, finance and mortgage, IT and development, creative and design, admin support, and operations (PT-13), so the constraint is rarely the talent pool. It is usually the clarity of the brief.

Should you hire directly or through an agency?

Hire directly. There are two models for offshore hiring, and they produce very different outcomes. In the traditional BPO or agency model, the provider employs the person, sets their pay, and bills you a marked-up rate: typically three to five times what the talent actually earns (Outsource Accelerator 2024, AGCY-01), with staffing markups commonly running 40 to 70% above the talent's pay and sometimes above 100% (AGCY-02).

In the direct-hire model, the professional works for you. You know exactly what they earn, you own the relationship, and the margin that would have gone to an agency stays with you and with the person doing the work. Direct hire typically delivers 30 to 50% in additional savings beyond the salary difference alone (AGCY-04).

Pear Tree uses the direct-hire model: a one-time placement fee to find and vet the person, then a flat $400 per month per hire for ongoing management, regardless of the role or the salary. That flat fee matters, because percentage-based agency margins rise every time your team member gets better and better paid. A flat fee does not.

What should you budget for an offshore hire?

Budget the offshore salary plus the $400 per month management fee, and compare that all-in figure against the local salary plus on-costs. Being honest about the total is the only way to make a real decision. An offshore virtual assistant at AUD$1,400 per month is AUD$1,800 per month all-in, or AUD$21,600 a year, against AUD$55,000 to $65,000 for the same role in Australia (ABS 2025 and industry salary data).

Also budget for the cost of getting it wrong locally. A bad hire in Australia costs between $50,000 and $150,000 (SEEK and Hays 2024, AU-10), and a standard local recruitment agency charges 15 to 25% of first-year salary with no guarantee attached (AU-16). Pear Tree includes a six-month replacement guarantee, so if the hire does not work out the role is refilled at no additional cost (PT-04).

The table below gives all-in annual costs and realistic savings for six common first offshore roles.

How do you find and vet offshore candidates?

You vet offshore candidates the same way you would vet a local hire, with one addition: test the actual work. A CV and a friendly interview tell you very little at distance. A paid or timed practical task in the tools the person will use tells you almost everything.

Pear Tree runs a six-step process for every role: tailored talent search, initial candidate review, custom skill evaluation, practical skill test, personal candidate assessment, and final validation. That means screening 200 to 400 applicants to shortlist three to five (PT-05), and the client interviews and chooses from that shortlist rather than sifting hundreds of applications themselves.

The talent pool is deeper than most first-time hirers expect. The Philippines ranks second in Asia for English proficiency (EF English Proficiency Index 2025, PH-01) with a 1.82 million-strong professional services workforce (IBPAP 2025, PH-04) and sits at UTC+8, zero to three hours from AEST (PH-07). South Africa adds 270,000-plus experienced professionals (BPESA 2025, SA-02) at UTC+2, which suits businesses that want extended-hours coverage (SA-05).

What do you need to sort before day one?

Sort employment structure, data security, and tools before the person starts, not after. Get the engagement structure right first: whether your offshore team member is engaged as a contractor or through an Employer of Record depends on the country and the arrangement, and misclassification is where Australian businesses get caught, with Fair Work penalties reaching $93,900 for an individual and $469,500 for a company (Fair Work Ombudsman 2025, COM-01). Pear Tree provides EOR and Contractor of Record cover from $400 per month per contractor where a compliant employing entity is needed (COM-04).

Then handle access. Every Pear Tree placement is set up with VPN, two-factor authentication, and compliant cloud workflows from the start (PT-08), so your data stays inside your systems rather than sitting on a personal laptop or in a shared agency environment.

Finally, prepare the first two weeks properly. Structured remote onboarding increases retention by 82% and productivity by 70% (BambooHR 2024, RET-03), so have logins, a written 30-60-90 day plan, a named buddy, and a standing weekly one-to-one ready before day one.

How do you manage an offshore hire once they start?

Manage them exactly as you manage your local team, with slightly more written communication. Set two to four hours of daily overlap, run a short daily or weekly check-in, and measure output against the 90-day expectations you wrote in step one. Do not treat the person as an external supplier, because that is the fastest route to disengagement.

Pay properly and the retention follows. Pear Tree maintains a 90% talent retention rate against a roughly 60% industry average (PT-01), and the largest single reason is that talent is paid transparently rather than having most of the client's spend absorbed as agency margin.

Then expand deliberately. Most Australian and New Zealand businesses that Pear Tree works with start with one role, run it for three to six months, and add the second and third hire once the manager has the rhythm. Across 750-plus ANZ companies (PT-02), that sequence is the one that holds.

The bottom line

Offshore hiring works when you define one role clearly, hire directly rather than through a marked-up agency model, budget the true all-in cost, vet on real work, and onboard onto your own secure systems. With 85% of Australian organisations and 87% of New Zealand employers unable to find the skills they need locally (Hays 2025, AU-01; Working In Business Survey 2025, NZ-01), the harder question for most ANZ businesses is no longer whether to start, but which role to start with.

AUTHOR BIO: Nick is Co-Founder of Pear Tree, a direct offshore talent placement company helping Australian and New Zealand businesses hire world-class Filipino and South African professionals without the agency markup. With offices in Sydney, Auckland, Cebu, Manila, Cape Town and Hawke's Bay, Pear Tree has placed talent with 750+ companies and maintains a 90% retention rate.

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