#7 - 8 Reasons Why I Won't Hire "Western" Employees Anymore.
The Advantages of Overseas Team Members vs UK/US Hires.
This concept is nothing new, but the speed and value differentials have grown even larger in the past 5 years or so.
When I say “Western” employees, all I mean is the more traditional type, salaried-based employees that tend to be hired for one role in one company.
Personally all my hiring experience is in the UK (for the traditional/western approach) and I’ve hired virtual team members (Asia/Africa etc) for over a decade as well, hiring well over 100+ virtual team members or virtual assistants (VAs).
In this post I’ll outline the 8 reasons why I likely won’t hire a UK/Western employee ever again.
Cost & Value
The first one is obvious, cost.
To hire a semi-competent person in the UK (low level) probably costs at best £24k/year.
If you are looking for someone with industry experience, sharp social skills and closer to that A-player avatar, you are looking at closer to £40k/year and in London that’ll jump to £60-70k for someone half decent.
All in all, pretty expensive, but everything is relative.
Things can only be expensive vs the outcome.
If you paid someone £40k/year but they delivered £400k/year of value to your company, that’s a great hire. If they deliver only £60k, then adding in the management, hassle and other costs, it’s probably a bad hire.
Value is the more important metric when it comes to judging success or failure of these employees.
For me, value is related back to cost, it’s simple “Value Provided” - “Total cost + admin” = Net gain. If someone has a high net gain for the business, of course they are great, but for the other reasons on this list, it seems like the net gain for western employees is drastically decreasing.
Entitlement & The Low BAR
Depending on where you live in the Western world, you’ve probably started to noticed this victim and entitlement concept start to creep into your daily lives a lot more.
Amplified by media this has started to lower the bar to average massively.
Despite sounding like an old man who shouts at clouds, when I was first looking for a job in my teenage years, wages sucked, positions were getting filled within hours and there were no “good” positions.
I’m sure every generation says this, but it does seem more apparent know based on the quality of hospitality employees being so low.
But, this is also great for someone looking to actually get hired, if you are social, slightly outgoing, can hold a conversation and get to work on time, you are now in the top 5% of people looking for work, and based on how desperate companies are getting, you can get any low to mid level position you want.
But, from a purely UK vs overseas discussion, the entitlement that VA’s have vs UK employees is a factor of magnitude lower.
In general, harder working, better work ethic and happy to have a “job” rather than someone in the western world.
PAYE, NI & Government Fees
This might be the killer for me.
PAYE, NI and all the government fees that come along with hiring someone are one of my pet hates with the UK and the structure of a lot of taxes/NI.
In short, in the UK at least, you have to pay the government to hire people.
So before you pay your employees (and before you even help the country generate jobs), you have to actually pay HMRC to have the privilege of paying people…
One of the most counter-intuitive things if you are trying to optimise for job growth.
We only have a small UK team, but even our PAYE & NI tax bill (before pensions or anything like that) is £1,200/month….
A fee that could actually go out to hiring other team members or just growing the business.
When you hire overseas team members obviously this fee is not applicable.
Wage Differentials (And Value)
Similar to the value point mentioned above, wage differential is essentially what you get for a similar employee(s).
The most stark example of this is anything that can be semi-automated or where you don’t need your overseas team members to communicate directly to clients.
A couple of direct examples of jobs with compensation vs the overseas version of this. I’ve used PH figures for this as hiring overseas team members in the Philippines is the one we recommend the most and the country we’ve hired the most team members from.
Customer service (remote): UK: £20,000, PH: £4,000.
Design services: UK £25,000. PH: £5,000.
Professional video editor: UK £40,000 PH: £9,000.
So as you can see it’s roughly about 5 times cheaper for the same quality of work.
What’s more is if you have a £40k budget for a position on your team, you can either just £30k and invest the difference into your business elsewhere, or you can actually hire more than 1 person and still come in half the price as before.
AI Automation
Very trendy at the moment and also extremely obvious.
Most UK team members could be replaced or their jobs merged with a VA and AI.
This is probably my favourite approach currently, where you teach the VA to use the AI rather than teaching the UK employee. In this situation your costs drop and your effective output actually increases, best of both worlds.
Flexibility
Another key benefit with this approach is the flexibility you get from hiring overseas team members.
Not only in the hiring/firing side of things, but also in the ability to change their role.
When you hire an overseas team member you should hire the person not the role, which is very counter-intuitive to general hiring wisdom.
The reason for this is you can always tweak their role as you move along.
This makes everything far more flexible for you as the employer, if your business changes and pivots you can pivot the role and if they don’t like the new role, but you really like the person, you can create another role for them (again against hiring wisdom).
The reason this is possible is due to the lower hit on your bottom line. If someone costs your company £3k/month its tough to take a few months to find them a better role within your company.
If a team member costs you £600/month, it’s a lot easier to take a month or 2 to rebuild the structures and optimise them in the correct way.
Freelancer vs Employee Mentality
Another more niche benefit I’ve noticed is that the mentality of these individuals is more aligned with a business owner.
For example, a freelancer or business owner knows they need to complete specific tasks at specific times to achieve desired results in a business.
An employee will be more concerned with looking good and ensuring they stay green on teams than actually profiting the business.
This obviously can be an issue with how the dynamic is set-up rather than specifically how the individual team member actually is, but nonetheless it’s an issue I’ve noticed occurring frequently.
Hiring Ease & Filtering
The final major benefit is just how easy it is to hire good people.
Using sites such as onlinejobs.ph and others, we can find really good team members in minutes rather than months.
These people come to you and using correct filters and pre-screening questions (more on this process in another article), you can hire multiple individuals to stage 2 of hiring and the test-task process within minutes.
From here, simply saying,, please work on this for 1 day ($20) and then creating a very niche test task to test; speed of work, quality of work and overall problem solving.
Then, simply hire the best candidate.
It’s very streamlined and as a result, extremely easy to hire.