Karen Ng is the Regional Head of Expansion & Market Lead in Hong Kong, Singapore, ASEAN, and India of Deel. She drives expansion and oversees Deel’s business development across Asia, Greater China and India. Karen is a sales leader and people manager with over 15 years of business development experience across the technology and hospitality sectors. Prior to joining Deel, she was Regional Head of Commercial at HReasily.

In an exclusive conversation with People Matters, Karen shares her expert insights on the key trends in the world of hiring, how Deel empowers an end-to-end streamlined recruitment process and the driving values in making remote hiring successful with the right technology and the right partners.

Here are some excerpts. 

Given how the best talent is synonymous with the best growth opportunities for businesses today, what are the top trends that leaders must capitalise on when it comes to competitive global hiring?

There are three things that I would like to highlight in terms of the trends that we're seeing, especially with businesses looking at attracting global talents:

Firstly, being open to hiring remotely. India is a vibrant place with highly skilled software and tech talent. Still, we’ve found that Indian companies here are looking for international talent, for instance, in Singapore and Vietnam, where we have witnessed an expansion. At the same time, Europe and the US remain regions where they wish to attract talent. 

The second is to engage the right partner to facilitate remote hiring in a compliant manner. Deel connects companies with the right partners for hiring talent in unfamiliar regions where they’re looking to expand. In other words, it is as much about the search as it is about compliance.

Finally, once the candidate is hired, onboarding and engaging them is the next task on the list, which is primarily done by the HR function. It also makes it evident how HR is at the forefront of expansion in talent acquisition by making remote employees feel that they belong in the company's day-to-day activities, even when working from different locations and time zones. 

Deel’s recently released State of Global Hiring Report found that global hiring has been accelerating at speed. So, how does Deel support organisations in this endeavour to get the best talent compliantly? 

We have a network of partners that we work with everywhere we go. So Deel is in 150 countries today, with a team of around 1,200 people that we work with full-time. But when we enter new countries, we engage local partners generally in the accounting, tax, and legal fields. We also partner with recruitment firms and those in advisory bodies, who will be our go-to provider for full compliance. We have a team that solely does this – they source the best talent in the market and support procedures concerning tax, legal compliance, and accounting. And we use these providers to ensure that the quality of service rendered is efficient and reliable.

To sum it up, we create a roadmap for enterprises where they no longer have to double-guess when hiring. We support recruiting talent compliantly with our in-house team of professionals and by partnering with recruitment firms and local providers to ensure top-notch service to our clients. 

As leading businesses across India experiment with flexible work practices, how do you see it impact recruitment in this region? What are some of the talent trends in India that you believe would impact the business landscape? 

The pandemic has had quite a significant impact on global hiring strategies for a lot of companies. For example, in India, we see the trend in the mid-market and larger enterprise companies wanting to expand overseas. Perhaps before the pandemic, they would automatically send people who have been working in the company for a while as expatriates. But with the pandemic, that was not possible because of many different reasons. One was closed borders because mobility is always something to consider when you look at global hiring. So, they then had to look for local talents in those countries not to stop business. 

Now, when one wishes to hire, for instance, in Southeast Asia, it's no longer possible to send someone from headquarters; one must rely on local talent, which has become one of the trends. As a result, global and remorse hiring continues to carry on the business along with costs. The rise of extended remote working as an option, alongside the challenge of cross-border immigration introduced by the pandemic, has driven a new global hiring movement. This is evident in the numbers reported in the State of Global Hiring Report, which highlights how there has been a 227% increase in hiring remote employees and contractors in the Asia Pacific; this follows behind a 286% and 250% increase in Latin America and Europe, Middle East, and Africa regions, respectively.

With technology at the forefront of these new-age recruitment strategies and practices, how will Deel rethink what’s possible in the talent landscape in India? What are some of the innovations that you’re excited about? 

In the digital world, organisations today are rethinking how they adopt technology and for us at Deel, it’s really about facilitating end-to-end hiring. Once we source you the desired candidate in a remote country through our recruitment partners, our software generates the contract compliant with the company’s laws and regulations. This removes the uncertainty in the process of hiring remotely for the foreign company and even for the candidate because they are given paperwork similar to the kind they would have to sign had they been employed in a company in their own country. 

When we talk about the question of talent mobility,  navigating the challenging visa regulations also comes in, and that too is something we support at Deel through our partnerships with Legal Pad that facilitates visas into the US, as well as partnering with UAE to speed up the visa process for foreign workers. This is part of Deel's larger vision and mission to open up the world of remote hiring in several dimensions. Payroll is also an HR function that we facilitate. 

Coming to onboarding, technology can enable this process, especially when it comes to remote employees. What we have done is partnered with an enterprise called Hofy so we can disperse recruitment kits to employees regardless of where they work. WeWork is also one of our partners, so we can give employees the flexibility to step out of their homes and have a space to work even when their companies might not have offices in their country of residence. We have also looked into commuting by partnering with car rental companies in some countries. It’s all about an end-to-end process where we at Deel not only take care of the company’s recruitment needs but also the employee experience and access to the benefits that can help them seamlessly and efficiently work remotely. The right adoption of technology is fundamental to the success of the HR function in streamlining the process of hiring and onboarding talent. 

Having discussed at length about global hiring, what would be your final words of advice to organisations caught up in this race to hunt for new talent pools? 

Agility and flexibility are the two critical values. To be agile, organisations need to keep a pulse on workforce trends and how other companies are adapting to remote work policies because many components come in when making remote hiring successful for both employers and employees. Employers must also address the need for flexibility by adopting different working models and practices, from hybrid to completely remote. I believe that they need to be open-minded about it, which should reflect in their work culture. 

Finally, along with embracing agility and flexibility, it’s about getting the right partners, and that is one of the lessons we have learnt at Deel. You must partner with the right people at the right time because you cannot do everything alone. Even though we have 1400 people working for us, we still need our partners because we can’t be a rental company or solely a recruitment company. Creating an ecosystem of support with the right people and the right partners thus becomes critical.