Why Is Global Talent Acquisition A Priority To Agency Success?

The Axelerant team checks in from around the world to help agencies engineer digital experiences—and we’re expanding.

We're doubling down on finding accountable, coachable, and capable people who work well with others from around the world. Because distributed, global-level collaboration is required for our teams to help big brands and agency partners engineer scalable platforms, systems, and applications for today's global marketplace.

Working remotely, whether from home or the client's office or the beach, across time zones is no longer a nice to have work benefit. Instead, it's a basic requirement for an organization to bring the most relevant people together to ensure customer success.

And, we're succeeding: 160+ team members, 10+ countries.

Yet, why is global talent acquisition really a priority to agency success?

Diversity means tangible relationships

For years, Axelerant was principally hiring from within India. However, as work outcomes started focusing more on customer and employee experiences, something beautiful happened. Customers and employees began seeing each other as people, fellow humans with whom they wanted to have a relationship with.

And with those human relationships, growth in trust and respect evolved such that they began to care more about each other. Which led to the realization that forcing one side to overly accommodating the other wasn't healthy. Things like adjusting meeting timings so that parents could see kids off to school or allowing mid-day appointments become more common.

Next, people began to recognize that despite nationality differences, they could have a mutual love of pets, food, music, and many other things. And through these similarities, interest to learn more about each other began opening minds to people not like themselves.

In fact, as minds were opened to alternative perspectives, people's value to Axelerant and its clients grew because those differing opinions provided insights into local and regional market nuances. Plus even prompting or buffering desired behaviors.

And bluntly stated, experts are found in surprising places only when you're genuinely open to beyond what you consider normal.

Literally being closer to partners

Of course, global talent acquisition means that people are closer together. Like with clients and team members placed in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. That closeness matters whether by time zones for meetings or cultural nuances to localization of digital experiences.

Because bridging cultural gaps is one of the most difficult soft skills to adapt for, being able to be closer literally and bringing people who understand the regional context helps ensure that desired outcomes are successful.

Therefore, by bridging the gap across regions and time zones with accountable, coachable, and capable people who work well with others, the outcomes of collaborative efforts are greatly enhanced. Because these people genuinely care about what they're doing, especially when working with peers of meaningful relationships.

Operational benefits too

Beyond people relating better to one another, there are operational reasons and benefits to global talent acquisition that matter.

A too commonly cited one is competitive rates. While valid today, with globalization, salaries around the world are slowly coming together. 

In fact, with India's salary increases, within a few years, they'll become greater than those in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Already, India's salaries are higher than most Asian Pacific countries and closing in on Latin America too.

So even as a company with most people based in India, we have to grow beyond it to maintain competitive rates.

More importantly, being able to leverage round-the-clock, iterative delivery, especially for tight deadlines. This means that less time is spent on getting an engagement to its desired outcome that matters more than a cheaper contract price.

Of course, at times, clients just want people who are in similar time zones working at a pace like themselves. Therefore, reaching pleasant synchronicity to get their project accomplished.

By recognizing experts in atypical locations around the world and motivated by things other than money alone, these highly-capable people add to the delivery of increasingly complex projects.

Even better, these experts provide clients with access to specialized skills they would not usually have access to when regional-specific systems come into play. Leading to agencies getting a mutual knowledge transfer between highly skilled people and their teams to gain a longer-term sustainable edge for themselves.

Supporting community growth

Through global expansion, we’re also supporting the growth of open source communities. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic forcing distributed work upon us, there are still plenty of local and regional communities that come together in person or online for their interests. And, these group relationships provide a place to inspire leadership and eventual recruitment.

As Axelerant invests in global talent acquisition, through targeted regions, we're aligning clients and our interests. This means that we're fostering more diverse experiences for team members to help build up Open Source communities that matter to them and promote value-driven opportunity creation.

In Cuba, we've created the opportunity for developers to move beyond pet and university projects into work past their country's borders. And, we've learned that sanctioned countries make it hard for their people to connect with others.

In Taiwan and Japan, we've created awareness about Drupal and WordPress. We helped leaders and individual contributors find opportunities beyond coding for hardware and into more interactive consumer-facing systems.

Reaching beyond borders brings value

As we proceed with hiring beyond corporate office borders, we’re fostering more diverse experience on our team, building up Open Source evangelism, and creating value-driven opportunities of all types.

These opportunities for our people and clients reach beyond local, regional, and national markets giving them a chance to become better in unique and unexpected ways. Especially as we focus on valuable customer and employee experiences.

The value of diverse people from across the globe cycles back into our business core for client initiatives, refined best practices, and successfully completed ever-complex projects. 

And best of all, we're actively demonstrating our purpose; we empower people in ways that matter to them to create substantial value for our customers and positively impact the world.