Overview: Recruitment Outsourcing in Panama?

It’s time to scale your business and after giving it much thought, a decision has been made to expand into the Panamanian market. It’s likely that you’ll need to hire local employees to handle sales, marketing, accounting and payroll, regulatory compliance, and human resource tasks. Hiring can be a pain for employers at the best of times in familiar territory; it’s doubly so in a new jurisdiction with an unfamiliar work culture and language. But worry not: there are recruitment outsourcing resources in Panama that can smooth out the hiring process. 

What is recruitment outsourcing in Panama?

What is recruitment outsourcing, in Panama or anywhere else, and how does it differ from traditional hiring and recruitment? 

• In-house hiring/recruitment – If you’re fortunate enough to have a team in place that understands Panama’s work culture and talent/labor pools well, then it’s possible to perform talent acquisition in-house. But businesses entering an unfamiliar market are unlikely to know where the ideal talent is located – and without remedying this knowledge gap – is likely to cast too wide a net with job postings on social media or job boards.

• Recruitment outsourcing in Panama – Essentially, this is when a business outsources the hiring process to a third party, either an individual recruiter/headhunter, or a recruitment solutions provider with local knowledge and experience sifting through the slush-pile of CVs to find top talent. Recruitment firms can assume varying levels of involvement in the process, from managing the entire hiring and onboarding lifecycle, to finding promising candidates and forwarding their CVs to a hiring manager. 

Whichever method a business decides to go with, it’s important to get a sense of the intricacies of Panamanian culture and labor norms. Another specialized service that a company will want to consider is that of an employer of record in Panama. Like recruitment outsourcing in Panama, an employer for record (EOR) is a professional third party that takes responsibility for the legal, immigration, and employment needs of a company.

Benefits of outsourcing in Panama

• Help with crafting the ideal job description 
• Reduced employee training/onboarding time
• Greater chance at hiring the best available talent
• Recruitment is one less thing to worry about 
• Business is able to expand/scale rapidly

Top 5 advantages that outsourcing in Panama has over in-house hiring

1. Help with crafting the ideal job description

Some companies treat job descriptions more like a wish-list than an accurate portrayal of what kind of employee they’re really looking for. So it’s no surprise that candidates who are under-experienced and/or under-qualified will fire off a résumé anyway. The result is often a large pile of applications with little or no ideal candidates. A professional recruiter can help businesses tighten up their job descriptions so it’s clear to job seekers that they shouldn’t bother applying if they don’t have experience X or qualification Y. 

2. Reduced employee training/onboarding time

Businesses, in Panama and elsewhere, must spend time and resources bringing a new hire up to speed. But by outsourcing your recruitment process to a professional, companies have a better chance of finding a person that is not only a good fit, but also brings enough experience to be well acquainted with the position – meaning that onboarding time is kept to a minimum.

3. Greater chance at hiring the best available talent

To invoke a fishing analogy, casting too wide a net when recruitment outsourcing in Panama and you’ll end up with a pile of CVs and few, if any qualified candidates. But if you cast a fishing line with the right bait, you’ll attract a certain type of ‘fish’ (i.e., candidate). Recruiters who use focused searches will increase the company’s chances of finding a high-quality candidate who is among the top in their field.

4. Recruitment is one less thing to worry about 

Delays in filling vacant positions at a small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) can cause businesses to become stagnant or even contract. But finding qualified personnel is time consuming and downright stressful. Recruitment outsourcing for newly domiciled businesses in Panama makes sense – a good recruiter will assure management that they are doing everything they can to help the business thrive. Partnering with the right recruiter makes finding the right people for the job one less thing for managers to worry about.

5. Business is able to expand/scale rapidly

All companies want to be more productive and increase sales, but hiring the people needed in order to scale the business can be difficult, especially in a place like Panama. The country’s relatively small population (around 4.3 million) poses a problem. The population of the capital, Panama City, is less than 500,000 people. This means that the local talent pool is much smaller than in other jurisdictions. But with the right recruitment outsourcing in Panama partner – and with the right incentives – businesses can find the best people for the roles that need to be filled, allowing them to expand at a more rapid pace than if they had tackled the hiring process alone.

Biz Latin Hub can help you with recruitment and outsourcing in Panama

At Biz Latin Hub, we provide integrated market entry and back office services throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, with offices in 17 major cities around the region.

As well as knowledge about recruitment outsourcing in Panama, our portfolio of services includes hiring & PEO, accounting & taxation, company formation, bank account opening, and corporate legal services.

Contact us today to find out more about how we can assist you in finding top talent, or otherwise do business in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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