Most mid-sized employers do not need a global talent strategy. They need a clear answer to a narrower question: for each open role, where should the person sit? Cost used to settle it. It rarely does now.
Here is a practical way to decide, written for employers hiring in Canada and the United States.
Start with the work, not the country
Sort your open and likely roles by how the work actually gets done:
- Needs to be on site. Production, skilled trades, maintenance, warehouse, quality. These are local by definition.
- Needs real-time contact with your team or customers. Sales, customer-facing operations, finance business partners, project leads.
- Can run on a defined handoff. Data preparation, back-office processing, some software development, reconciliations.
Only the third group is a serious candidate for offshore. The second group may work nearshore if time zones overlap. The first group never moves.
What each model is good for
| Model | Works well for | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Local hire | On-site, regulated, client-facing roles | Tight supply, higher pay |
| Nearshore | Roles that need same-day collaboration | Employment law, tax, payroll set-up |
| Offshore | Well-documented, repeatable work | Time-zone lag, quality drift, data security |
Canadian employers have an advantage with US-aligned time zones and often a shared working culture. Nearshoring from either country usually means Latin America, where overlap with North American hours is the main draw. Offshoring works best when the process is already written down. If it lives in one person's head, it will not survive the move.
Compliance is now a hiring input
Immigration cost and paperwork have pushed some employers to place work abroad instead of bringing people in. That can be a sound decision, but it is not free of compliance. Hiring a person in another country can create employment, tax and permanent establishment obligations. Contractor classification gets scrutinized in both countries.
Before you commit, get answers to three questions:
- Who is the legal employer, and where?
- Where does the data live, and who can access it?
- Who owns the work product and the know-how?
If you cannot answer all three in a sentence, you are not ready to hire abroad.
Skills-first hiring widens every option
Dropping degree requirements where they were never needed makes a larger pool available locally too. A finance team that insisted on a specific credential for every analyst seat, or a plant that demanded formal certification for entry-level technicians it was willing to train, often finds capable people it had been screening out.
This is the cheapest move on the list. Review each job description and ask what the person must be able to do in the first 90 days. Test for that.
Automation changes the mix, not the need for people
AI tools now handle parts of scheduling, screening, forecasting and reporting. That shifts which roles you need more of. Demand grows for people who can check, tune and own the output: data analysts, process leads, controllers who understand the systems. Whoever sits in those seats, local or remote, needs to be able to say when the output is wrong.
Do not send a broken process abroad and expect software to fix it. Fix it first.
A blended model usually wins
Few employers end up all local or all remote. A common pattern looks like this:
- A local core for leadership, customer contact and anything physical
- Contract or project staff for peaks and one-off builds
- A small remote or nearshore team for defined, documented work
Contract staffing is the quiet piece of this. It lets you test whether a role is stable enough to build a permanent team around, before you take on a foreign entity or a long-term headcount.
One GTA food manufacturer we worked with hired more than 20 people over 18 months across production, skilled trades and office roles. None of that work could have been placed anywhere else. The office roles, though, were scoped carefully, and some were made hybrid. The point is that each seat was decided on its own merits.
What to do next
Take your current openings and forecast for the next 12 months. Mark each role as on site, real-time or handoff. Then price the local option honestly, including how long the seat has been empty and what that costs you. Only then look at moving work.
If you want a second opinion on where a role should sit, or you need the local people to make the plan work, a Traverse recruiter can help with that.