You’ve invented a groundbreaking product or developed a game-changing new way to solve an old problem. It’s not enough in today’s fast-moving global economy to have the best idea—you also have to grab the first-mover advantage before your competition steals it from you.

That requires speed and flexibility. You have to be ready to seize—or create—the right opportunities in the right markets at the right time. Whether you want to tap a new customer base or gain access to top talent, international expansion is a strategic way to accelerate growth.

In a study conducted by the Chief Executive, companies that moved into new countries were rewarded with higher total shareholder returns, which factors in both dividends and share price appreciation, in proportion to how quickly their international business grew. In other words, the faster you can grow outside your home base, the bigger the benefit you’ll see.

To do that, you need an agile HR team that can quickly ramp up recruiting, hiring and onboarding anywhere in the world. 79% of global executives consider agile performance a high priority because it’s proven to improve efficiency, increase innovation and empower teams to work more independently in order to accomplish their goals.

The benefits of agile HR 
According to Gartner, taking an agile approach to recruiting can increase recruiter productivity by 31%. As with all agile ways of working, agile recruiting emphasises flexibility as well as collaboration, both within and across teams. Decisions are made faster, and gaps and shortcomings are identified more easily. 

Avature, a maker of recruitment CRM software, adopted agile HR processes and significantly sped up in-process time for new candidates, leading to more competitive hiring, and saved its team 140 hours of interviews. 

Agility in HR also means taking a people-centric approach instead of a more traditional organisation-based view. Spotify revamped its feedback process to increase employee engagement by separating salary negotiations and performance management from ongoing coaching and continuous feedback. As a result, employees can ask anyone in the company for feedback and suggestions for improvement as often as they wish. 

Research shows that employees who receive frequent feedback that’s both specific and constructive are more engaged and more motivated to improve and that directly impacts a company’s success. A Gallup survey quantified the benefits of employee engagement:

• 14% increase in productivity 
• 10% improvement in customer loyalty 
• 18% uptick in sales
• 23% increase in profitability
• 14% growth in organisational participation

Don’t let hiring slow you down
In August 2022, the Federation of Small Businesses found that 78% of small businesses in the U.K. had reported difficulty identifying skilled applicants during the previous 12 months and suffered a decline in output, profitability or growth as a result. How effective you are at hiring directly affects your company’s economic health. If your organisation needs to ramp up in order to expand and grow, HR can’t become a bottleneck. You need the best people on your team, whether that’s an AI engineer in Buenos Aires or a savvy negotiator in Bangkok.

An agile operating model for HR lets organisations quickly adapt to market changes and neutralise complexity, which leads to more efficient growth. To speed up your company’s overseas expansion, for example, you might: 

• Add recruiters by reassigning employees or hiring independent contractors
• Shorten the time to hire by giving HR teams more autonomy
• Partner with a global workforce solutions partner who can recruit and hire for you in whichever new markets you want to explore 

 
To hire in other countries, not only will your HR team need to quickly establish a talent pipeline, but they’ll also need to understand the complex legal requirements and cultural expectations that govern contracts, compensation, benefits and workplace communications. If you don’t have that knowledge in-house, partnering with a local recruiting and hiring partner who’s already well-versed in these regulations is the kind of creative solution that can position your company to better capitalise on opportunities.

Outsourcing recruitment also frees up HR leadership to focus on strategic business concerns like long-term resource planning, upgrading the employee experience, upskilling team members or restructuring the organisation to be more adept at meeting company goals.
Related: Tips and tricks for managing international benefits and compensation

What does agile HR look like?
To become more agile, you need to flatten your reporting structure. Let teams self-organise and empower people to adapt to changing market conditions independently, making decisions in real time and reaching out to other teams as needed without waiting for management’s approval. 
Assign teams to specific parts of the HR life cycle.

ING divided their employee journey into four phases: join, develop, reward and recognise, and move on. Each team was devoted to one of those phases, helping them focus, expand their expertise and learn faster what worked and what didn’t.

Agile workforces communicate often to share data, ideas and insights both within and across teams. They also prioritise talking over email or Slack for its efficiency, with technology acting as a supporting player for distributed workforces. Frequent collaboration strengthens teams, boosts morale and eliminates silos.

Encourage creative thinking and problem-solving. In response to the global labour shortage, many companies have begun looking beyond traditional requirements like education, experience, or professional certifications and focusing instead on soft skills such as attitude, capabilities, personality, and values. In fact, this kind of skills-based recruitment increased 63% between 2021 and 2022.

Penguin Random House introduced anonymised skills-based tests to help them understand how candidates think and behave in specific situations. They ask questions like, “It’s 5 p.m. on a Friday and you have these five tasks to do but you can only do three; which would you work on?” Not only does this system help them hire people who are a better fit culturally, thus improving employee retention, but it also widens their talent pool and eliminates racial and gender biases. 

Creativity requires experimentation, and some experiments will fail. But building in permission to fail is critical for an agile HR department. It drives learning and development, pushing you to evaluate what’s working and what’s not, so you can improve and innovate in response.  

This iterative learning lies at the heart of agile HR. Modelled after the way children learn to do things like walk and talk, iteration has four stages: making an attempt, failing, evaluating what went wrong and refining the approach before starting the cycle again.

Driving business growth through innovation
Hiring is integral to expanding into new markets, and HR’s ability to adapt quickly to shifting staffing demands can help or hinder international growth. Adopting an agile approach to recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and managing workers can set you up for success wherever your company wants to go next. Organisations that are primed to secure top talent, regardless of their location, will give themselves both staying power and a first-to-market advantage over companies that are slower to move.

Agility also drives innovation through an increased appetite for creativity and experimentation and a heightened tolerance for failure, and innovation is critical for growth. In fact, innovative businesses grow twice as fast when it comes to both sales and employment vs. businesses that don’t innovate. 84% of consumers want the companies they buy from to be innovative, and 94% of CEOs list innovation as one of their top three strategies.