Hiring Remote Talents from Italy — Resources 2024 + Useful Tips

Today’s Italy is a beautiful country with lots of potential. However, a lack of qualified personnel curbs business growth there. According to a ManpowerGroup survey, over 50% of Italian employers reported difficulties in finding qualified personnel. The shortage of skilled workers is mainly observed in the fields of information technology (IT), engineering, science, and healthcare. This problem is linked to several factors, such as declining birth rates, high youth unemployment rates, and a lack of investment in education and vocational training. Interestingly, the shortage of skilled personnel is especially noticeable in the IT sector. The "Digital Talent Gap in Italy" survey conducted by Linkedin shows that Italy has a shortage of digital technology specialists of more than 80,000 people.

How does an HR manager find a perfect match for a long-vacated position? One way is to reconsider traditional search tools and spice them up with EasyStaff, a freelance management platform.

From our experience, we see that the tendency is to outsource regular workload to overseas specialists. It may seem difficult to manage a remote team labor law-wise, but that’s not the case with EasyStaff. A freelance management platform like us is the Employer of Record for international teammates. They are paid by us and are ‘hired' by us which makes you, the actual client, safe from expensive payroll taxes.

If you are in Italy and you worry about language and culture fit of your prospective teammate, consider the following countries where Italian is widely spoken:

Now that you see how borders can’t stop your hiring process, let’s revisit the well-known tools and fine tune them for your international HR hunt.

Monsters.it

While posting job offers is free, it’s hidden behind a paywall. There are three subscriptions to help you get the best out of the website — Starter, Standard, and Premium. Importantly, regardless of what plan you choose, you will always get access to Monsters' highly developed ad system. The array of tools includes Social Job Ads to target desired professionals on their social media; and TalentBin that generates a generic composite of ideal candidates. Interestingly, job ads are highly flexible. For example, you can withhold company information until a specific step is taken in the application process.

Monsters Best Practices:
#1: Your job ads and postings are your company’s presentation. You want to invest in high quality copy before you go out there to lure in the best hires.
#2: Use your company’s branding to stay out of the crowd. Your branding is important to help create a virtual entity in the eyes of job seekers.
#3: Pump up your titles and texts with keywords that will help Monster read and rank your job posting.

InfoJobs

Founded in Spain, the job board has gotten popular all over the world. In Italy, you will find their Italian website. The flow is easy and familiar. On the one hand, you can buy a subscription to unlock all the CVs in their database and search in that collection. On the other hand, you can create a new job posting and receive CVs from interested job seekers. It’s cool that you only pay for getting contact details of candidates you find appropriate. But before you pay, you can check if the candidate is actually interested in your offer to make sure you don’t waste money. Interestingly, you won’t have to post a job! Browse CVs and reach out to individual candidates.

InfoJobs Best Practices:
#1: When writing your job posting, keep in mind the ranking system. InfoJobs' ranking rewards job postings with the highest rank if there are complete sentences, accurate wording and filled out ‘optional' fields.
#2: When drafting the job posting, use the language of a job seeker. What word would they use? For HR managers, it’s common to use exclusively company-specific terms and job names.
#3: Salary range is important, but try keeping it as narrow as possible. Too large a gap between minimum and maximum may deter some prospects from applying.

Remoters

This job board is originally Spanish but it has already gained its audience in the rest of Europe. The job board boasts a wide variety of locations and work areas to choose from. There are three payment plans — they are called ‘job inclusions'. The most expensive one is $ 170, and it offers the widest range of options — from job posting editing, to adding employers' socials and getting published on Remoters' social media. Besides a simple layout and traditional job board sections, this job board has a rich blog section featuring HR trends, remote hiring and everything else.

Remoters Best Practices
#1: Consider bullet point lists instead of long unstructured texts. It’s important to allow an interested candidate to quickly scan the requirements and decide whether to apply or not. Why make things harder for your perfect hire?
#2: To make a posting lucrative, describe a job opportunity. Naturally, it’s important to list responsibilities; yet you want to explain how a job entails growth opportunities and development paths.
#3: Describe the application process in the posting. It will outline the future for candidates, and filter out those that want to apply fast and just for the hell of it.

JobTeaser

This is an interesting one. If you are looking for candidates for lower positions — or even junior jobs. Jobteaser is exactly that! Employed widely across Europe and Italy, the website focuses on graduate and student work opportunities. If you are looking for an enthusiast to turn them into your perfect teammate, then JobTeaser is a great option. The population is not exclusively locals. In fact, Rome Business School partnered up with JobTeaser, and it offers exclusive jobs — or positions with preliminary access — only to its students. And its students are internationals that came to Italy specifically to study. With JobTeaser, you are looking at a job posting in multiple schools. In fact, if you are inclined towards a particular educational institution, you may publish a job posting specifically for them.

JobTeaser Best Practices:
#1: When creating your company’s page on the website, it’s advised not to miss any fields, even ‘optional' ones. Information and its fullness contribute to your ranking when students browse the website.
#2: The word ‘intern' in the title will not bring your job posting anywhere as virtually all jobs posted there are for interns. You want to invest in a concise, yet accurate job description on the resource to get views and applications.
#3: With JobTeaser, you publish jobs to those schools that signed up. This means that universities are very much interested in publishing real jobs with exact details. JobTeaser only posts jobs that pay at least the bare minimum required by law in the country. Despite the resource being student-oriented, you should not consider it to be a cheap labor force resource.

Linkedin

Good old Linkedin is more than a hiring tool. It offers much more than automated ads or direct message campaigns (which are great!). The beauty of LInkedin is its networking nature. Sending tons of messages to a faceless pool of job seekers allows you to make the search massive. However, if you trace your current employees' connections on the website, you may find like-minded people and reach out to them.

Linkedin Best Practices
#1: Personalize messages to show your prospects you are truly interested in them. While it can be tempting to send out templates to reach more accounts, quality messages increase success rate by about XX%.
#2: Make your first message about the person you are reaching out to. It may be helpful to skip personal introductions (‘I am this and that at ABC'), and get their attention quickly through explaining how they are a great fit to your business.
#3: Refrain from being too generic when complimenting a person’s skills or qualifications. Again, doing things fast seems correct, but efficiency is higher when you make you every contact point meaningful and customized

Wellfound (formerly Angel List)

The resource is focused on startup jobs and remote workers. Wellfound doesn’t require candidates to apply for jobs only in their locations, and the workforce that comes to Wellfound to look for job opportunities are diverse and usually speak at least 2 languages. The job board is centered around tech startups (and specialists). Its marketing set is not as diverse as some of the others discussed above — no social ads or mass posting. If your company has an ATS, Wellfound easily integrates with it. So your hiring process is seamless. Both parties (prospective employees and businesses) seem to highlight the website’s UX and mention that it looks better than well-known Seek or Indeed.

Wellfound Best Practices
#1: Set a clear remote work policy. It will save time if you set up your remote work expectations upfront. Thankfully, Wellfound has a specific field related to it, so leaving it empty is not recommended.
#2: Show your current team. Oftentimes candidates look for more than just a pay. A position that helps learn from the best is just as valuable as a well-paid position. If you know your team is top notch, don’t be shy and attract your next great hire with a current team of professionals on board.
#3: Highlight your corporate culture. Remote candidates are more likely to feel unengaged than offline employees. When hiring a remote talent, let them know that your company is a lot more than tasks in task trackers. Share corporate events and beliefs, and use a corporate culture as a valuable asset when hunting for the best remote workers out there.

The world of HR tools has never been as diverse as it is today. While we were researching for this article, we came across the following tips to make your remote/local hiring process easier. These tools and tips are international, and regardless of where you are or from where you are hiring, you might consider using them.

• Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) were a frequent result in Google when looking for job boards.

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is software that manages the recruiting and hiring process, including job postings and job applications. It organizes information about job seekers and makes it searchable. As its name implies, an ATS tracks candidates through the hiring process. It helps with interview scheduling, issues notifications and alerts, and sends automated emails to candidates and employees, such as recruiters and hiring managers. But these systems are far more than organizers. An ATS is also used to cull applicants and recommend the top candidates. It may conduct a preliminary analysis of the applicants to find the best fits for a job. It may also look for keywords or use AI-type algorithms that run a deeper analysis of the job applicant. The goal is to speed HR’s review of job applications and resumes. One super-popular ATS is Workable.
EasyStaff Comments: While we are not a huge international corporation yet, we do believe that ATS are irreplaceable when it comes to massive HR processes. However, remember that ATS treats your prospects and submitted CVs as units in a system. Sometimes a personalized human approach may be just as effective.

• Job board engines are a very helpful tool to help you locate a perfect job board where you will hunt your ideal candidate.

In simple words, job boards are a place where all companies come to post their jobs, and candidates go there to send their cover letters and apply. A job board engine, however, scours multiple job boards to the benefit of both a company and a job seeker. Job seekers can see way more job postings than through a regular job board. And HRs can basically find the right place to carry out their search. For example, Jobboard Finder and ZipRecruiter let you look for a job/country-specific job board to maximize response rate and optimize head hunting with targeted job postings.
EasyStaff Comments: Job board finders may be an amazing place to start your search, really. To target a particular geography or a particular skill set, you may want to include job board engine as your very first step in the HR funnel.

• Telegram communities are really a makeshift Linkedin but they are just as powerful.

You may think that Linkedin is the best way to keep your network organized. Well, the truth is that a chat-based social network Telegram is an extremely popular place for remote workers. The social network boasts a huge amount of work/profession-related communities and channels. To get straight into your candidate community, check out Telegram community selections like this, where links and short descriptions are provided. You may have to speak to admins to post your job postings, or you may easily reach out to candidates in private messages.

With EasyStaff, working with freelancers or international specialists has never been easier. With safe and 100% legal money transfers, you can hire talents without worrying about taxes. EasyStaff offers a wide variety of services to facilitate hassle-free hiring and payment processes of your remote team. If you are looking to grow your business, relocate or cut hiring and payroll expenses, join our platform now and our managers will customize the best solution for you.