Hiring Across Multiple Locations

Denitsa Nikolova
Dec 15, 2025
3 min read

Best Practices for Growing Companies

Hiring across multiple locations has become a standard growth strategy for startups and scale-ups. Access to broader talent pools, faster hiring, and geographic flexibility are strong advantages. At the same time, multi-location hiring introduces complexity that many companies underestimate.

The challenge is rarely sourcing candidates. The real challenge is making clear, consistent hiring decisions across different markets.

1. Start with role clarity, not location

Before deciding where to hire, companies need to be aligned on what problem the role is meant to solve.

Without clear role definition, opening the same position in multiple locations often leads to:

inconsistent candidate evaluation
changing expectations mid-process
delayed decisions

We must first define responsibilities, seniority, and success criteria. After that, we can determine whether the role is local, multi-market, or global in scope.

2. Acknowledge market realities early

Hiring conditions differ significantly across countries. Availability of skills, compensation expectations, notice periods, and candidate motivation vary more than many teams expect.

Companies that succeed in global hiring invest time upfront in understanding:

realistic timelines per market
compensation benchmarks
talent supply constraints

Assumptions based on one location rarely transfer cleanly to another.

3. Define a clear compensation philosophy

Multi-location hiring quickly exposes gaps in compensation strategy. Trying to keep everything “equal” across regions often creates friction, while fully localised approaches can lead to internal inconsistency.

What matters most is clarity:

how salaries are benchmarked
how benefits differ by location
how equity or bonuses are handled

When compensation principles are unclear, negotiations slow down and trust erodes on both sides.

4. Standardise the hiring process, not the context

A common mistake in global hiring is over-customising processes per location. This often leads to inconsistent decisions and confusion for candidates.

Best practice is to:

maintain one core hiring process
use consistent evaluation criteria
keep decision ownership clear

Context may differ by country, but hiring standards should not.

5. Design interviews with decision speed in mind

In global hiring, strong candidates often have multiple options. Long processes, unclear steps, or slow feedback loops significantly increase drop-off rates.

Effective teams:

limit unnecessary interview stages
define decision points upfront
communicate timelines clearly

Speed and clarity protect quality more than adding extra interviews.

6. Prepare for trade-offs, not perfect candidates

Hiring across locations almost always requires compromise. Differences in cost, seniority, experience, or market maturity mean that “ideal” profiles rarely exist everywhere.

The key is not avoiding trade-offs, but making them consciously:

deciding what matters most for the business now
understanding the risks of each option
aligning decision-makers before final interviews

Unprepared teams often delay hiring while waiting for conditions that never materialise.

7. Treat recruiting as decision support

Multi-location hiring works best when recruiting is treated as a decision-support function rather than an execution task.

Strong recruiting support:

challenges unrealistic expectations
provides market context
highlights risks early
supports clearer, faster decisions

This is where global hiring succeeds or breaks down.

Making multi-location hiring work in practice

Hiring across multiple locations does not fail because of geography. It fails when clarity, ownership, and decision discipline are missing.

A few principles help prevent that:

Be explicit about what is flexible and what is not
Validate assumptions before sourcing begins
Protect decision speed throughout the process
Support hiring managers with context, not just candidates
Optimise for clarity before expanding location coverage

Hiring across multiple locations is ultimately a decision-quality challenge, not a sourcing one. Companies that recognise this build teams that scale more predictably and avoid costly hiring mistakes.