Freelancers from the CIS are storming the market – Kommersant FM

Russian companies have begun to hire personnel from neighboring countries more often. From the beginning of the year until mid-summer, 4.5 thousand freelancers received work. These are mainly specialists living in Georgia, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. But the largest group is from Kazakhstan, according to a study by the Solar Staff service. The number of employing companies has increased by a third over the past year. If in 2022 there were about 190, now there are 260.

In total, they paid almost 1 billion rubles to their foreign performers, said Alexander Norovyatkin, head of the Solar Staff communications department:

“If we talk about the neighboring countries – Georgia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan – then such freelancers were paid a total of 815 million rubles, which is three times more than last year. It is important to understand here that these figures are not comparable to the amount of money that these same companies pay Russian freelancers.

But if we compare the statistics year by year, a certain trend is visible – there are more such workers, and companies work with them more often. These are people who are involved in advertising, education, e-commerce and media. Plus programmers, QA engineers, that is, testers, mobile developers, project managers – everyone who is in one way or another connected with digital products.”

For employers, contracts with freelancers are more profitable than with permanent employees. This way, companies can find more qualified personnel for less money, explained Denis Kaminsky, a partner at FutureToday:

“Why is it great to work with remote employees while tapping into other candidate markets? You get, firstly, the opportunity to close a position cheaper and faster, and secondly, you have higher quality for less money. Statistics show that as soon as you offer the flexibility to work with freelancers abroad, the number of job applications increases dramatically.

Considering that our labor market is now very difficult for companies, there are few responses, it is difficult to find candidates, this is a big and important factor in attracting employees. That is, if you look for the right specialist in Moscow or in another city, it may happen that the allocated budget for him is simply not enough. And if you expand your search to freelancers abroad, you get more influx and you can find the right candidate.

This affects not only the availability of a specialist, but also their quality. A person who goes abroad has much fewer opportunities to find a job. Therefore, while he has not acclimatized there, you can find freelancers who were previously unavailable, but are now ready to cooperate. In this way, it turns out to hire an overqualified worker who has more experience and skills than those who are in the Russian Federation.

The second component: if you work with freelancers, then a different tax regime applies. When hiring a person in the state, according to the Labor Code, it is necessary to pay not only personal income tax for him, but also contributions to social funds, and this is a fairly significant amount. When working with a freelancer, this is not the case. The employee takes the risk. You get some tax benefits as well.”

Asia has become a popular destination for finding freelancers in 2022. The number of Russians who moved to the countries of this region and joined Russian companies as freelancers increased by 30% compared to the first half of 2022. The companies mainly hired people who had relocated to Thailand, Indonesia, India, South Korea and China. According to Solar Staff, the total amount of payments to freelancers from Asia is close to 190 million rubles.

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Svetlana Belova