How to hire remote business analysts

In the current fast-paced work within a data-driven economy, business analysts play a crucial role in driving strategic decisions and operational efficiency. As remote work becomes a new normal, organizations are increasingly looking beyond their local talent pools to find skilled business analysts who could operate across borders without compromising on performance or collaboration.

Hiring a remote business analyst offers access to a broad range of expertise, flexibility, and cost advantages. However, it also requires a thoughtful approach to sourcing, screening, integrating the professionals into the workflow, and ensuring they stay productive at work. In this blog, we have discussed in detail the key steps and best practices to successfully hire a remote business analyst and manage them across borders, which will align with the business goals.

What are the roles of a remote business analyst?

As businesses are highly adopting hybrid and remote working models, the demand for skilled remote business analysts is growing significantly. These professionals serve as the link between business objectives and technical solutions, thus ensuring data, processes, and systems are in line to assist in the company’s growth, all while working from a distant location. Although there is a geographic constraint, remote business analysts are expected to deliver the same level of accuracy, communication, and efficiency as their in-office counterparts. Their role is quite dynamic and often spans various departments, including IT, operations, finance, marketing, and product development. An enterprise business analyst’s roles and responsibilities usually cover the following:

1. Gathering the business requirements

One of the primary responsibilities of a remote business analyst is to gather and document the business requirements. This also involves working closely with stakeholders across the departments to understand their goals, pain areas, and functional needs. They identify the required changes or improvements via video calls, digital surveys, and virtual workshops. Further, they translate these insights into actionable documentation for technical teams.

2. Focus on data-driven analysis 

Business analysts are required to use data to identify trends, inefficiencies, and performance gaps within the existing processes or systems. A remote business analyst should be skilled in interpreting KPIs, dashboards, and reports from multiple data sources. The insights often help businesses to make informed decisions about product enhancements, customer journeys, financial issues, and more.

3. Process optimization and mapping

Using tools like Miro, Lucidchart, or Viso, remote business analysts map out the existing workflows and then recommend optimized versions that eliminate bottlenecks and reduce manual efforts. They are quite instrumental in identifying the automation opportunities or digital transformation gaps, therefore, often contributing directly to ERP or RPA implementation strategies.

4. Stakeholder communication

Business analysts act as a bridge between technology and business. They constantly communicate with stakeholders. Additionally, they also translate technical details for the business teams and clarify the strategic goals for the engineers and developers. Their remote role makes it important for them to be proactive and consistent using digital communication tools such as Slack, Teams, or Zoom.

5. Design solution collaboration

Remote business analysts often collaborate with solution architects, IT leads, or product managers to evaluate and validate the proposed solutions. Their job is to make sure that the design aligns with the business expectations, adheres to the project timelines, and meets technical feasibility. They will also be required to participate in UAT or User Acceptance Testing and provide feedback during the rollout.

What are the benefits of hiring a remote business analyst?

Hiring business analysts remotely comes with a lot more than just flexibility in staffing; it will open the doors to a huge talent pool, cost savings, and also enhance the agility in business decision-making. Some of the most valuable benefits that organizations experience are:

1. Access to the global talent

By hiring offshore business analysts, companies would no longer be limited by geography. This means that they can tap into a wide pool of experienced business analysts with domain expertise, niche skills, and industry certifications, regardless of where the business is located. This will also help businesses in scaling faster by hiring based on capability and not just proximity.

2. Highly cost-efficient

Hiring remotely can significantly reduce operational expenses. Without the need for a physical office space, relocation costs, or on-site equipment, businesses can easily reinvest savings into other strategic areas. Additionally, hiring from other regions with lower living expenses would allow the companies to maintain quality while also optimizing the salary budgets.

3. Increase in flexibility and time zone coverage

Remote business analysts will offer time zone diversity, which could speed up the project delivery cycles, especially in a global organization. When these are managed effectively, continuous progress becomes possible, thus enabling teams to make continuous improvements and updates even outside the standard business hours.

What are the challenges of hiring a remote business analyst

While hiring a remote business analyst offers cost benefits, flexibility, and access to a global talent pool, it also comes with a varied set of challenges. Whether hiring talent internally or through a staffing agency, companies should proactively address these hurdles to ensure a successful collaboration and timely project delivery.

Let’s dive into some of them below:

1. Legal compliance issues

Hiring across borders will involve navigating labor laws, data protection regulations, and contractor classification rules. Missteps in contracts, taxes, or payroll could lead to penalties, fines or even lawsuits. This is especially true in countries with strict compliance requirements.

2. Lack of visibility into performance

One of the primary concerns for businesses is tracking the performance of the remote analyst. Without in-person supervision, it could get quite difficult to monitor the daily progress, work quality, and time management unless proper KPIs, reporting tools, and metrics are in place.

3. High costs of the traditional staffing agencies

Various businesses approach staffing agencies for speedy hiring; however, this often comes at a major cost. Agencies charge high markups, limit access to candidates, and offer inflexible contract terms. This could result in inflated expenses with limited transparency into pricing and candidates’ pay.

How Global Squirrels simplifies hiring a remote business analyst

Global Squirrels is a staffing and payrolling platform that sources, hires, and onboards top talent locally/globally based on your job requirements. Along with this, the platform has in-built remote talent management tools, such as multi-country timesheet and leave management, one-time/recurring task assignment, and SquirrelTracker, to ensure your offshore resources are productive and aligned with your project’s goals. Here’s how Global Squirrels and its Employer of Record (EOR) solution can help you overcome the above challenges with hiring remote business analysts.

1. Simplified global compliance

Global Squirrels can help you manage foreign labor laws, tax requirements, and categorization concerns. As the Employer of Record (EOR), our platform manages legal agreements, international payroll, benefits, and compliance for every nation where you hire. This reduces risk and guarantees that your company complies with regional laws without requiring you to invest in infrastructure or retain legal counsel.

2. Task and performance monitoring

One of the most frequent problems with managing remote talent is a lack of visibility into the tasks and performance. You can assign one-time/recurring tasks to your remote workers with a single click. Managers and employees can see task statuses at a glance, ensuring transparency and accountability​.

3. Transparent hiring with no markups

Global Squirrels offers flat-fee pricing with no hidden costs, in contrast to staffing agencies that have huge markups and little visibility. By paying only the payroll cost and flat license fee per hire, you get access to elite, pre-screened business analysts, without the need to extend your recruitment budget.

How does it work?

If you are looking to hire a remote business analyst, the Orange Plan would be an excellent fit, as it covers recruitment and EOR. To onboard your self-sourced talent, our Purple Plan will handle this and also manage the payroll and benefits administration. However, if you prefer having better oversight, choose the Blue Plan to hire business analysts who will work from one of our managed offices located in India, Mexico, or the Philippines.

Easy steps to hire top remote business analysts by choosing the Orange Plan:

• Sign up or log in and post your job requirements, along with your chosen hiring location.
• In 2-5 business days, you will receive an email notification to review three curated profiles on the portal.
• Conduct interviews and shortlist your ideal candidate for onboarding.
• Review and approve the offer letter and pay your new hires’ onboarding deposit (one-month hiring cost equivalent to the payroll cost and flat license fee)
• Global Squirrels will onboard the remote business analyst and handle all HR-related duties, such as payroll, benefits, and compliance.

Hiring top remote business analysts does not have to be complex or expensive if you choose the right staffing partner!

Take a tour of our staffing and payroll platform and see how Global Squirrels makes a difference in hiring and managing top talent locally and globally.

Ready to post your business analyst job requirement? Get started here!