How to hire a foreign worker in Portugal

Hiring someone who lives outside the European Union follows an order that catches many companies off guard: the contract comes first. It is the contract that lets the person apply for a work visa at the Portuguese consulate in their country, and only after arriving do they register with AIMA and Social Security. Companies that start by looking for the person and leave the paperwork for later find out too late that the process has to run the other way around.

The first step is deciding what you are looking for, and it is more specific than it sounds. It is not a number of people: it is roles, verifiable skills, shifts, and a date from which they are needed. An operation that needs twelve people in September has a different problem from one that needs two right now. This definition is what determines which country makes sense to look in.

Then comes selection. At Indica7 we recruit in Nepal, India, Thailand, Brazil, Mozambique and Cape Verde, and also in Portugal when the profile exists here. Candidates are pre-assessed and the company meets them by video before any decision. Those who pass take practical tests in their home country: nobody boards a plane without showing they can do the work, because finding that out on arrival costs everyone.

The legal side is the one that takes the most time and the one most likely to go wrong. Contracts, visas, AIMA and Social Security are a chain in which a badly prepared application comes back and takes weeks with it. This part stays entirely on our side, and it is the reason a licensed agency exists: IEFP licence 097023 is what authorises us to do it.

Then there is the arrival, which is where a lot of international hiring falls apart. Someone who lands in a country they do not know, without knowing where they will sleep or how they get to work on Monday, is someone who gives up in the first month. We handle the reception, the accommodation when it is needed, and the first day on the job is supervised.

Finally, the probation period is followed closely, and not as a formality: that is where you see whether the placement worked for both sides. If it does not work, we replace. The risk of an international hire going wrong is not for the company that hired to carry.