How to launch your tech company over the Spanish market

 

The number of tech multinationals that are interested in tapping into the Spanish market has been on the rise since the end of the 2009 recession.

According to a study by Mobile World Capital, Spain currently hosts over 8,9% of European startup talent, only surpassed by the UK and Germany.

While it’s true that Spain’s competitive costs and qualified workforce makes it an ideal country to expand your tech startup, there are a few things you will need to get right to successfully launch business operations over here.

At PayPerTalent, we’ve helped a number of tech companies successfully expand their business in Barcelona and Madrid. In this post, we would like to share some insights that we’ve gathered over time as to how to launch your tech operations in Spain.

 

Why Spain

 

Simply put, you’ll get as good a business output in Spain as you would in other European countries, at a lesser cost. This is because salaries in Spain are lower than in other European start-up hubs such as Germany and the UK. To give you an idea, hiring a business developer in Barcelona would cost you between 30.000€ and 45.000€ a year, while the same profile in the UK or Germany would cost you between 50.000€ and 80.000€ a year.

Keep in mind that taxes are lower in Spain than in other European countries, Germany being particularly known for its high taxes. This means that an employee who’s making a gross salary of 40.000€/year in Spain would end up with the same net salary as someone who’s earning a 50.000€ gross salary in Germany. This tax-friendly system makes Spain a particularly attractive destination for expatriates.

Also, every day life in Spain is cheaper than in most Western European countries, which means that employees are usually better off in Barcelona or Madrid than they would be in London or Frankfurt in spite of earning a lower paycheck.

  

Hire a local headhunter

 

Rely on a Spanish headhunter to help you create your team. Local headhunters can help you find the best tech talent in Barcelona and Madrid, as they work with local databases and have a personal relationship with candidates which means they can refer you with trustworthy profiles who are already living in Spain.

Make sure your headhunter specialises in Digital Marketing, as this will speed up hiring processes by ensuring you only talk to highly qualified candidates.

Also, hire headhunters who speak good English to ensure a seamless collaboration, as your HR staff might not be fluent in Spanish. Keep in mind that headhunters who aren’t fluent in English are unlikely to do a good job assessing your candidates’ English level, and you don't want to be hiring Spaniards who aren’t able to communicate effectively in a multinational environment.

  

Make sure your headhunter knows how to find the best tech talent

 

There are a number of recruiting agencies that claim they specialise in finding tech talent, which can make it difficult to decide which headhunter to hire.

It’s become such a competitive industry that it’s quite frequent to hear headhunters promise they’ll give you the very best talent at no initial cost, and that they’ll only charge once you’ve hired their candidate. In other words, lowering their prices instead of increasing their value proposal.

Let’s face it, it doesn’t take much for a recruiter to reach out to people through LinkedIn’s search engine and offer them a job, or to tap into their existing database and see who’s available. Next thing you know, your HR is flooded with less than average CVs who hardly fit the profile, or worse, who are not taking your hiring process seriously. 

However if your goal is to find the very best tech talent within a short time frame, you’ll need to rely on a headhunter whose methodology can guarantee you results, which is something that not all recruiters can offer.

At PayPerTalent, we’ve worked hard at designing a testing methodology that ensures the candidates we refer have demonstred their technical knowledge of Digital Marketing beyond their CV. Candidates take a 3 hours long test, which not only proves they have a solid understanding of Digital Marketing, but also shows that they’re really interested in the position they’re applying for. This guarantees our clients a swift and reliable hiring process, as most of the filtering occurs before the client gets to interview our candidates.

 

While expanding business operations in Spain is a great move for most start-ups, it can only be done by getting the right people to join your team. That is why picking a headhunting partner who works with a reliable recruitment methodology is an essential requirement to successfully establishing your tech company in Barcelona and Madrid.

 

 

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