Which Asian country should you hire remote staff from?

Most advice on this question comes from a company that operates in exactly one country, which makes the answer predictable.

We recruit across five and take no commission on salary in any of them, so we’ve no stake in which you pick. Here’s how they actually differ.

The short answer: match the country to the role, not to the price. The cost gap between these markets is smaller than the gap in what each is genuinely good at. Hiring a developer out of an admin market to save $200 a month is a false economy you’ll pay for inside a quarter.

Choosing the country is step two. The rest of the process is in how to hire your first remote worker.

Start with the working day, because it rules out more than cost does

This is the constraint people underestimate, and it’s pure arithmetic — so do it first.

Assume your hire works 9am to 5pm in their own local time. Here’s how many hours actually overlap with your 9-to-5:

Standard time. Daylight saving in either country shifts these by an hour — usually in your favour for UK summer, against you for Australian summer.

Three things fall straight out of that table, and no vendor in this market will tell you any of them:

Australia is the best-served market by a distance. Six hours of genuine overlap with the Philippines or Malaysia is a normal working relationship. Nothing else on the table comes close.

The UK needs shifted hours. A Filipino worker on 9-to-5 Manila finishes at 9am London — exactly when you start. This is workable, and thousands do it, but you are asking someone to work 1pm to 9pm their time to give you a full day. Say so in the job post and pay for it.

The US needs a night shift, from all five countries. There is no arrangement where a standard Asian working day meets a standard American one. That’s not a reason to avoid it — plenty of people prefer night shifts and the premium that comes with them — but going in without acknowledging it produces turnover.

If the role is asynchronous — bookkeeping, development, content, back-office processing — most of this stops mattering and India’s depth becomes available at no real cost. Most hiring mistakes in this market are timezone mistakes wearing a costume.

Where each country is genuinely strong

Philippines — customer-facing and administrative

The deepest English-speaking market in the world for remote admin and support, built on two decades of BPO industry. High cultural alignment with Western business norms and a comfort with phone work that’s genuinely hard to find elsewhere.

Hire here for: virtual assistants, customer support, executive assistants, bookkeeping, real estate and trades admin, social media.

Trade-off: the most competitive of the five. Good people have options and expectations have risen. It is no longer the cheapest, and anyone selling it as such is quoting 2019 rates.

Vietnam — engineering

Large, fast-growing developer market with strong technical fundamentals and rates well below Western equivalents. Increasingly the default for teams that outgrew freelance platforms and want dedicated engineers.

Hire here for: software developers, QA, DevOps, technical support, data work.

Trade-off: spoken English is generally weaker than the Philippines. For engineers working async through tickets and pull requests that’s often irrelevant. For anything client-facing, screen hard.

India — finance, marketing and technical depth

The broadest pool of the five by a wide margin, with genuine seniority available in accounting, financial analysis, marketing, SEO and software. If you need someone who has done the thing at scale before, this is where you find them. It’s also the best timezone fit for UK employers on the table above.

Hire here for: bookkeeping and accounting, financial analysis, SEO and paid media, developers, data analysis.

Trade-off: the market’s size cuts both ways. The range between excellent and terrible is enormous, so your screening has to be genuinely rigorous.

Malaysia — bilingual and regional

Smaller and more expensive than its neighbours, with a specific strength that justifies it: genuine English–Mandarin and English–Bahasa bilingualism, plus a business culture that reads as familiar to Western firms.

Hire here for: bilingual customer support, regional coordination across South-East Asia, finance and compliance.

Trade-off: cost. You’re paying a premium for the language capability. Worth it if you need it, poor value if you don’t.

Indonesia — e-commerce and operations

The largest population in South-East Asia and a rapidly maturing remote workforce, particularly strong in e-commerce operations, marketplace management and digital ops.

Hire here for: e-commerce operations, Shopify and marketplace management, customer support, digital ops, design.

Trade-off: the thinnest published salary information of the five, which makes it easy to overpay or to insult someone with an offer. It also means less competition for the good people, if you know what you’re doing.

A word on English rankings

Every provider quotes the EF English Proficiency Index, usually without mentioning it measures a self-selected sample of people who chose to take a free online English test. It’s directionally useful. It is not a hiring instrument.

The only ranking that matters is how the specific candidate handles the specific communication your role needs. A country average tells you where to look and nothing about the person in front of you. Test the individual.

So which one?

If the honest answer is that you’re not sure what the role is yet — resolve that before picking a country. The role determines the market, not the other way round.

Browsing is free on every plan, including full profiles and search by country, role, salary and English level. You only pay when you want to make contact. See what that costs.