Hiring employees in Portugal
If you are planning to expand your business to the European nation of Portugal, it’s likely that you will need to hire in Portugal. However, the laws and procedures surrounding Portugal recruitment can be challenging to understand, with a unique set of regulations, compliance, and customs.
Horizons’ expansion consultants can guide you through the Portugal recruitment process and provide outsourcing services to take care of your recruitment in Portugal for you. With our assistance, you can find, recruit, and onboard your workers quickly and compliantly, even if you don’t have a registered subsidiary in Portugal.
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Portugal hiring guide
Explore some of the key information about Portugal recruitment and how to hire the best talent to help with your business’ Portugal expansion.
How to find and hire employees in Portugal
Sourcing suitable candidates in Portugal can be done in various different ways. Traditional methods, such as physical job boards and newspaper adverts are still used, but, as in most countries, are gradually falling out of fashion. The internet is a rapidly growing medium for finding candidates, with social media companies in particular, such as LinkedIn, proving increasingly popular.
For some high-level positions, you may want to use a recruitment agency, but this can be very expensive. One effective and economical option is to use expansion specialists, such as Horizons, who can offer expert Portugal recruitment outsourcing for a wide range of roles, along with myriad other associated services.
It is not uncommon to encounter legal challenges from employees and candidates in Portugal, so it is advisable to have a strong, detailed, professionally written employment contract in place for every employee.
Discrimination and harassment laws in Portugal
In line with most countries today, Portugal has specific employment laws relating to discrimination and harassment, designed to protect the fairness for workers in Portugal recruitment and employment. For example, it is illegal to discriminate against candidates based on their age, gender, religion, race, disabilities, trade union membership, and so on.
To ensure you don’t fall foul of these laws, you should always try to use neutral language in job adverts and avoid asking unnecessarily intimate questions in interviews. Also, you may wish to enlist the help of specialists such as employment lawyers or a global PEO such as Horizons.
Due to these strict laws, you always need to be vigilant of your conduct not just with employees but also with potential candidates. A great way to ensure you understand and follow the regulations at all times is to hire experts in Portugal recruitment via a global PEO such as Horizons.
Onboarding staff in Portugal
When onboarding and training your new employees in Portugal, it is up to you to determine the most suitable methods. We do, however, recommend being as clear as possible from the start about what you expect of employees and about the workplace culture. It is also always good practice to have a strong employment contract in place and reiterate the terms agreed upon for things such as working hours, sick leave and vacation procedures, and so on.
