Should You Hire Onshore or Offshore Workday Consultants?

 

05.28.2025 | Staffing Services

 

“I think we’ve had a soft landing,” said Mark Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management when asked about the economy at the Milken Institute Global Conference. Though some business leaders, economists, and policymakers feel we’re mostly out of the woods, the consensus isn’t universal.

The combination of surging layoffs, persistently elevated global debt, and stubborn inflation rates are causing the average citizen and business leader some trepidation. In fact, we’re seeing these and other factors prompt companies to make pragmatic decisions about their workforce as they attempt to absorb the shock of today’s bumpy economic road. However, going too utilitarian with your workforce budget can hurt the bottom line.

That brings us back to an ongoing question for knowledge-work industries since at least the 1970s: should organizations choose to work with onshore or offshore consultants? Then like now, there’s not a one-size-fits-all answer.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of hiring onshore or offshore Workday consultants—and why a hybrid model might be the best fit.

The Pros of Working with Onshore Workday Consultants

Responsiveness

When you are implementing a new Workday SKU or module, you want highly available consultants who can accelerate your process and react to immediate needs. It’s that level of timeliness that makes onshore professionals desirable.

When your Workday consultants are operating in the same or similar time zones, you can hold meetings, answer questions, and achieve milestones during your hours of operations. Communications and fixes can happen in much closer to real time when working with the right onshore consultants.

Offshore Workday consultants have a time-zone problem. Best case scenario? They work and reach out to you at irregular hours for them. Worst case scenario? You wait hours for a response to urgent questions as your consultants wake up or make it back to the office.

Knowledge of Domestic Challenges

Can offshore resources fully understand onshore challenges? Yes, but there’s a greater barrier to understanding. Onshore consultants are far more likely to be exposed to the regulatory, regional, and cultural challenges you face as well as the broader industry or technical ones. They consume similar news and media as well as work with more stateside companies, which puts them on better footing to tackle your issues.

Offshore consultants might understand some of your sector’s challenges or the overall software landscape, but they are often removed from ongoing domestic industry or market conditions. It takes research on their part, frequent interactions with U.S. customers, or the guidance of onshore project managers (which we can provide) to quickly adapt to your circumstances.

As a result, this can impact their ability to anticipate where the market is going and advise on how you can sidestep or surmount emerging problems.

The Pros of Working with Offshore Workday Consultants

Cost-Effectiveness

The financial challenges of the current market cannot be overlooked. When you compare the price of an onshore Workday consultant to an offshore Workday consultant, the gap is significant. Typically, we see that offshore solutions are 60% to 75% cheaper than onshore solutions.

It’s the impetus for more tech companies moving elements of their workforce to India, Mexico, and other offshore/nearshore destinations. With the global presence of Workday, there are experts all over the world with Human Capital Management, Financial Management, Payroll, Planning, and other features of the enterprise cloud platform. You just need to know where to look.

Scalability

Since offshore Workday consultants can be more cost effective, they are also easier to scale with the complexity or urgency of a project. You can assemble a team of sophisticated Workday experts to deliver on your project for the price of a handful of stateside professionals. This accelerates your timelines, increases your overall quality, and ensures collaboration that can even boost interoperability.

If you collaborate with a contract staffing services partner, you can quickly hire a range of offshore Workday consultants to meet your demand. The difficulty of finding Workday professionals falls away when you have skilled staffing partners leveraging their network of consultants for you.

Finding a Combination of the Two

The right combination of onshore and offshore staff can help to bridge the gap. Creating a hybrid team of Workday consultants can keep your project cost-effective and scalable while also providing strategic insight and responsiveness while also providing onshore oversight.

There are innumerable workforce combinations. You can have a range of offshore consultants and an onshore project manager to steer the ship. You can engage an onshore Workday consultant in the interview and planning portions of legacy system migrations and then direct your scalable offshore team to tackle each deliverable. You can even mix and match, depending on onshore and offshore availability based on specific skillsets.

Best of all, you can choose a Workday staffing partner to gather your team, keeping you focused on the big picture instead of how to get there.

Still deliberating over onshore vs offshore Workday consultants? We have you covered either way. See the difference our staffing and recruiting team makes.

Related Articles

Why Your Next Workday Hire Won’t Be an Easy Find

5 Challenges Hiring Workday Talent That Can Sabotage Your Candidate Search Before It Starts

How to Evaluate and Hire a Consultant for Your Workday Project