How to Onboard Offshore Appointment Setters Without Losing Them in Week One

You spent weeks sourcing, screening, and interviewing. You found an A-player. They accepted the role. They're excited to start Monday.

Then Monday comes and their email isn't set up. Their dialer access isn't ready. Their contract hasn't been sent. And when they ask about getting paid, you tell them you're "still figuring out the payment processor."

By Wednesday, their excitement has turned to doubt. By Friday, they're interviewing with someone else. By the following Monday, they're gone.

This happens constantly. The most common reason companies lose great offshore hires isn't poor performance — it's a disorganized onboarding process that signals to the agent that this company doesn't have its act together.

The fix is simple: have everything ready before you ever post the job.

Set Up Payment Processing First

This is the single most important onboarding step, and it needs to happen before you hire anyone. Not after you make an offer. Not during their first week. Before you start recruiting.

Payment delays destroy trust faster than anything else. Offshore callers — especially in markets like Pakistan, Philippines, and Latin America — often operate with tight personal budgets. A one-week delay in payment isn't an inconvenience for them. It's a crisis. And when payment is late, the first thing they do is start looking for a backup position.

The Recommended Setup: Deel

Deel is a global payroll and compliance platform that handles contractor agreements, tax compliance, and payment processing in one system. It's not the cheapest option, but it solves every problem at once.

What Deel handles: locally compliant contractor agreements (their lawyers have templates for every country you'll hire in), tax documentation you need at year-end, misclassification protection (if a country's tax authority claims your contractor should be classified as an employee, Deel covers you up to a certain amount), and fast payment processing — when you submit payment, money typically arrives in the agent's bank account within hours, sometimes minutes.

Setting up a Deel account takes a few days. They'll verify your business with documentation, so don't wait until you have someone ready to start.

When adding a new contractor in Deel, select "Contractor" (not "Employee" — employer of record is a separate, more expensive service), choose "Pay as you go" for the rate structure, and select the contractor's country of tax residence. Deel provides pre-built role descriptions for common positions like appointment setters and business development representatives.

Payment Frequency: Weekly

Pay weekly, not monthly. Salespeople spend money. Making them wait 30 days for a first paycheck is a retention risk you don't need to take.

Submit payments on Tuesday for the prior week's hours. If you process payment Tuesday evening, agents typically see the money in their bank account that night or first thing Wednesday morning. Fast, reliable, predictable pay is one of the most effective retention tools available — and it costs you nothing extra.

For commissions and bonuses, a monthly payout on the 15th works fine. But the base hourly pay should hit their account every week without exception.

The Budget Alternative: Wise

If Deel's fees are too high for your current stage, Wise (formerly TransferWise) is a payment-only alternative with lower transaction costs. It handles international transfers efficiently but doesn't provide contractor agreements, compliance protection, or tax documentation.

If you use Wise, you'll need to handle contracts separately (have a lawyer draft a contractor agreement compliant in the agent's country) and manage tax documents yourself. Critical: make sure you have a Wise Business account, not personal. Personal accounts used for repeated contractor payments get flagged and frozen. When your account is frozen on payday, your agent doesn't get paid, and you've got a problem.

Other payment methods — Western Union, PayPal, personal bank transfers — create more problems than they solve.

The Day One Checklist

Before the agent's start date, have every piece of infrastructure ready:

Deel contract sent and signed. Both sides sign before the start date. The agent should never work a single hour without a signed agreement in place.

Company email created. Set up their email address on your domain before they start. When they log in Monday morning, it should be waiting.

Dialer account created. Their user account in your power dialer should be configured with campaigns, scripts loaded, and dispositions set up. First call should be possible within minutes of logging in.

CRM access configured. If they need access to Go High Level or any other system, create their account and set permissions before Day One.

Scripts and training materials accessible. Put everything they need — scripts, objection handlers, FAQ sheets, product information — in a shared location they can reference during calls. Inside the dialer is ideal.

Welcome message sent. The night before or morning of their start date, send a brief welcome message confirming the start time, providing all login credentials, and letting them know what to expect.

The First Day Structure

Day One should be structured, not improvised:

Morning standup (15-20 minutes). Welcome them, introduce the team, walk through the day's plan. If you use Zoom breakout rooms for monitoring, explain how that works.

System walkthrough (30 minutes). Walk them through the dialer interface, show them how calls flow, how dispositions work, where scripts are located, and how their metrics are tracked.

Script review (30-60 minutes). Go through the scripts they'll be using. Role play a few scenarios.

Shadowed calling (first session). Have them listen to recordings of strong calls, or shadow a live caller if possible. Then let them start dialing with the understanding that the first day is about getting comfortable, not hitting targets.

End-of-day check-in (10 minutes). Quick debrief: how did it feel, what questions came up, what needs clarification. Set expectations for Day Two.

Most capable agents are productive by Day Three and hitting their stride by the end of the first week. If someone isn't showing progress by the end of Week One, the hiring decision — not the onboarding — was the problem.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Professional onboarding isn't just about efficiency. It's about positioning.

When an agent joins your company and finds a signed contract, a funded payment account, every system ready to go, and a structured first day — they immediately feel like they're working for a real operation. That perception affects everything: their effort level, their commitment, their willingness to push through tough days, and their likelihood of referring other top performers to you.

When they join and find a scrambled setup — no contract, no payment timeline, systems not ready, nobody sure what they should be doing — they start hedging. They keep their job alerts active. They respond to other recruiters. And the moment something better comes along, they're gone.

The setup cost for professional onboarding is a few hours of preparation. The cost of losing a great hire to sloppy onboarding is weeks of lost production and a restart on the entire hiring process.

Prepare once. Hire confidently.

Download the full onboarding checklist with contract templates, system setup steps, and Day One scripts. Get the Onboarding Checklist →