Why hiring in Central Asia is harder than it should be
Everyone tells you the talent is there. Nobody tells you that the sites where it looks for work will not accept your listing.
The first thing you do when you decide to hire a motion designer in Kazakhstan is search for Kazakh job boards. You find hh.kz within about ten seconds. It is the largest one in the country and it looks entirely normal: listings, salaries, a button that says post a vacancy. You click it, and about four steps later you are asked for a Kazakh phone number to receive a verification code.
That is where most agencies stop. Not because the wall is high, but because it is boring. There is no error message explaining that foreign companies cannot post. There is just a form you cannot complete, in a language you may not read, at eleven at night when you were supposed to be doing something else.
What actually blocks you
It is worth being precise about this, because the problem is usually described as though it were a legal one. It is not. Nothing prevents a British or American company from employing a contractor in Kazakhstan. The obstacles are all procedural, and they sit on the advertising side rather than the employment side.
| What the board asks for | Why a foreign company fails it |
|---|---|
| A local phone number for SMS verification | Virtual numbers are commonly rejected, and roaming does not help if the code never arrives |
| A registered company the board recognises | Some boards check a business identification number against a state register |
| Moderator approval, in Russian or Uzbek | A moderator reads the listing and can reject it without a translated reason |
| Payment in local currency | A foreign card is often declined, and invoicing needs a local billing entity |
| Someone to answer applicants | Replies arrive in Russian within hours, and a slow reply reads as an inactive employer |
Individually each of these is solvable. Together they add up to a week of work before a single applicant sees anything, and that week has to happen again for every new market. An agency hiring one role does not do it. An agency hiring one role in three countries definitely does not do it.
The listing has to be in the right language
Russian remains the working language of the creative industry across Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and it is widely used professionally in Uzbekistan alongside Uzbek. Younger designers often read English well, particularly ones who have already worked with clients abroad. That is the group everyone is competing for.
Post in English only and you are advertising exclusively to the people who are already being contacted by studios in Dubai and Berlin. The designers who are excellent and have never worked outside the region will scroll past, because a listing in a language they have to translate reads as one that is not really for them.
Three markets that behave differently
Central Asia gets treated as one place by people who have not hired there. It is not one market, and the differences change how you should approach each.
Kazakhstan
The deepest pool of the three, concentrated almost entirely in Almaty rather than the capital. There is a real commercial creative industry built on advertising and broadcast, which means the people you meet are used to client feedback, revisions and deadlines. Motion design and video editing are the strongest disciplines. Senior art direction is thinner, because the best people at that level have often already moved to Dubai.
Uzbekistan
Earlier in its development and moving fast. Tashkent produces a growing number of designers working for regional agencies, and rates tend to be lower than Kazakhstan for comparable work. The quirk here is that the largest jobs audience sits on a classifieds site rather than a dedicated job board, which changes how a listing has to be written to stand out.
Kyrgyzstan
The smallest of the three, effectively just Bishkek. The pool is correspondingly small, and competition for it from local employers is far lower. A well written listing from a foreign studio stands out here in a way it would not in Almaty. The flip side is that the same strong candidates appear across several listings at once, so moving quickly matters more.
The part nobody writes a blog post about
Once the listing is live, somebody has to read the replies. In our experience the first serious applications arrive within a day, and a good proportion of them are in Russian. Some include a Behance link, some a Google Drive folder, some a PDF that is mostly logos from an agency the person worked at rather than work they personally made.
Sorting that is the actual job. It is why the access problem and the review problem are worth solving together. Getting a listing onto hh.kz achieves nothing if forty applications then sit in an inbox nobody can read for three weeks.
How Elsewhere handles it
We hold verified advertiser accounts in each market we operate in, so the phone number, the business registration and the moderator approval are already done. You write the role once in English. We translate it, post it to the local boards, and pay whatever they charge.
The review side works by comparison. When you create a job you upload examples of the work you want, whether that is frames from a spot you liked, a showreel, or three stills. Every applicant's portfolio gets scored against those references before you see them, so the ranking is about the work rather than how well somebody writes a covering letter in their second language.
We are open in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan today. There are country guides for each with the boards, the working language, the time overlap and how contractors usually get paid.