The Global Hiring Mistakes CEOs Are Too Confident to See Coming

Someone, somewhere right now, is managing international payroll in a spreadsheet. 😱 

Does that make your stomach do backflips too, or is it just me???

I know this the way I know that somewhere a company is “circling back” on an offer they made like six weeks ago, because some things are just always happening, and they’re always a disaster!

International hiring is one of the most high-stakes operational moves a company can make, and some companies doing it are absolutely winging it. Hey, no shade I love winging things at times! But winging complicated with legal implications things??? No thank you, I’m good!!! 

A lot of this has been happening in plain sight for years. Before Employer of Record services became a real category, the compliance piece of international hiring was something a lot of orgs just straight up ignored. 🤯

That mindset hasn’t fully gone away, and for legal and emotional reasons, I’m not gonna tell you how I know what this looks like, so instead I’ll just say: I know what this looks like.

The complexity of global hiring is a part of the game, but there’s NOTHING more complex than building something you have to constantly manage around!

Thankfully, as the world becomes more interconnected, the good examples of global hiring keep growing, so I want to talk about what’s at stake when you hire across borders, between the massive opportunities and risks, as well as what it means to finally have a foundation that holds.

The Best Candidate for a Role Might Not Live in Your Country.

The New Normal: Hiring Everywhere

Somewhere along the way, hiring across borders stopped being a bold, future-of-work move and just became… how it works now. 🌍

In fact, Remote’s research found that nearly 70% of companies have already hired internationally. SEVENTY PERCENT! That’s not the early adopters anymore, that’s most of us!

And honestly, it makes sense. 

Post-COVID, the assumption that the best person for a role lives within commuting distance (or even within US borders) basically fell apart. Once teams went remote, the talent map got a whole lot bigger, and companies walked right through the door that opened.

So this isn’t a “should you hire internationally” conversation anymore. You probably already have. The offer letters are signed, and somebody in Berlin or São Paulo is already three weeks into onboarding. 🤷‍♀️

The hard part was never the hiring. It’s everything that comes after.

Because the second you bring on someone in another country, you inherit a whole new layer of complexity. Different labor laws. Different benefits expectations. Different rules about what you legally can and can’t do as an employer. 

And guess whose plate all of that lands on?

Yours.

I already know what the objection sounds like: “Okay, but…the complexity!” 

YES, there’s complexity, and I promise we’ll get to that in a sec, but just know it’s totally manageable when you have the right infrastructure behind you.

You know what isn’t manageable? Pretending you’re not already a global employer when your org chart very clearly says you are.

So, if that’s our new baseline we gotta talk about the fact that there are still risks we should all be aware of! 

The Consequences Are Financial, But They’re Also Personal

One of the more common risks you come across in global hiring is managing payroll.

TBH: the CEOs who respond to global hiring risk with “whatever, we’ll take the risk” are the ones who have never had to explain to an employee in another country why their paycheck didn’t land.

I’ve been in rooms where execs said exactly that, too! 🙄

And what kills me is they legitimately don’t understand what the risk looks like from the other side.

When you hire someone internationally, you’re taking on an obligation to that person as a whole, which means paying them on time.

You’re also responsible for their employment protections under local law. 

For example, whatever benefits are required by their country, and their classification as an employee or a contractor, all have their own unique legal requirements.

Every single country has its own employment laws and tax codes…which can change without warning. 

There are termination rules, notice periods, compliance requirements, and so on that vary by worker type. 

That means if you misclassify someone as a contractor when local law says they’re an employee, then you probably just created legal exposure, but you also potentially denied that person protections they were owed the entire time they worked for you! 

And yes, I literally have heard a CEO ask, “Do we have to give them health insurance?” 

The look on my face was priceless. 

The lawyer-ish answer, which you need actual infrastructure to navigate, is: it depends on the country. 

It always depends on the country, and that dependence is exactly why a gut call from someone who won’t be managing the fallout is not a good enough strategy.

What makes this hard is that most companies don’t build a global employment infrastructure intentionally! 

Instead, they cobble it together with a manual process that works…until a regulation changes or someone understandably forgets a step. 😵

I think this has historically been so difficult to get right that execs will occasionally give in to the temptation of cutting a corner or two.

The consequences of getting it wrong can have personal consequences for your team though, which may be a missed payroll, a worker who doesn’t have the benefits they were entitled to, or an employment relationship that doesn’t hold up under local law. 

As far as I’m concerned, these are failures of the basic trust a company is supposed to earn and keep when it brings someone aboard!

The Tool Underneath Everything Else Is the One That Matters

Here’s the question you should be asking during every software renewal cycle: 

“Is this actually something I can grow with, or am I going to spend the next two years working around it?”

It’s basically the fairest question you can ask yourself, especially in a space where every HRIS platform has spent the last decade claiming to do everything. 😒

You know what happens when software tries to be EVERYTHING? 

It ends up being nothing particularly well. 

Like…I used to play basketball. Imagine me trying to play every position on the court!! 

It would be a disaster, and everyone watching would know it before I did.

That’s how I think about the whole “we can do everything” approach. The confidence is always louder than the capability, and you usually don’t find out the gap exists until something has already gone horribly wrong.

Any tool that swears it’s excellent at everything is lying to you, and you should trust your read on that.

The same principle applies to global employment infrastructure. 

There are simply too many moving pieces to ever know all the answers, so you want something built that specializes in doing the hard things, which could be compliant payroll or employment across borders, and it needs to do it right, every single time. 

Stop Managing Around Your Infrastructure and Just Fix It

Okay, you’ve survived the sobering info I’ve thrown at you, so now we can wrap this up in a positive way by acknowledging that the infrastructure problem in global hiring is solved! 🎉

It has been for a while, so all that’s missing is the willingness to actually invest in the foundation before something breaks.

You don’t have time to track the labor laws changing every single day in every single country and province in this world. Nobody does. 

That’s just the reality of what global employment compliance actually requires, and the best solution is to work with infrastructure that already does it.

That’s what Remote was built for! It’s the employment and payroll infrastructure for companies operating globally, and they’re sharply focused on Employer of Record and payroll, done compliantly, at scale. 

They’ve processed billions in payroll annually. Companies like Workday, BambooHR, and Personio have built their own global employment offerings on top of Remote’s infrastructure, which tells you something about how seriously the category takes its foundation.

Your next hire might be in a time zone you’ve never thought about! 💡

That’s not a problem at all.  

In fact, it could be an exciting opportunity that transforms your org in uniquely impactful ways, as long as what’s underneath can hold it.

Your foundation is waiting