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[Updated on 8/26/2020]
When companies become global, it can be important for them to find the right software tools to support their expansion:
US-based companies are increasingly chasing talent wherever they can find it, which oftentimes means expanding operations internationally and hiring remote workers wherever they live.
There are two driving forces behind this trend: The first is that new productivity technologies like Slack, Zoom and Basecamp have made it easier for work to be done anywhere an internet connection exists.
The other reason that companies have an increasingly location-agnostic appetite for talent, is because the labor market in the US has remained historically tight for years. With unemployment rates so low in the US, attracting domestic talent has become much more costly.
There are obvious corporate benefits to hiring the best talent, regardless of where that talent is. However, many HR teams are still, rightfully, unsure how to recruit and manage an international workforce.
Thankfully, many innovative companies have developed new products and services that HR teams can lean on as they expand internationally:
In order to hire an employee in a foreign country, businesses traditionally have had to go through an arduous process to get their businesses registered and compliant in new countries.
This process can be such a headache that most companies opt to hire the new employee as a contractor, instead. However, this approach can reduce your talent pool because the best international talent prefers to be a fully benefit-eligible employee.
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To address this challenge, companies like Velocity Globalhave developed unique solutions to this problem: their model is called an international PEO.
Essentially, these companies have done the burdensome leg work of establishing legal entities in nearly every country across the world. So once you have an international employee you’d like to hire, you can skip the step of registering your business in a new country, and instead just hire that employee through an international PEO provider. Your international talent can now become a fully benefit-eligible hire, immediately.
If your company already has an established global presence, one of the biggest challenges can be standardizing your payroll operation across different countries.
Payroll and tax laws are so complex and distinct from country-to-country, that even the most well-known payroll companies, such as ADP and Ceridian, can only provide native payroll services in a handful of countries.
However, companies, such as Blue Marble have created international payroll solutions that can standardize the payroll process for companies, no matter where they have operations.
Blue Marble has developed relationships with local, in-country payroll providers that are experts in local tax and compliance law. But, from an end-user perspective, Blue Marble standardizes the entire process with an intuitive technology interface. This allows an HR manager in Kansas to view payroll runs across the globe from a single dashboard.
Blue Marble can even integrate with leading HRIS’s, such as Bamboo, Namely (acquired by PrismHR) and Paylocity, to help create a fully integrated payroll experience.
When it comes to managing and developing a workforce, most companies rely on their HRIS to automate and facilitate many of those tasks.
However, not all HRIS’s are internationally-capable. Some, smaller providers don’t bother to offer international capabilities, and even the more well-known companies may overstate just how internationally-capable they are. Some may rely on Google Translate for language localization or only offer US-based support operations.
When it comes to finding a true global HRIS partner, few can compete with Sage People in the breadth and depth of their international offering. Sage People offers a talent management & development platform that is used by customers in over 150 countries. On top of offering local support across the globe, Sage People offers a wealth of knowledge regarding international security and compliance, which is key in the GDPR era.
While there has been a lot of innovation in the HR technology space recently, immigration services has been one area that has been mostly ignored. On top of the lack of innovation, the political climate in the US has made it more challenging than ever to bring talent stateside.
The traditional immigration process is a paperwork-intensive process that is highly reliant on lawyers and very opaque to both the potential hire and the company. The Google’s and Facebook’s of the world can afford to invest heavily in legal resources to facilitate immigration, but mid-market companies have traditionally struggled to compete for the same international talent.
However, innovative companies like Bridge have developed new technology platforms to simplify the immigration process for companies. Bridge has a dedicated, on-staff legal team available to all of their clients, and offers a technology platform that allows recruiters, hiring managers and candidates to easily track what stage they are at in the immigration process.
For recruiters and hiring managers, initiating an immigration process is as simple as uploading a resume from an ATS. From there, the Bridge team handles all of the legal steps, while providing communication along the way.
