We often hear from our customers that once they start hiring candidates globally, they wonder how they ever stayed swimming in their own local pool of talent.
Global Employer of Record (EOR) solutions allow businesses to jump the hurdles of establishing payroll and contractor arrangements, and hire candidates from anywhere in the world. No need to set up local entities, and no risk of legally complex freelancer agreements.
With a global EOR, the world becomes a whole lot smaller. You create relationships with local partners in the same location as the candidates, who handle the administration and payroll, as well as handling HR duties on your behalf. For the employee in question, it all feels the same as it would if they were a local employee.
EOR is a Win-win, but Only if it’s Done Right.
There are two ways of creating a global PEO model for your company. One is by setting up individual partner relationships in single countries, as and when you want to hire new employees abroad. This is the “work it out as you go along” method. The second, is to onboard an EOR solution who work with multiple partners on your behalf. This is the “plan ahead” version of EOR. We like to call it “the right version.”
Let’s look at the benefits of the second choice, and why you’re giving yourself a huge advantage being prepared for any eventuality when it comes to hiring overseas.
Make it Easier for Yourself
By working with one single provider for EOR, you gain consistency of operations. You’re working with one team, and can have a single point of contact, even if you have employees in 5 or 10 countries around the world. You can get to know your single CSM, strategize with them directly, and help them get to know your company as a whole, not on the basis of the small number of your employees who they deal with in one location.
Think about day to day operations on a practical level. If you’re using 10 different providers in 10 different countries, they may well be in 10 different time zones, or speak multiple languages! With one provider, you are adding a streamlined experience where you speak to one person, who works in your time zone, and who speaks your language, both literally and figuratively. At Papaya Global for example, we have six global offices, which include London, Austin, Melbourne, and Tel Aviv, so we have every time zone covered.
Now consider cost-management. Different local companies will charge according to their unique business model. By consolidating your relationship through one provider, you gain consistency in how you are charged. The best solutions will have one transparent pricing model that is fixed and easy to understand, and will apply to the management of all of your global employees.
This obviously helps limit complexity at the end of the month but can also help you to forecast business costs ahead of time for moving to a new location or adding new employees to the mix.
This also helps in terms of economies of scale. Think about how important you are as a customer to a local EOR provider where you have 1 or 2 employees. Frankly, you’re a small fish. On the other hand, think about consolidating all your overseas employees into one partner relationship, you suddenly become a lot more important.
Adding Value and Business Intelligence Through One Solution
However large you grow, working through Papaya Global also means you are using a single interface for your whole payroll experience. With multiple global partners, you’re forced to use many disparate software solutions, each with its own login details, security measures, and requirements. These will be extremely complicated to manually compare, resulting in additional technology and manual effort for added steps such as reporting or analytics. In some cases, this will be impossible to complete.
In contrast, Papaya Global provides a single pane of glass for your global workforce, standardizing the process for more than 140 countries, and consolidating all your information into one dataset. This means that you can take advantage of advanced analytics, spotting trends ahead of time, making intelligent predictions for success, or allocating budget effectively to save on your bottom line. Here are a few examples:
HR: An advanced HR report can show you your joiners and leavers over a specific period, so that you can accurately ascertain the turnover in specific locations, departments, or time periods. Discover the common thread that’s causing loyalty or employee churn.
Costs: With transparent pricing for management and control over a global workforce, it all comes down to wages and benefits. From a single report, Papaya Global allows your organization to visualize the true cost of your workforce. Uniquely, we offer a breakdown of costs and a comparison of costs so that you can look at two datasets side by side.
Workforce at a Glance: See all active projects, including their costs, and your current workers organized by expense, with granular detail down to a single employee. From a centralized dashboard, you can feel the pulse of your organization, including leavers and joiners, global footprint, and overall employment costs.
The Added Reliability and Control of an Aggregator Model
The benefits of using multiple EOR partners around the world is immense, providing local expertise and support to your company in terms of tax, compliance, salary, and benefits whilst avoiding the headache of setting up local entities or risking contractor misclassification. However, there are two ways to make this happen, and they aren’t created equally. Unlike a third party wholly-owned EOR infrastructure, an aggregator model for EOR is the much smarter choice, mainly because it offers much more flexibility and control.
A third-party wholly-owned EOR which opens its own local office in each country offers no room for manoeuvre. If you feel that the quality of work being done from that office location is not a good fit or good quality, it may be impossible to change. You may also need a particular service/expertise such as immigration or equity handling that the wholly-owned provider doesn’t cater to, requiring you to hire extra expertise adding to your monthly outgoings.
On top of that, a wholly-owned EOR partner will want you to fit to their processes, which may include the salary that you can offer your candidates, and the benefits and perks that you can provide.
In contrast, an aggregator model like Papaya Global gives you a lot more freedom to choose the process that works for you, whether that’s offering an out-of-the-box candidate package, or finding a specialized partner that can meet a particular request.
The Benefits of an Added Layer
By utilizing Papaya Global as an added intermediary between you and your EOR partners, you also add a valuable amount of due diligence to your processes. With Papaya Global as an intermediary, you have an extra layer of checks and balances, for peace of mind.
A “plan ahead” choice means exactly that – we’re ready for anything. We describe ourselves as a growth partner for our clients. If you’re looking to expand elsewhere in the world, a single local partner will be neither incentivized nor able to support you with this growth. In contrast, that’s exactly what we’re known for. We’re a single point of contact with knowledge about the global economy and workforce. No need to start from scratch looking for a partnership in a new location, you can hit the ground running from day one.
Want to discuss your own unique business context? – Let’s schedule a call.
