How to work in any country legally?

The way to hire and relocate yourself or other people in all over the world. Hassle free.

I have lived and worked in four different countries: Vancouver, Canada; London, UK; Moscow, Russia; and now I reside in Zurich, Switzerland. Of all the relocation-related struggles, the one that causes me the most frustration is dealing with the bureaucracy of immigration offices and visa-related paperwork. Because I was moving for work, my employers took care of the most of that struggle. But now, as an employer myself, I understand how complicated it can be to hire somebody from another country. I want to share some tips that can make this process easier.

The Hard Way

When I was leaving Google last year, I was thinking about how I could keep my work permit and stay in Zurich. I decided to form my own company and employ myself since it's the main requirement to keep a work visa in Switzerland: to be hired somewhere. It was quite a long process with many conversations with accountants, lawyers, banks and consultants. I have a rule that whenever I'm looking for a service provider in a new area that I'm not familiar with, I find at least three different options, talk to them, and compare them. This way, I can get a sense of the market and explore different pricing and quality offers. I think somebody with a Stanford MBA degree told me about this rule, or I picked it up from one of the folk tales when I was a kid, I don't remember really. But you can imagine that with this rule applied, there was a lot of talking.

The Easy Way

Ironically as soon as I finished the process of setting everything up I discovered that there is an easier way. These days there are providers that can help you with hiring people or yourself globally without even forming a company in those places. They take care of everything:

• Hiring full-time employees and all related paperwork

• Payroll and Benefits like Health Insurance, Pension etc

• Legal, Compliance and Immigration questions

The way those companies (providers) work is that they have a legal entity in every country that acts like a middle man, so when you want to hire someone as a full-time employee in country X it’s their legal entity in country X hires them and you (as a company based in country Y) make a contract with the entity to pay the salary and work with “your” new employee. It’s called Employer Of Record (EOR). In this way all the burden of responsibilities is on the provider’s entity (EOR) and you just pay them extra for the headache of legal handling of your employees.

It’s pretty much like what AWS is for infrastructure, or WeWork is for the office space. You can easily scale your team anywhere in the world without the bureaucracy nightmare of dealing with local authorities and regulations. No need to know who HMRC or SVA are.

You still have to have a company in country Y to do this, but it’s way easier to open a company and a bank account in some countries rather than in others depending on your background.

Use Cases

I see a couple of use cases for the services provided by those companies.

Hiring yourself in a country to support your visa. For example you are from country A that is not the UK and you have a company in Dubai that works with international customers. You might want go to London to look for the new clients, so you hire yourself through a provider company in London, they help you to get a work visa and employ you so you can legally stay and work in the UK. Hassle free.

Hiring locals. The same thing with hiring new employees: if you want to try out your business in a new country, opening a new company, a bank account and dealing with the local regulations would be expensive and time consuming. You want to avoid that. Finding local employees is stressful enough. So if you use an EOR you escape these problems and can start in days rather than months.

Relocating your team. In case your team needs to move to another country for whatever reason the fastest way to do that is through a such provider.

Service Providers

I know of at least four service providers that offer global full-time employee hiring. They differ in price, the number of solutions they provide, and the list of countries where they operate.

• Deel, they charge extra $600 per month for each full-time employee hired through EOR, help with immigration and work in 90+ countries.

• Remote, $700 per employee, also help with immigration and 71+ countries.

• OysterHR, $600 per employee, limited immigration help, 130+ countries.

• Pilot, $550, immigration help, 100+ countries. They work with US-based companies only.

Take into account that immigration and visa fees that you need to pay when hiring somebody abroad might be quite high. It depends on the provider, but I know approximate pricing for a few countries:

UK Work Tier 2 Visa ~ 19’000 GBP + 9’000 GBP for each dependent including the gov fees.

Spain, Portugal, Netherland ~ 7’000 EUR.

Switzerland - as far as I aware those providers can’t help to get a new work visa and immigrate to the country, but they can hire residents or those who have a visa already.

Summary

People got used to the idea that work relocation is difficult. Especially when we are talking about hiring talent abroad. But as you can see there are modern tools to deal with this struggle, so you can focus on building whatever you’re building without distractions.