Companies building international teams today are simultaneously drawing from a mix of markets, each selected for a specific kind of role. Remote People, an EOR platform operating in more than 150 countries, tracks where its clients are hiring the most. The top five markets right now:
- India
- the Philippines
- China
- Germany
- Spain
Remote People CEO Antoine Boquen explained to HR Executive why a combination of places is often attractive to employers. “Five years ago, global hiring usually meant offshoring engineering to India,” Boquen says. “Now the same business hires engineers in Bangalore, customer success leads in Manila, hardware specialists in Shenzhen and senior product talent in Munich, all on one team.”
Each market is winning a specific type of role, rather than competing as generic offshore labor. “The companies hiring fastest are the ones building that mixed map instead of forcing every role through one country,” says Boquen.
When HR teams move quickly to secure engineering or AI talent across borders, three problems come up consistently, according to Boquen.
The first is misclassification. “Hiring an engineer as a contractor to move fast, yet local law treats them as an employee from day one,” he says. That triggers back taxes, social contributions and, in markets like Germany or France, serious termination liability.
The second is IP exposure. Boquen says U.S.-style assignment language does not translate across jurisdictions. He cites Germany’s Employee Inventions Act, China’s employee-IP rules and France’s compensation triggers as places where standard U.S. contracts routinely fall short. “Companies usually discover this only when the engineer leaves with the work,” he says.
The third is data residency. Boquen describes how an engineer in mainland China touching customer data falls under the Personal Information Protection Law whether or not the company accounted for it at the offer stage. “None of these get caught at the offer stage,” Boquen says.
Read more: How Unilever International is pioneering a new era of AI-powered leadership
Four signs a CHRO is already behind
For HR leaders still relying on traditional international hiring infrastructure, Boquen identifies four signals that the gap is already widening.
Time-to-hire: Senior international roles taking six months while the company waits on entity setup. An EOR partner, he says, can put someone on payroll in 6 to 10 days post-offer, depending on the market.
Offer-to-start drop-off: Candidates who accept and then go quiet because the start date keeps slipping. In competitive talent markets, that gap costs the hire.
The contractor workaround: Line managers hiring international engineers as contractors to sidestep the entity question. The workaround loads misclassification risk onto the books before anyone in HR notices.
Candidate filtering by geography: Recruiters passing on strong candidates because Finance has not set up payroll in that country. “None of these show up on a standard HR dashboard,” Boquen says, “which is why the gap widens quietly.”
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