Frustrated with EOR providers? You’re not alone. Too many EOR are focussed on growth and profit margins. They neglect the most important part of the business: providing premium customer service to their clients and supported employees. It’s simple. When your new international employee does well at their job they help your company achieve it’s business objectives. The role of the EOR is to support this at every step, your success is their success. If you are looking for EOR providers who understand this, you’ve come to the right place.
At Contractor Taxation, we have been working with international employment since 2008. We have experience working with all the major EOR companies as well as the boutique providers specialised by region or industry. Whether you need to hire one person in France or build a remote team across the world, we’re here to help you implement EOR services for international expansion. Our EOR advisory service is completely free. We are knowledgeable, friendly, and responsive by phone or email.
Aligned on success
Our clients have many different reasons for employing someone internationally. Often it’s a sales rep who will bring in new revenue. Or a hard-to-find executive who happens to be overseas. But the common thread is always that there is a Very Good Reason for doing it. You’re not going to expend the effort and expense of hiring someone in this place unless there is a good strategic justification.
And this is where the fundamental alignment should start between you and your EOR provider: you should both be focussed on your business getting a successful outcome from this initiative.
No question much of this responsibility sits with your organisation and your employee. You’re the ones doing the work day to day. The EOR is basically infrastructure, supporting the administration of the employment. Ideally it should hum along in the background and barely be noticed.
But we believe there are 3 key domains where the EOR, in particular how they approach customer service, can either HELP or HINDER your progress.
- Minimising Friction.
- Do they make it easy for you? Do they accommodate your reasonable requests? Do they help you maximise engagement with your new employee?
- Personalised service.
- Do they know and understand you, your employee and your business?
- Resolving issues.
- When something comes up, do you and your employee end up feeling satisfied or frustrated?
This starts from when you first contact them. Are they just trying to close the sale? Or are they working to get you and your employee what you need? Many employees are nervous about the EOR model, especially if they have spent the rest of their career working directly with large corporates. And it makes sense, it can feel a bit risky and disconnected when your employer is half a world away and it’s a different company name that appears on your employment contract and payslips.
One of our former clients explained the risk to us in a way that changed our approach. She was the CEO of an Australian start-up selling medical equipment. They had significant client demand in the Northern Hemisphere but turning that into revenue had been a bit more complicated than expected. Firstly they incorporated an entity in the UK and hired a Regional Sales Manager based in London. This worked well for the UK market but they couldn’t make any headway in Europe. Localisation was one obvious barrier, it was hard to sell into France and Germany without local contacts, context and language skills. So they decided to hire locals in each country. First stop was the Netherlands which was a success, sales were good. But there were some pain points and learnings too: it was really hard to find the right candidate; it took longer than expected to get that person onboarded, aligned and productive; and administering their Dutch entity proved painful.
So when they moved on to test France and Germany, they went with local hires employed through an EOR. And put a lot of planning and effort into recruitment and training. When we were setting up the French employee there was a bit of a delay in generating the offer letter, we had some back and forth on the terms and wording. We were in the early days of Shield GEO and whilst we knew customer service was important, we treated this as a routine delay. But then this CEO called me and explained her concerns. She talked about how important this employee was to her organisation, how hard it had been to source them and the lessons they had learnt in the Netherlands and England about the added importance of onboarding and supporting their international employees. She explained how employee engagement was critical to the success of their sales team and that it was generally highest when the person commenced work. She cited studies which showed that if engagement drops, it’s really hard to recover it. And she pointed out that our delays were putting this at risk. If the employee grew frustrated with how long things took or that the EOR setup was going to be a hassle… it could damage their enthusiasm for the job and the mission. She challenged us to do better.
It was a wonderful insight that changed how we approached servicing our clients. And also what we expected from our partners. It’s remained core to our approach today, more than ten years later. We only work with EOR and Umbrella Companies that understand the importance of great customer service. This applies to much more than preparing offer letters – it’s the whole employee life-cycle.
Your Employer of Record provider should be actively acting in a way that supports your success. Their processes should be smooth, simple and reliable. They should be approachable and accommodating. They should communicate with you in a way that leaves you feeling heard and respected. They should explain things clearly, patiently and with as much detail as you require. They should know you and your employee and your company. And your needs and preferences should be factored in to how they service you as a client.
If they aren’t doing this, come talk to us. We’ll point you to the ones who will look after you properly.
How to pick a great EOR
This is a challenge. The market is swamped with Employer of Record providers and they all look pretty similar. They talk about how quickly you can hire through them. How many countries they cover. Their cool tech. Their AI agent with a funky name. Their customer satisfaction stats. Their awards. But what are they really like to work with?
The honest answer? They are probably good, just as long as nothing goes wrong or gets complicated.
The problem is that international HR is inherently complicated. Take the above example of a Regional Sales Manager in France. Firstly you’re dealing with really nuanced and byzantine regulations like the French Code du travail. Throw in the beliefs and expectations of a French employee who has grown up in a culture that deeply values intellectual debate, worker protections and individual rights. And on the other side you might have a Sales Director who has huge targets, little patience and a disappointing attitude towards HR policy. Oh, and sprinkle in some political and economic uncertainty to keep everyone on their toes.
The likelihood is that some sort of issue will come up at some point where you’ll need help from your EOR. At the very least you want to be prepared for it, just in case.
Customer Service at a typical Employer of Record
Most EOR are following the same blueprint. Take funding, build infrastructure, lots of sales, hockey stick growth and a big exit. And this means most EOR offer customer support in the same way. Enterprise clients might get an account manager, or at least a fast track to Tier 2 support. Everyone else get an email address or a chatbot. i.e. an impersonal entry point to nine circles of customer service hell.
The problem is this can be hard to gauge until you’re an actual customer. In this model the sales team is well funded and well resourced. So your initial contact person is probably great to deal with. But once you have signed up you won’t speak to them again. Unless, perhaps, you are adding more employees.
So what can you do?
You can ask for references. Or better yet, ask someone you trust for their experiences dealing with this provider.
You can ask the provider questions before signing up. How do they structure support? Who will you be dealing with? Where are they located? How long does it take to respond? Can they share an actual example of how an issue is dealt with?
Or you can talk to us. There’s a bit more about our background further down the page but in a nutshell we’ve seen this industry from all sides. We’ve run an EOR ourselves. We have used EOR for our own employees. And we’ve introduced many clients EOR providers. In the process we’ve dealt with all the EOR companies. The big names, the oldest ones, the boutique providers and even those who aren’t around anymore. And we can help you benefit from all that knowledge and experience.
What We Do: Free EOR Advisory
We will give you a free consult by phone, zoom or email. We will take time to understand what you need and then give you our advice. And we know what we’re doing.
What help do we offer?
It is quite flexible but generally is one of:
- Recommending a different EOR that better suits you
- Changing your processes for managing your EOR employees
- Renegotiating with your current EOR
- Helping you manage your EOR employees
- Using a different model than EOR like engaging workers as contractors or incorporating your own entity
Why us?
✓ Over 18 Years of Experience
We’ve been here since 2008, before the EOR industry started.
✓ Unparalleled Knowledge
We founded one of first EOR companies (Shield GEO), we’ve worked with almost every EOR and umbrella company in the world and we have employed our own staff through EOR. We understand all aspects of EOR from sales and onboarding through to payroll adminstration, issue resolution and handling terminations.
✓ We Know All Your Options
We have experience of all the established EOR companies and many smaller providers that are specialised in a region or industry.
✓ Handle all industries and job titles
Historically we used to specialise in IT contractors but today we can service almost any industry or role – as long as our partner’s insurers will take it on.
✓ Solution Agnostic
We understand when to hire as a contractor, when to employ through an EOR and when to incorporate. We’ve used all 3 solutions extensively and even moved between them within country as our needs changed over the years. We’ll help you discover what works best for your situation.
Our background
CT has been around since 2008, before the global EOR industry started. Safeguard World didn’t start offering global employment at scale until 2009. There was no Deel or Remote or Globalization Partners. Back then our focus was mostly on international IT contractors working fixed term around the world. And we built up a network of local partners, companies that knew how to pay workers compliantly in their local jurisdiction. Often they could organise work permits and visas for foreign workers too.
Over time we had more and more corporate clients contact us for help with their international employees. We introduced them to our partners but there was a disconnect with service levels. Our partners were used to dealing with individual contractors and recruiters. Corporate clients were different. They had more complex needs, higher expectations in responsiveness and support and access to expertise. Our partners struggled and we had to get more and more involved to smooth out interactions and solve problems.
We realised that we could, in effect, resell our local partners’ product in a way that better served growing companies with international employees.
So in 2015 we created Shield GEO. This was still before Employer of Record had become common parlance – we were calling it GEO (global employment organisation). That term never stuck but what did work was our dedication to good service.
Our model was to use local partners but act as a “service layer” for our clients. Dedicated account managers, personal service, very responsive, transparent, reliable and empathetic. We became experts at problem solving. And our clients were happy. We grew to support 900 EOR employees for more than 300 companies across 55 countries.
And we practiced what we preached. Our own 75 staff were located in 24 countries. We used our same local partners to employ our own people. We had many of the same issues that our clients experienced with setting up benefits and negotiating compensation and managing performance and handling random HR issues and difficult terminations. Which was complex and stressful at times but very valuable for building our empathy for what our clients went through.
And our clients were happy. We only ever lost 2 customers to our competitors. Almost 70% of our new EOR employees came from our existing clients. It’s important to note that this wasn’t just because our service was so amazing (although we believe we delivered great service). It was mostly because our clients were getting good results from their international business activities and wanting to expand further.
This meant they had sourced the right person, they had set them up well and the person had succeeded. And now our client wanted to do it again somewhere else. And our job was to make sure that the EOR portion was a positive contribution towards that success. Generally by being as invisible, reliable and friction free as possible.
Who we help best
Our services best suit clients who
- Want the peace of mind that comes from dealing with friendly, responsive, accessible expertise
- Employee experience is very important
- Compliance and reliability are non-negotiable
- Have employed internationally before & familiar with some of the good and bad
- Have used EOR before
- Worried about risk, complexity and cost of situations like performance management and termination of overseas employees.
Who we don’t suit
We don’t work well for clients who
- Want a hands-off tech focussed solution
- Are looking for the cheapest solution
- Believe they won’t have complications with their international employees
How It Works: Simple, Straightforward Process
Step 1: Free Consultation
Contact us by phone or email. Tell us about your hiring needs: How many people? What roles? What’s your timeline? We’ll discuss your options—no obligation.
Step 2: We Present Your Options
Based on your needs, we’ll recommend several solutions such as providers who deliver great, responsive personalised service
Step 3: We Help You Choose
We’ll explain the pros and cons of each option in plain English. You’ll understand exactly what you’re getting, what it costs, and what the compliance implications are.
Step 4: We Facilitate Setup
Once you’ve chosen your solution, we can help coordinate the setup. We’re here to answer questions throughout the process.
Step 5: Ongoing Support
Even after your employees are onboarded, we’re available if you have questions, need to scale up, or want to adjust your arrangement.
Contractor Taxation – Your friendly, knowledgeable partner for EOR advice. We know all your options, and we’re here to help you choose the best one.
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