Hiring a key employee in France and worried about using an EOR? You’re not alone. Too many EOR are focussed on growth and profit margins. They neglect the most important parts of their business: reliable payroll, attention to detail, being responsive and 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 should be 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 VIP in France or are building 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.
US companies hiring remotely in France
When we ask our American clients why they are choosing to hire in France, there are a wide variety of drivers. Often it’s about generating revenue from opening up a new market in France. Sometimes its to retain a valued employee who is relocating to France for personal or family reasons. Increasingly we hear about highly specialised personnel who are hard to find and the perfect candidate just happened to be in France. But there are two things they all have in common. Firstly their business has a Very Good Reason for hiring there! And secondly they have no intention for their company to establish any sort of legal or physical presence in France.
It’s not surprising given that France has a well deserved reputation for being a challenging place to be an employer. There is the complex legislation of the French Code du travail and portage salarial – their specific model for third party employment which is implemented via the portage salarial conventions collective or collective bargaining agreement. The social security costs are almost 30% for the employer alone and significant time off (25 days annual leave, 11 public holidays and potentially RTT days on top). Also you have the beliefs and expectations of a typical French employee who has grown up in a culture that deeply values intellectual debate, worker protections and individual rights. And often there is the counterpoint, a US line manager more experienced with “at-will” employment and a different communication style.
This is not to put you off proceeding. We’ve helped hundreds of companies get great business outcomes from hiring in France. We’ve learnt that choosing the right EOR is especially important when hiring a key employee in a difficult country.
How to choose the right French EOR
Start with the basics. Does their service and approach make sense to you? Do you feel valued?
Are they aligned with you on the employee experience you want to deliver to your staff? Is it clear what responsibilities you have vs the EOR in terms of managing and supporting your worker?
Do they understand that your new hire is often nervous about an EOR setup and needs reassurance. Do they help give your employees confidence that their employment will be compliant, reliable and hassle-free?
Are they responsive, reliable and accurate? This starts from understanding your particular situation and flows through the onboarding process. Many providers have a drop off in service once they think they have closed the sale. And you don’t want to find this out when you get to topics like local health insurance and expense reimbursements.
This can be overwhelming for someone making their first hire in France. Some things are really hard to know until you have actually experienced them and you can’t anticipate every problem that might arise let alone how your EOR might deal with them. Or you can talk to us. At CT we understand what to look out for and we are waiting to share that knowledge with you.
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 to 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 experience. Here’s just one lesson we learnt from working with international clients and their French employees.
The importance of employee engagement when hiring in France
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.
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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How to contact us for advice about using an EOR for your international employees
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