Global expansion and entering new markets present great opportunities and challenges in compliance and creating a seamless working experience for employees abroad. Hiring foreign workers for full-time positions requires adherence to all legal and social norms. However, laws and regulations in different countries are constantly changing and can become significant obstacles to your goal. Keeping up with all the rules on your own is challenging, as managing a business itself requires time, effort, and resources.

At the same time, entering new markets offers promising prospects. It brings greater profitability to your business investments instead of being limited to domestic markets. For example, Apple increased its global revenue from $274.52 billion in 2020 to $394.33 billion in 2022, largely due to global expansion. So, what can you do to create your own success story and overcome challenges such as global hiring?

More and more companies are turning to a global EoR (Employer of Record) service provider to mitigate risks during globalization and delegate a significant portion of responsibilities. By utilizing an EOR, companies rely on them to ensure global payroll, benefits, and compliance in the countries where they plan to hire employees. This strategy helps entrepreneurs achieve success abroad by bypassing bureaucratic hurdles.

What is global hiring with EOR?

An Employer of Record organization is a registered employer of a business service that acts as the employer of record for tax and legal purposes. Such a company ensures compliance with corporate requirements in establishing foreign legal entities, payroll processing, and workforce management. This way, businesses delegate a significant portion of administrative work and have the opportunity to focus on other crucial aspects, such as marketing, product and service improvement, and further expansion.

How does EOR work?

An EOR company primarily handles the hiring and termination of international employees, bringing the best talent to your project while ensuring compliance with international personnel management requirements. Collaborating with a partnering employer guarantees that your company is not legally responsible for labor law violations when hiring international workers. The official employer of the record service takes legal responsibility for several aspects, including:

• Payroll processing for employees;
• Ensuring overall business compliance;
• Tax processing and reporting;
• Employee insurance and maintaining appropriate coverage;
• Calculation and payment of payroll taxes;
• Managing sponsorship applications and visa requests.

Using employer-of-record services is particularly beneficial for your business when dealing with financial matters and labor legislation in different countries. EOR solution takes on legal responsibility for your hired international employees, acting as the lawful employer, handling employment contracts, processing international payments, and complying with local requirements in each country. They provide legal support in case of terminations and administer bonuses. Additionally, the employer of record services handles tax and contribution payments.

Thus, collaborating with an EOR helps mitigate risks associated with legal and tax matters. The official employer acts as an intermediary between companies and their foreign workers, facilitating the establishment of branches abroad. They handle complex tasks such as compliance with labor laws and wage requirements. Moreover, in some countries, for business establishment, a foreign director must have a residence visa. Without such a visa, global hiring is impossible until the company hires a local director.

Therefore, while working with an EOR, you not only successfully enter new markets but also eliminate unnecessary risks and have the opportunity to attract the most talented employees who will eagerly contribute to your company’s growth and development overseas.

Benefits of Employer of Record Services

Getting rid of bureaucratic difficulties and constraints is the main goal you achieve with an Employer of Record (EOR). But let’s take a closer look at why this is advantageous for your business:

• Transferring personnel management to an official employer saves time and allows you to focus on efficient business development.
• Working with a registered employer ensures greater accuracy in personnel management, payroll processing, and other payments.
• An EOR partner assists with record management, ensuring report accuracy and process efficiency.
• Using an EOR solution reduces regulatory risk as they are responsible for compliance with tax and labor requirements in different countries.
• EOR can simplify the taxation process, avoiding the need to establish a permanent establishment in the country of operation and taking full responsibility for tax compliance.
• Utilizing EOR services allows you to concentrate on business development, mitigate risks, and save time and resources associated with personnel management and taxation.

Thus, global workforce management optimization and compliance with legal requirements in different regions become an easy step for you. While your competitors struggle to handle these tasks on their own, they are losing the time that you gain along with the opportunity to surge ahead and confidently capture your market share.

Wrapping up

The official employer takes responsibility for complying with labor laws and regulations in various countries, helping the company operate within the law and avoid legal issues and penalties. Additionally, by partnering with an EOR, businesses delegate complex tasks such as employment contract management, payment processing, taxation, and social contributions. This streamlines payroll processes and internal accounting. All of these grant valuable time to EOR partner companies for the development and promotion of their products, becoming the driving force for further rapid progress.

Whilst the modernisation of agriculture in the Western world has contributed not only to a rapid increase in food production in recent decades, it has also opened up a can of worms as regards environmental and societal concerns over matters such as greenhouse gas emissions, deteriorating soil quality and losses in biodiversity.

Of course, the plus points of modern farming, in a world where food demand is at its highest ever, are undeniable. Employed today are processes which make farming easier and faster, providing the highest yields, greater areas of land being cultivated, reduction in food costs, the saving of time and energy, greater meat availability to consumers and increased job opportunities.

But on the flip side, modern farming methods have continued to use natural resources and increased the use of fertilisers which has led to the loss of soil fertility. The use of groundwater for tube well irrigation has brought about water depletion on a massive scale and, overall, contemporary farming methods need a great deal of capital.

Not all about profits – expert Alexandr Aristov

Alexandr Aristov, agribusiness expert, stresses that agricultural processes are not all about making profits. He comments: “Agribusinesses can improve their sustainability by adopting environmentally friendly and socially responsible production practices, which is something businesses should always strive to achieve and with great results.” Alexandr Aristov, as a former food and beverage producer, is very well aware that good farming practices today are a necessity for the benefit of the environment and the health of the nation. Those practices also include animal welfare and the well-being of his workforce.

Alexandr Aristov is not alone in his vision for sustainable agriculture. Farmers globally are intensifying their efforts to monitor the impact of their production processes on a wide range of sustainability issues. In line with this development, the use of certification schemes for sustainable food products has increased rapidly. Other CSR initiatives from farmers – such as public open days on farms and in school education – and retailers (for example, commodity roundtables and market standards) are increasingly being organised in the West. But there’s been a disconnect between farmer and consumer which has made the latter increasingly dependent on such information initiatives from producers and retailers to learn just how their food has been produced, based on the farming practices used and what values. It’s all there, on the product packaging, in the local supermarket.

No one likes being told what to do, and moral judgments are inevitably personal, many improvements in the sustainability performance of farms (such as the lowering of greenhouse gas emissions, efforts to maintain biodiversity, protection of water and soil and improving animal welfare) result from producers’ own moral judgments endorsing ethical farming.

Access to capital often a problem

“The biggest bottleneck in a good food system is not entrepreneurs, it’s access to capital,” says Eric Kessler, founder of Washington-based Arabella Advisors, a company that focuses on impact investing and philanthropy, with the food system as one of its three primary areas of focus. When he created Arabella as way back as 2005, Kessler said no one even used the term “impact investing.” Over the last decade, it has become a buzzword, however, and financial services companies are applying many models to all segments of the food system.

Pressures to produce among rising costs of things like fertilisers, livestock feed, labour, fuel and machinery maintenance have thrown up an enormous challenge to farmers. According to data compiled by the UN, by 2050 we will need to produce 60% more food to feed a world population of 9.3 billion. At the same time, there is a need to encourage industrial-scale farmers to be far more environmentally aware by providing the right incentives and penalties where necessary.

There are many schools of thought supporting new ventures to improve sustainability in agriculture to meet the demands of a growing global population, but governments will have to make the concept of sustainable agriculture much more incentivised for those who work at the heart of the industry. It’s a case of by helping the agribusinesses, they in turn will keep food on our tables. At the same time, more innovations are needed in promoting best practices for environmental health and stability.