How to hire internationally without an HR team

Plenty of companies want to hire the best person for a role regardless of where they live, but worry they lack the in-house HR and legal function to do it compliantly. The good news is that a dedicated HR team is not the thing standing between you and an international hire. The compliance burden is, and that can be carried by someone else.

This guide covers the real obstacles to hiring abroad without an HR team and how a small company can employ across borders safely.

The barrier is rarely finding the person. It is everything that comes after the offer. Each country has its own employment contracts, payroll rules, tax withholding, mandatory benefits, leave entitlements and termination procedures, and getting any of them wrong carries real consequences.

For a company without an HR or legal team, the instinct is often to engage the person as a contractor to sidestep all of that. It feels simpler, but it introduces misclassification risk, which can unwind into back taxes, penalties and retroactive benefit claims. The compliance problem does not disappear. It just moves somewhere less visible.

There are really only two compliant ways to employ someone in another country. The first is to set up a local entity there, register with the tax and social security authorities and run payroll yourself. For a business with one or a handful of hires in a market, that is a disproportionate amount of cost, time and ongoing administration.

The second is to use an Employer of Record. The Employer of Record becomes the legal employer in that country on your behalf, while the person works for you day to day. It removes the need for an entity and, just as importantly, removes the need for in-house expertise in that country’s employment law.

An Employer of Record does the work an internal HR and payroll team would otherwise do for each country, without you having to build that capability. It issues a compliant local contract, runs payroll with the correct deductions, handles tax and social security, administers statutory benefits and manages onboarding and offboarding within local rules.

The result is that a five-person company can employ someone in another country to the same compliance standard as a large multinational, because the same infrastructure sits behind both. The HR expertise is provided as a service rather than hired as a headcount.

Using an Employer of Record does not mean giving up control of your team. You still choose who to hire, set the salary, direct the work, manage performance and decide on progression. The day-to-day relationship with the employee is yours.

What changes is that the legal employment responsibilities and the country-specific compliance sit with the Employer of Record. You keep the parts that are about your business and hand off the parts that are about local law.

For a company without an HR team, the support a provider offers matters as much as the mechanics. The questions worth asking are whether the provider holds its own infrastructure in the markets you need, how transparent the pricing is, how compliance is handled and how much help the employee actually receives.

Boundless was built for exactly this, offering compliance-first Employer of Record services with transparent pricing from €175 per month and white-glove support, so a small team is not left to work things out alone. Coverage spans 110+ countries, backed by Payoneer, a public company listed on the NASDAQ.

Airbotics, an early-stage company without a large back office, used Boundless to employ internationally without building an HR and payroll function first, keeping their focus on the product rather than on compliance.