A Remote Opportunity Becomes Reality

How G-P paves the way for businesses to hire the staff they need, wherever they live

Nearly 13 years ago, Boston-based G-P founder and CEO Nicole Sahin saw a void in the market.

With remote work gaining acceptance at the time, some companies wanted to hire staff overseas, but they quickly realized complying with other countries’ varying payroll practices and labor laws made it all but impossible to expand internationally.

As a result, Sahin created Globalization Partners—now called G-P—to solve that problem.

An employer of record company, G-P takes care of hiring, payroll, human resources and labor law compliance, taking the risk and headache out of the process.

When Sahin started her company, she couldn’t have known that a global pandemic would accelerate the workfrom-anywhere business model for middle-market companies.

A McKinsey & Co. report, called the American Opportunity Survey, surveyed 25,000 workers in spring 2022 about remote work and found that 58% reported they could work remotely at least part of the time. About 35% said they were offered remote work on a full-time basis. About 87% reported that if they were offered remote work, they would take it.

As remote work has become more popular, G-P—through its wholly owned infrastructure model—has paved the way for many businesses to hire the staff they need, wherever they live.

“We took off as the pandemic hit,” says Kevin Burke, G-P’s director, M&A, private equity and venture capital. “So that was the catalyst for us but also our industry, too. It’s been a fascinating ride to see how it’s grown.”

Growing Pains

When Watertown, Massachusettsbased EditShare wanted to expand internationally, it quickly realized that establishing a legal entity to do so would be too cumbersome.

“[Establishing legal entities in each country] requires a pretty heavy lift in terms of resources to maintain compliance. In most instances, it also locks you into that country in a pretty big way,” Jackie Hazan, vice president of people operations at EditShare, told G-P for a case study published on G-P’s website. “For a small and growing organization, this just doesn’t make sense.”

EditShare picked G-P over competitors due to its wholly owned infrastructure model, which allows EditShare’s international employees to interact with a streamlined interface.

While EditShare’s international employees complete work for the company just like local employees, they technically work for G-P, which assumes all the human resources and payroll responsibilities associated with the country where the employees live.

This is the case with all G-P’s clients, whose international staff technically work for G-P while performing the work on a day-to-day basis for the client, just like local staff.

Unlike local staff, EditShare’s international employees interact with G-P’s dashboard interface for payroll and human resources-related matters. It was essential to EditShare that the interface was easy to use so international employees felt they were treated fairly and were part of the company culture.

“We want them [employees] to look and feel like regular employees, regardless of who is doing the administrative paperwork,” Hazan told G-P. “It’s no fault of their own that we don’t have a legal entity. We don’t want them to feel like their experience is less than any other EditShare employee.”

Growing Too Quickly

Boston-based Snyk, a developer security platform company, had a similar issue to EditShare.

Due to the pandemic, Snyk grew at a rapid pace, far faster than expected. Between 2019 and 2021, Snyk grew from 170 to 700 employees.

Like EditShare, the company recognized that it needed help to bring on talent quickly and efficiently.

“We quickly realized that onboarding an employee in Australia is entirely different than onboarding one in the Czech Republic, and recognized we needed an experienced partner to help us expand while maintaining compliance,” Nathan Jeune-Manning, Snyk’s lead people partner, told G-P for a case study.

Snyk selected G-P because of its easy-to-use full-stack global employment platform.

“For us, it came down to useability and speed of response,”

Jeune-Manning said. “It’s a similar, consistent process with G-P in each and every country.”

A Company Starting Over

While some companies are new to hiring internationally, others have overseas staff they’ve worked with for years.

San Jose, California-based cybersecurity company SonicWall found itself carved out from a larger entity without the ability and knowledge to support its international workforce. When the company was divested from Dell in 2016, it had many employees throughout Europe and Asia.

With employees spread across several countries, setting up legal entities was untenable.

“We had to basically build from the ground up at the same time we were experiencing unprecedented international growth,” Bryce Ashcraft, vice president of global human resources, told G-P. “The challenge was, essentially, that you’ve got a company that has existed for 25-plus years, and we’ve got to continue supporting the operations and managing our talent as seamlessly as possible.”

SonicWall picked G-P due to its wholly owned infrastructure model, which it preferred over an aggregator model where international staffers would have to interact with a thirdparty provider in each country.

Now that SonicWall has partnered with G-P, it’s able to hire talent around the world.

“The wholly owned infrastructure model is really, really important for us because there were so many errors, including miscommunication with subcontractors, under another service provider,” Ashcraft said in a case study about SonicWall’s work with G-P. “And we just couldn’t afford to have mistakes like that, because if there’s a mistake, it has a very real impact on the lives of our employees.” //