Deel, the payroll and compliance company, recently raised $425 million in series D at a valuation of $5.5 billion. Deel’s exponential growth comes as no surprise considering how remote work has boomed during the pandemic.
My guest on this episode of SaaS Open Mic is Liina Laas, the Head of Expansion at Deel. She focuses on expansion in the Central and Eastern European regions. In our conversation, Liina and I looked at trends in hiring. We also talked about best practices for hiring global talent.
The complexities of global hiring
There’s no way to sugarcoat it, hiring people in different countries comes with a lot of headaches. You have to set up your own entity, register a foreign employer, hire a team of lawyers to look through the contracts, also, hire tax advisers and an accountant. There are plenty of legal complexities to consider. So why go through all that effort to hire people outside of your country base?
Some companies are still scared of cultural differences. It’s time to get over those fears, because diversity does really, really move you forward.
Liina Laas helps SaaS leaders and founders hire talent all over the world. She has been in the startup field for nearly a decade and is an advocate for diversity and remote work. Building an international team has become a given for more and more founders and leaders.
Employee retention starts with onboarding
It is currently an employee’s market rather than an employer’s market, according to Liina’s observations at Deel. People know that they can find a better offer when they’re good at their job. So to keep talented people, it’s not only about higher salaries.
Liina explains how important it is to have a solid plan for hiring and onboarding, as part of the efforts to build a strong company culture. Going above and beyond for your employees is instrumental to a company’s success.
One element that contributes to employee satisfaction is clarity of benefits and policies. For example, how many vacation days are there in Spain? How much tax do we have to pay?
There are new challenges that employers face that they need to solve in order to keep employees.
Some [companies] need a solution for their existing employees who have decided to move somewhere else. Once COVID happened, people realized that they can work remotely and choose where to live. (..) That is a problem that employers are facing. If they don’t want to lose their team members, they have to find a way how to employ them in the other country.
On this episode of SaaS Open Mic
- What is the hotbed for technical talent right now?
- Creating a plan for hiring and onboarding new employees
- The minimum requirements to run a global team
- Going above and beyond for your employees
