Small and midsized businesses (SMBs) have long been locked out of global hiring by the complexity of international payroll, legal compliance, and employer-of-record (EOR) requirements. A new partnership between human capital management provider isolved and global employment platform Remote aims to change that. In a recent episode of the podcast You Should Know, hosted by WRKdefined's William Tincup, Barry Gauch, Executive Vice President at isolved, and Pim Altena, GM for Remote Embedded and VP of Partnerships at Remote, detailed how their integrated solution collapses those barriers and why the timing is critical as skill-based hiring accelerates.
The alliance emerged from a formal request for proposal (RFP) process in which isolved evaluated ten providers, narrowing the field to five before selecting Remote. Gauch explained that the decision was driven by surging customer demand for cross-border hiring. "Our customer demand for global hiring had picked up," he said, noting that isolved chose to partner rather than build its own global hiring capabilities because "it's not our key competency, but we know we needed to deliver it." The integration builds on a prior referral relationship, but the deeper embedded connection now allows isolved customers to access Remote's platform directly from their existing HCM workflows.
Remote offers three hiring modalities within a single platform: Employer of Record (EOR) for fast market entry, contractor management for flexible engagements, and global payroll for companies with established international teams. Altena emphasized that this flexibility is essential because companies often unconsciously constrain their talent pool by geography. "You're hiring people for skills, right? Like, that's what you should do, but you're actually constraining yourself often unconsciously by just the compliance capabilities, the legal entity footprint that you already have as a business," he said. The conversation highlighted the operational reality of global employment: the U.S. State Department recognizes 192 countries, each with its own federal, state, and municipal payroll rules. Altena pointed to extreme divergence in labor law, such as mandatory pre-employment medical exams in some jurisdictions and prohibitions in others, as well as high employee-protection regimes in France and Germany.
Gauch stressed that affordability and white-glove customer treatment were non-negotiable criteria for isolved. He also previewed how the integration with ApplicantPro, now fully folded into isolved, will benefit talent acquisition teams and staffing-company resellers seeking a unified platform. The partnership effectively allows SMBs to compete for talent on a global scale without needing to establish legal entities or navigate complex compliance landscapes on their own.
Altena framed the opportunity in personal terms, recalling his own experience as a Remote customer trying to hire an Italian candidate he could not legally employ. That frustration, he said, is what drives Remote's mission to make global hiring accessible to any business, regardless of size. For isolved's customers, the partnership means they can now hire the best person for the job, wherever they are in the world, through a single, integrated system.
