A Global Employment Organization (‘GEO’), is a company that provides international employment solutions for multi-national companies. It is increasingly common for successful enterprises to seek to expand and hire foreign employees: It has been estimated that by 2025, half of Fortune 500 companies may have an outpost in an emerging market. Here we define ‘Global Employment Organization’, set out the key benefits of a GEO solution, and contrast them with global employment outsourcing.
Key Takeaways
1. A Global Employment Organization (‘GEO’) provides employment and contracting solutions for businesses around that engage staff around the world.
2. Global Employment Organizations are adept at acquiring top international talent for your business.
3. Global Employment Organizations ensure that you can acquire staff quickly, and in full compliance with the law, wherever they are located.
4. Global Employment Organizations can set up separate entities or subsidiary companies for enterprises operating in other countries.
5. Global Employment Outsourcing is one of the expansion solutions commonly offered by a Global Employment Organization.
What is the Definition of a Global Employment Organization?
A Global Employment Organization (GEO) helps international businesses employ workers overseas. GEOs ensure that multi-national companies employ workers in full compliance with employment and tax laws, as well as making international human resources and payroll more efficient.
Sometimes the term ‘GEO’ is used to mean the same thing as ‘Global PEO’. A Global PEO is a company that becomes the legal employer, or ’employer of record’ for staff, ensuring labor law and tax compliance for those companies.
For more on the definition of ‘PEO’ see ‘What does PEO stand for?‘
While a GEO usually does provide Global PEO solutions, they also provide a range of other service. Those services usually include:
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- International recruitment
- Many global employment organizations will search for and acquire staff based in different international locations.
- Payroll or benefits administration outsourcing
- Sometimes multi-nationals already have a legal entity/subsidiary in an overseas location and therefore have no need for an ’employer of record’ solution. In this case, businesses may seek to outsource payroll or benefits administration to a GEO to streamline employee payments and payroll tax withholding.
- Where administration is outsource it is often known as an Administrative Services Organization (or ‘ASO’).
- Compliance
- A GEO can often provide compliance advice and solutions for businesses expanding overseas. This might include advice on local HR and tax laws.
- Global expansion strategy
- Which overseas location is the best expansion target for your business? GEOs often provide advice on which location would best service your international growth goals.
- Legal entity or subsidiary set-up
- Where a company seeks to set up a subsidiary company or other form of legal entity to hire employees in-country, a global employment organization may be able to help.
In short, a global employment organization is an international expansion partner with a broad range of solutions for businesses engaging a workforce overseas. GEO is especially beneficial for businesses that need a package of services for their international expansion. For example, following Brexit, UK businesses unable to hire EU workers might benefit from a range of recruitment, global PEO and subsidiary set ups, in different EU countries.
GEOs when a business needs to source international employees quickly and efficiently as is often the case with managers hiring employees for startups.
Below we set out three key benefits of using global employment organization solutions.
Global Employment Organization Benefit 1: Talent Acquisition
Any good business leader knows that to have a strong and stable company, it is necessary to find the right people to cover important roles. In today’s increasingly global world, companies do not have to limit themselves to local talent when filling these roles.
By partnering with a GEO, organizations have access to international recruitment networks: This means access to a worldwide pool of candidates. It is through assessing both local candidates and foreign candidates that companies can find the most suitable overseas employees.
A GEO with an international recruitment team offers the following benefits for international businesses:
- Workers with an enhanced skillset
- A GEO can often tap into talent that might otherwise be unavailable in the country in which you are based. For example, it may be difficult to hire tech workers in your own country, but relatively easy in another country. In this way, recruiting overseas with a GEO is a useful way to up-skill your workforce.
- Increased productivity
- It is often a misuse of resources for businesses to commit to hiring staff based overseas for themselves. Leaving this to specialists allows multi-nationals more time to focus on their core business.
- Diverse cultural backgrounds
- Adding to your workforce with staff based overseas can give your enterprise the benefit of staff who understand overseas markets in greater depth than any head office staff could.
- Advanced language skills
- Using the dedicated recruitment resources of a GEO usually means multi-lingual recruiters who can communicate with new recruits and hires in their own language.
- Enhanced local knowledge to help with access to new markets
- A local recruitment team not only understands the legal constraints on hiring staff, they also understand standard job market conditions in that country. For example, it may be that there is no legal requirement for ‘13th or 14th month pay‘, but it is a standard expectation of the local workforce.
Your recruits can fill important functions within your company, such as:
- Launching a new product series or service
- Helping you restructure your organization
- Supporting international expansion
- Leveraging your reputation to create new relationships with local partners.
Any good GEO will customize a recruitment project to match your company needs , enabling you to target candidates that have the right education, experience, and background to advance company goals and integrate well into your existing staff.
Global Employment Organization Benefit 2: Quick and Compliant Staff Hire
Many companies that implement an international expansion strategy decide to expand globally when they have brand recognition and have received positive publicity about their innovation, superior services, or insight into their customers’ needs.
Taking advantage of being first to market can often provide a strong foundation for later growth. Therefore, companies need to be prepared to deploy staff quickly in a compliant manner to take advantage of their new opportunities.
Global staffing solutions – often a Global PEO or an Employer of Record (EOR) – are often the best tool offered by a GEO for deploying staff quickly and compliantly.
In today’s fast-paced world, you cannot afford to wait until a new opportunity emerges. A Global employment organization enables you to onboard staff overseas without the burden of establishing a local subsidiary or company.
GEO solutions allow you to eliminate the need to manage administrative functions so that you can focus solely on your international expansion and core competencies while delegating tedious oversight tasks to a trusted expert.
You also gain the advantage of being able to compete with larger businesses while scaling your business in a quick and compliant manner.
GEO and staffing solutions services usually include:
- Onboarding
- The GEO should have a local team that will ensure that all immigration requirements, mandatory insurances, in-country tax registrations, and other key declarations are in place to ensure compliance.
- Payroll processing
- The GEO should set up a compliant payroll system for your business and make proper calculations for individual income tax, insurance payments, social security contributions, and other allowances. It should also manage employee expenses and reimbursements, preferably without charging you extra every time you need to process an expense. A good GEO makes payroll easy; your company should simply receive a monthly statement and invoice without all the additional hassles.
- Ongoing support
- A GEO often takes on all Employer of Record responsibilities, which includes handling termination and severance arrangements, employee renewals, and compliance matters related to the employment relationship.
Global Employment Organization Benefit 3: Entity or Company Establishment
To achieve the greatest amount of flexibility and to plan for long-term growth, many businesses will want to establish a legal presence in the countries where they expand.
Long-term growth demands careful planning of how to use resources, conducting market research, and establishing checkpoints for the company’s expansion.
Top GEOs provide entity and company incorporation solutions to assist you to:
- Set up a subsidiary or separate legal presence
- Incorporate your business
- Open a corporate bank account
- Register with tax authorities
- Obtain necessary certifications
- Maintain necessary corporate records and filings
What Is Global Employment Outsourcing?
Sometimes the term ‘global employment organization’ is confused with the term ‘global employment outsourcing’, which is unsurprising given that the initials (‘GEO’) are the same. So what exactly is the difference between the two? To answer that question it is to establish what exactly outsourcing involves.
Many functions of an enterprise can be outsourced: That is, the enterprise contracts with a third party to carry out a particular function or operation. A common example of outsourcing is Business Process Outsourcing (BPO): This covers, for example, the outsourcing of accounting, IT, human resources, or payroll. ‘Front office’ functions can also be outsourced: For example, the outsourcing of customer relations or sales. A crucial element of your international human resources (HR) strategy needs to be a decision on which processes and functions to outsource.
Businesses decide on global employment outsourcing when they decide to outsource the employer function and all the compliance and payroll responsibilities that come with that. This is the same as a ‘Global PEO’ or ‘Employer of Record’ solution. With this in mind, there are two key differences between global employment outsourcing and a global employment organization.
First, most global employment organizations provide global employment outsourcing, but they may not do so in every country or region. For example, some global employment organizations when operating in such as the United States, offer ‘co-employment’ staffing solutions. That is, both the client company and the third party take on some level of legal responsibility for employees. This means, for example, if a PEO fails to perform its legal duties in the United States, the client company may still be found liable.
Second, a global employment organization offers more than global employment outsourcing. Global employment outsourcing is just one of multiple expansion solutions offered by a global employment organization. They also often provide recruitment, payroll, HR, and immigration /visa services, for example.
Frequently asked questions
A global employment company, also known as a global employment organization (GEO) is a company that enables the hiring of employees based overseas, in full compliance with laws and regulations.
Prices start from USD $200 per employee, per month. The exact price depends on the country of hire and the specific services contracted.
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