Standing on Giants
at a glance
Founded in London in 2012, Standing on Giants is a full-service community agency that helps brands and businesses build and maintain online communities. Standing on Giants has built thriving global communities for companies like Airbnb, Tesco Bank, and Lenovo.
Standing on Giants partnered with Oyster in order to access talent in the countries and regions where their customers are based. Hiring globally enabled them to better serve their global client base, expand their service offerings, and transform their business.
- Standing on Giants can recruit faster and fill roles more easily
- Standing on Giants can scale quickly and flexibly around the world
- Standing on Giants expanded their service offerings for their clients
The challenge
As a London-based community engagement agency serving clients around the world, Standing on Giants helps leading brands build and manage thriving global communities. Whether it’s engaging an employee base across 85 countries for Heineken, a one-million-strong community of Airbnb hosts across eight languages, or Arabic-language gamers for Lenovo in the Middle East, Standing on Giants helps companies generate business value by building and engaging brand-owned communities.
Building a community for a large corporate client typically requires coverage of multiple languages, countries, and regions. In other words, Standing on Giants often hires for language-based community management roles that require a very specific skill set. Hiring solely in London meant they were limited in their access to talent with the right combination of language skills and community management skills, explains Emily Gallagher, Head of Operations and HR at Standing on Giants.
“Prior to working with Oyster, we were really limited to people who spoke those languages and were living in or around London, which made it quite challenging to fill certain roles because we were pulling from a small pool.”
Emily’s team considered hiring people from Europe, but after Brexit this would require the extra paperwork of visa sponsorship in addition to relocation. Meanwhile, they had already switched to remote work due to the pandemic, so it no longer made sense to limit themselves to local talent or sponsor visas for overseas talent.
As a small company serving international clients in multiple languages, Standing on Giants needed a fast and easy way to hire global talent to work for them remotely—without the hassle or expense of setting up entities.
The solution
After considering various options, Standing on Giants eventually chose Oyster as their global employment partner in October 2021 because they were impressed by the Oyster team’s knowledge and expertise.
It’s not just hiring talent globally that Oyster enables for Standing on Giants, but ensuring compliance with labor laws and tax regulations in each country. Emily’s team also relies on Oyster’s local knowledge and expertise to help them build fair compensation packages and offer competitive benefits around the world to attract and retain top talent.
“Oyster not only helps us hire employees, but they provide really helpful HR advice, too. So that’s everything to make sure that we’re paying the right taxes in the area and complying with the right laws, but also that we’re paying people fairly, providing a great set of benefits, and really giving people access to everything they need to work safely and healthily in their home country.”
For Emily, having peace of mind regarding compliance is a huge benefit of working with Oyster. It means not having to worry about the details when it comes to compliant contracts, statutory benefits, or employment regulations.
“It’s quite nerve-wracking for a business to move into global hiring with very limited knowledge about it. So having a team of experts on hand to give us advice about hiring, benefits, local legislation, and just being able to take care of our employees in those areas has been really amazing.”
The Standing on Giants team members on Oyster find the platform user-friendly and employee-centric. “Our team members that use Oyster often give me great feedback about the service that they’re being provided,” says Emily. The HR team, too, appreciates the self-serve knowledge and tools as well as the helpful and reliable customer support.
“The experience working with the team at Oyster has been great. We have an amazing account manager, Lucia, who is always on hand to answer questions and ready to go above and beyond to solve any problem that may arise.”
As an impact-driven company and certified B Corp, Standing on Giants appreciates being able to partner with Oyster as fellow B Corp. Emily is particularly proud of the company scoring high for their people policies, and she acknowledges Oyster’s role in ensuring an excellent employee experience for their global team members.
“Oyster has been fantastic in making sure that we’re able to take our people practices in the U.K. and apply them around the world. So, not just abiding by all the laws, but offering a good employment package, a broad range of benefits, and a healthy setup for our employees. So that’s been extremely helpful.”
By partnering with Oyster, Standing on Giants is now able to recruit more easily and scale faster than they could when they were limited to the local talent pool. They’ve now built a globally distributed team spanning 10 countries on five continents.
“Oyster has helped us grow and scale the business by enabling us to hire from a wider pool of candidates. We currently have 14 employees hired through Oyster in 10 countries globally. We have people working in Canada, Lebanon, Colombia, the U.S., Egypt, Hungary, and more—a really wide range of countries that we weren’t able to hire in previously.”
Being able to hire anywhere means they can better serve their global customer base. If they need to build a community in Latin America or the Middle East, they can easily hire someone in Colombia or Egypt—which has enabled them to scale quickly and flexibly wherever and whenever the need arises.
“We’ve used Oyster to hire team members from Colombia to Singapore, and it’s been really transformative for our business. We can hire people that speak their native language in their native country. Since we build and run global communities for our clients, being able to hire talent in the country or region where that community is based has been fantastic for us, and has really helped us scale.”
Access to global talent has had a significant business impact for Standing on Giants by allowing them to expand their service offerings and integrate more deeply with their clients and the communities they build and manage for them.
“The ability to hire globally has really created opportunities for us to expand our services. When we hire community managers sitting in local countries, it’s not only people who can speak their language, but people that really understand the culture of the country and what’s happening there day to day. It has enabled us to offer a wider range of services to our clients, such as organizing in-person events and local area meetups.”
Looking ahead, Emily says she’s “excited to keep growing our team globally and hire people in more countries.” In her monthly calls and biannual reviews with the Oyster team, she enjoys learning about the latest features and updates on the platform.
“There’s always so many things being built and implemented on the platform, ranging from tools to calculate salary insights or benefit offerings or you name it. They’re constantly striving to build and do more, so they feel like a really innovative company to me.”
Having experienced the benefits of building a global team, Emily is happy to recommend Oyster to other companies.
“I would say to any company looking to hire globally or work with an employer of record to have a call with the Oyster team and learn more about it. It can be quite daunting to try global hiring, but the team at Oyster takes that stress and anxiety away. They’re a team of experts you can rely on. I would recommend having a chat and giving it a go.”
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"Prior to using Oyster, employing anyone outside the U.K. was a nightmare for us... now it's super fast and painless."
CEO and founder of Juno
Ally Fekaiki
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