Global employment platforms: What businesses needed yesterday and will depend on tomorrow

While global employment platforms are new to many, the need for them has been growing for years. 

We’re amidst a multi-decade shift that’s driving us away from the industrial revolution and towards what I’d like to call the “knowledge phase”—a digitalized future that will require us to employ more knowledge workers than ever. 

This shift is not stopping any time soon and it’s escalating the talent shortage in the West. By 2030, we could reach a deficit of more than 85 million workers in developed countries. BCG expects this could lead to a $10 trillion GDP gap. 

However, I do not believe this is a supply and demand issue. There is a surplus of skilled knowledge workers ready to work worldwide. In fact, we expect 1.5 billion knowledge workers to come into the workforce in the next 10 years, many of whom will be from emerging economies. 

When you take a step back and see all the talent the world has to offer, it’s clear that inaccessibility is at the heart of this issue. There’s a massive opportunity to equalize access—to jobs and talent—and create a sustainable future of work. 

And that is why we created Oyster: a global employment platform whose mission is to help companies access and hire all these brilliant people around the world. 

Global employment—without the platform

Yes, global employment opens up your talent pool. But managing it all internally—from hiring to paying and providing benefits—is very cumbersome. It’s prone to error. And it’s expensive. 

Why? Because most of us aren’t experts in global employment. For hundreds of years, we have hired locally. And we knew how to find, assess, hire, pay, and provide benefits to our teams. 

When you hire internationally, you enter unknown territory. You must learn how to assess the qualifications of international talent, meet local compliance standards, manage global payroll, and create competitive benefits packages for each country, among other challenges. 

A challenging experience I know all too well 

These are not just my observations. I encountered these obstacles myself at Nexmo, where I was the founder and CEO. 

At Nexmo (now Vonage), we were hiring people in over 45 countries and spent millions of dollars building employment infrastructure internally. We had to hire many lawyers and law firms to set up entities and get help with compliance, payroll, and benefits for each country. 

This process simply wasn’t scalable. As a result, we failed to support our People Ops teams. We failed to deliver an exceptional experience to our new employees. And because it took months—four to five months—to hire someone in a new country, we ran the risk of losing great talent.

I faced many global employment barriers at Nexmo. But I also got a glimpse of the power of an internationally distributed workforce, in terms of diversity and impact. This inspired me to build a solution that removes the aforementioned challenges and brings these benefits to the forefront.

The global employment solution of today

Global employment platforms enable companies to compliantly hire, pay, and care for teams around the world. Through scalable software, they standardize processes and make it as easy to manage a team globally as it is locally. 

Here at Oyster, we want to empower companies to truly view the world as one talent pool and help them benefit from this new model of employment. So when we developed our platform, we focused on:

• Offering businesses an affordable and scalable solution to compliantly hire and pay anyone, anywhere in the world.
• Supporting People Ops teams with country-specific guidance, knowledge, and resources.
• Providing their teams with delightful employee experiences that are equal across countries. 

The Oyster difference 

Our global employment solution is driven by our mission. By reducing barriers for businesses and creating job access for millions around the world, we can equalize opportunity between countries that enjoy a concentration of great jobs and everywhere else. We believe the social impact that stems from this can be profound—and I invite you to read Oyster’s 2022 Impact Report to learn more. 

Moving forward, a global employer is an attractive employer

As I’ve said, the need for global employment platforms has been building for years—but it has been accelerated by the pandemic. 

After working remotely for over over two years, we know that we can be highly productive and impactful working from anywhere. The bias toward the office has been completely debunked. And this sentiment is especially apparent among employees. 

Working from home gave employees a new degree of freedom and sense of wellbeing, and they’re not going to give it back now. In this new world of work, the power has shifted to the employee and they have defined new expectations for employers—one of which is to offer remote, flexible work. 

“But will we lose our engagement and culture?”

Global employment is actually a forcing function to be a better, more human-centric business and organization:

• It forces you to define clear ways of communicating and working together, and improve your tech stack. 
• It pushes you to adopt an outcome-based approach and define clear objectives and key results—from the top to the individual level. 
• It encourages you to prioritize trust-building and inclusivity.

In the office, it’s easy to overlook these fundamentals. Global employment pushes you to create strategies that optimize engagement, culture, and business success. 

Global employment platforms fit seamlessly into this modern way of working, and Oyster is living proof: our diverse team spans over 70 countries and is 58% female identifying. We’re completely office-less, yet our engagement levels are in the top 3% of all VC-backed companies and we continuously receive over 12,000 job applications per month. Our global employment platform enabled us to build the diverse team that I dreamed of at Nexmo. 

Join us in building a better future of work 

The world of work is evolving in favor of global employment. Pressure is not only building to deliver a solution that supports this employment model, but also on businesses to adopt a new mindset.

So I invite you to join us in building a future of work that’s more just, sustainable, and human-centric. You have the opportunity today to make an impact on your business, your teams, and communities around the world tomorrow. It’s time to seize the moment. 

Go global with Oyster

To learn more about the benefits and capabilities of global employment, check out Oyster’s Global Employment Assistant: an interactive guide to the tools, information, and resources you need to start building a thriving global team. Or, skip ahead to a free Oyster demo. 

About Oyster

Oyster is a global employment platform designed to enable visionary HR leaders to find, hire, pay, manage, develop, and take care of a thriving distributed workforce. Oyster lets growing companies give valued international team members the experience they deserve, without the usual headaches and expense.