Yves Just Chatting (Ep. 30): How Comdivision Became a Global Employer

Hello and welcome. This is Episode 30 of Yves Just Chatting and today's topic is based on user requests, based on some previous podcasts, and based on some discussions on LinkedIn and other platforms lately and the discussion or the topic for the day is how comdivision became a global employer. And I want to give you a bit of a background, comdivision by itself is a professional services company.

And as such we have been operating primarily in EMEA and in the US for the last couple of years, and for those two territories, we primarily use, besides employees, freelance resources, but we were more or less limited to people which we had either directly in the US or which we had in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, so more or less just around where our offices were located Last year we started on a journey to expand our team primarily for

Architects and Consultants, and we're looking for new people to join us on the team, whether it was on freelance whether it was as an FTE (full-time employee) or anything in between, no matter what people were looking for. And we were of the opinion that we would be primarily looking in the US and actually find

some good resources in the US. So we started campaigning on social media and other platforms and very soon we figured out that a lot of the candidates who actually apply to us were not necessarily coming out of the US primarily. Back then we started to look into different options, because trying to employ people Globally is not as easy as it sounds. Several countries have requirements that you need to have: either a local subsidiary or

something else. One of the things which we learned very soon is that you can work around that scenario with something which is called an employee of record. There are several companies out there globally who provide these types of services and the advantage of working with EoRs is also that they do a lot of the local paperwork you can basically enter all the information about the employees you want to hire -- from a salary, benefits, and everything else perspective.

They more or less give you the total cost for the company and everything else. So it's, in this modern day and age, actually much easier as a company to make this work based on the fact that we have been running as Multinational company for many years with our US and EMEA operation, we were already pretty used to having people work in different time zones and in different geos. So that was not necessarily anything new for us. But the onboarding and hiring process

by itself became very interesting. The good or, I would even say, the interesting part which we learned out of this as a company was that hiring people in all these different territories gives you access to far more resources. Sadly enough there were certain limitations which we had to apply, which we couldn't actually work around with, which is actually very sad, and I can share a very good simple story out of that. So for example, we had one very very good candidate out of Iran.

But the challenge with that is, as we have so many customers in the US, but also security related customers here in EMEA, having someone from Iran was more or less a no go. We even evaluated if we could resettle him and potentially move him to our Dubai office or something like that, but even that wouldn't have solved the problem that he still has a passport from Iran, and based on that we are not able to just actually quickly get him to joining our our team from that perspective.

But, besides tha,t we were able to get a good list of candidates and actually had quite a few people join our team from different countries and primarily around Northern Africa, the Middle East and areas like that -- in real contrast to what we expected, because we were expecting a much higher amount of US candidates actually apply for us especially due to the amount of projects we run in the US and the customer base we have in the US, but it seems like

people were looking for for something different than us and to be realistic, at this day at age, the biggest challenge we have in the US is that due to the large tech companies like the big hyperscales, like Google, Microsoft, and people like that, the salaries are in ranges, which are just not achievable.

I mean, even if I look at our freelance resources, which are typically in a high higher rate than the employed people... even over there, it was completely unachievable to get to these salaries and even if we did the just the basic math and calculated how much would we need to raise or how much would we need to charge our customers to be at a

reasonable rate perspective didn't work out. But in the end it was just a handful of people from the US, but we had far more candidates from from from other countries. I think that is something, as more and more companies start talking about the fact that they want to allow a remote work, they want to allow home offices and everything else, I have the feeling that many companies are still limiting themselves with local resources. So from that perspective, it was an absolute go for.

Challenges we faced, and as I said before, I wanted to talk a bit about challenges we faced and identified on this pathway as well is: for those people which we had for the US, hiring someone in the US is far more complex than I thought it would be. I was used to German complexities, and based on that I was expecting is like, "hey, there is not much which can go worse."

But, actually the US hiring process, with all the different Taxes, insurances, and local scenarios and everything else is far more complex than I thought it would be. But again looking at all of these different scenarios we figured out that working with these EOR companies and HR companies to handle that externally is actually taking a lot of the pressure away from us as a company and making it a lot easier for us as well.

And by the way, if you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to drop them in the chat window we utilize different streams, so people are actually following on different streams, so I will read out the questions then if they show up.

One other thing which we have figured out, especially here in Germany, was by the point in time we changed our campaigns and actually changed from having a German job advertisement to an English speaking job advertisement, we had a completely different set of people applying for our jobs. No matter the job, advertising was going out via social media in form of a video, text, a picture, whatever.

Changing just from German to English actually made a huge difference and the last hires we had for example in the back office team were both from English speaking campaigns and the lessons which we learned from most of these people were that they are no longer applying to... that they were not applying to any local language

job advertising. It's not because they were not fluent in German or anything else, it was primarily because they have seen that, especially local companies, whether it is in Germany and we had similar stories about Spain and other territories... they are looking for local people and if you have people who actually come from abroad, it's a bit of a different different story. So, for example we have someone who joined our back office team, from

project management perspective. He's living in Germany comes from the US He explained to us that it was not necessarily always that easy to find allocation. We have someone who joined our assistance team and she basically came from Bolivia, was studying in Germany for many years and stuff like that. So all of them are not candidates, which are let's say... typical scenarios where you would say it's like "they barely speak German or anything else."

They are fully in the region and everything else. So I think it's as a company, if you really want to live the modern flexibility and everything else, you should really look deeply into becoming more open to hire people where they are and also to allow people to work where they are.

Really if the job allows. One of the things which I have to explain very often as a global company to people when we have discussions about a home office and stuff like that is... that there are certain limitations: limitations due to projects. So for example, we have some customers which require that any work is being done inside the Eu or Northern American territory, that needs to be looked after and people need to be sure that they apply for that.

We actually control that from a project management perspective and where we can from an IT perspective, so that we limit access to specific projects with geographical limitations. But that is just one step on how we make this work for people in the different teams from that perspective. So this is something you can easily deal with and you can easily handle that from that perspective.

So, for us I can only say so far this has been hugely effective and a positive experience to utilize a really global workforce. We could actually attract people in different countries in different models, and you need to start thinking outside of the standard box, which is something which we also saw.

So for example, we had someone in the Middle East territory, and from that Middle East territory that specific person actually said it's like "hey, I want to move to Dubai I don't want to stay where I'm living," and so we worked on a short-term plan on how we could actually transition that person to be in our Dubai office and that was something we had to deal with from a visa, work permit, and everything else perspective.

But again, don't be shy by these things because from what our experience, especially if you work with EOR or HR companies which deal with that, they can handle a lot of these scenarios on how you get visas for people, work permits, and everything else. This is nothing you as a company should actually deal with yourself, because it's highly complex It's highly differential in every different country and from that perspective.

On the other part, I must say is like the good part we have as of now is that now within comdivision, we have people from all over at least no longer just EU and the US, but we have people from all this all over the globe and This is actually helping us with customers and this is something which we see with customers as

well. Initially when we thought it's like okay, we're going to hire people in Dubai, in Egypt, in other territories, and how're our (especially US customers) going to react to that or even our European customers react to it? Many of them are used to working with us in English. Anyway, I mean for North America that's clear, but for even a lot of the European scenarios then we should actually work with that.

But overall, the feedback from a lot of the customers was actually pretty well received, because the customer said is like look, "the people you're bringing us are actually really solving our problems" and having the diversity on the team also helps customers who have a similar diversity on the team.

So for example, we have service providers in the US that then again have teams in Europe or in Eastern Europe, and the more different people you have on a project, the more it people actually have to adjust to use a standard wording, standard terms, etc. And, not actually go that much into Country specifics, but this actually helps all of us to be more and more successful from a company perspective. There is a question how do you deal with different salaries in all these different countries?

Clearly there is a salary difference. As I said in the beginning, we had quite a bit of a challenge with the US, because the salaries were or the expected salaries were completely outside of the range of what we could apply to customers. So that was a bit of a challenge from that perspective. On the other side, in some of these other countries, we have lower salaries, but we then try to make it

still very attractive for these people to join the team. So only because the let's say standard monthly salary would be like 5k in that region, if a reasonable salary and the people would actually perform for it would be more in the 7 to 10 K area or even higher depending on the specific job, then we could apply that for that specific person.

So, we try to not be country specific with the salaries, but actually be specific to the individual job, because people might be moving, people might be switching countries and roles, and it can't be that we actually limited from that perspective.

What we try to avoid with that is exactly the scenario that many US tech companies had after the pandemic, where during the pandemic people moved out of the Bay Area and moved into cheaper areas of the US and all of the sudden they had much more out of their salary. So instead of having a very small apartment They could afford having a house or anything else.

But now then the tech companies actually figured out is like oh people moved into a different scenario, and in the US certain companies have Regional bonuses depending on where you are working you get a higher or lower salary. So as the pandemic was over, as everybody was actually really basically rebasing and actually reporting where they are located, because people said, "oh, we can't actually come into the office, because I'm living now in Michigan instead of California."

People had to adjust to that, and we try to avoid that.

So the idea is that on average and it depends on countries, taxes, insurances, and a bunch of other things, but we try to balance this so that it is actually equal across the different countries, because as we run pretty open books internally for many of our scenarios within the companies, people would rather quickly figure out that there is a huge discrepancy between different daily or monthly salaries, and that would actually create a different motion in the team.

It would also cause other challenges, because potentially a Project manager or a Salesman position would actually be more attracted to take the lower rate resources and sell them as a senior resource to the higher rate country and then actually try to make this either as a margin or give customers a specific discount, and to avoid this we basically try to balance this out as best we can. Sure there are limitations and it doesn't always work that perfectly,

but it is actually for us. It's working pretty well so far. Another question coming in: "how do you deal with people moving?" The people moving for us is something clearly we need to consider that, because there are all kinds of tax and legal implications out of it, but in general, as I explained with trying to balance the salaries and everything else, we figure that that is not necessarily so much of an issue.

The important part is we need to make sure that we are legally and tax-wise and everything else in the green area, which also by the way applies to remote workers? So if someone is actually just for a week or two weeks somewhere else to work, it's typically not so much of an issue depending on the type of work the location and everything else, but if someone works, let's say from the holidays

it's relatively simple. If someone actually moves somewhere or works there for multiple weeks or something else. we need to consider this more thoroughly, because in those specific areas we need to be much more clear that we obey local tax laws and everything else.

So for example, even though you can easily move around within Europe from a job perspective, but as you are working... for example, if you're German and if you are actually working for four weeks, eight weeks or something like that from Spain that can actually become an issue, because you need to potentially pay local taxes in Spain and stuff like that. So this is something which I