Cross-Border Team Expansion for Canadian Tech Innovation: Case Study
This case study explores how a Canadian tech company expanded its team across borders to drive innovation
Client Overview
Our client is a dynamically developing mid-sized IT business — a Canadian division of France-based Green Solutions — that provides turnkey e-commerce platform development solutions domestically and internationally. It has recently faced operational challenges as a result of talent shortages or inadequate staffing. Facing two new large-scale projects, the company lacked talented software engineers and a managerial workforce to tackle pressing deadlines.
The client compared several large-scale platforms offering coverage to Canadian businesses, such as Deel and Velocity Global, and included GEOR into the comparison. The final choice fell on GEOR due to our flexible service terms and more affordable pricing without quality compromises.
One of the major barriers to effective staff recruitment is the lack of available and affordable tech talent in Canada, which would be able to satisfy the growing need for the company’s business growth and transformation.
Our client is a dynamically developing mid-sized IT business — a Canadian division of France-based Green Solutions — that provides turnkey e-commerce platform development solutions domestically and internationally. It has recently faced operational challenges as a result of talent shortages or inadequate staffing. Facing two new large-scale projects, the company lacked talented software engineers and a managerial workforce to tackle pressing deadlines.
The client compared several large-scale platforms offering coverage to Canadian businesses, such as Deel and Velocity Global, and included GEOR into the comparison. The final choice fell on GEOR due to our flexible service terms and more affordable pricing without quality compromises.
One of the major barriers to effective staff recruitment is the lack of available and affordable tech talent in Canada, which would be able to satisfy the growing need for the company’s business growth and transformation.
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Problem
A Canadian IT company turned to GEOR on the subject of a critical talent shortage and a persistent inability to expand its tech staff domestically. The company’s business expansion processes required rapid scaling and growth of its software development capacity. However, the Canada development agency was unable to address these challenges at home, while international staffing was an untapped ground for the company.
The company lacked legal expertise with international staffing on its own because of the complexity of labor laws across jurisdictions and the complicated taxation implications. There was no staff inside the company to handle the additional administrative burden of international hires, while in-house full-time recruitment of overseas staff was also associated with added legal costs and the lengthy process of legal entity setup and compliance arrangements across jurisdictions.
Client’s Requirements and Goals
The client wanted to set up two new remote teams of software engineers, headed by one Project Manager, with a salary cap from $ 48,000 to $ 55,000 per employee. The number of developers was not fixed, ranging from five to seven experts per team depending on their tech stack and experience.
The main goals the client wanted to achieve by engaging the GEOR team included:
1) Establishing development teams in several strategic global locations within a short turnaround.
Due to the pressing lack of tech staff on board and the rising software development loads, the company wanted to reduce the development team setup period from the regular 6−8 months to 1−2 months to meet its delivery deadlines.
2) Reduction of international expansion costs.
The cost of setting up a legal entity abroad was too high for the company, so it looked for alternatives that could cut down the hiring costs without compromising on its staffing needs.
3) Compliant hiring.
The client needed a 100% guarantee of compliant hiring and employee management across overseas jurisdictions.
4) Preservation of core company culture.
The client was also concerned about the potential degrading impact of international hiring on the company culture and sought effective solutions in terms of organizing the communication between in-house and remote teams.
5) Day-to-day assistance with international staff management.
The company’s representatives voiced the need for GEOR to handle the administrative challenges of day-to-day staff management because of their reluctance to add this administrative load to the core operations of the main office.
Solution Offered by GEOR
GEOR experts analyzed the set of requirements voiced by the IT company in Canada and proposed the use of the company’s employer of record (EOR) services for streamlined, effective, and quick staff hiring across jurisdictions. The client had no full-time recruitment staff, so they took advantage of GEOR’s EOR payroll management services and requested the recruitment add-on to delegate the candidate sourcing, screening, and onboarding processes to our staff.
Given the client’s time zone preferences and salary cap, GEOR experts conducted recruiting operations in Eastern Europe, including Poland, Ukraine, and Hungary. We managed to compile two cross-functional, experienced teams of five- six developers with the required tech stack, selected a Project Manager in Poland to head the teams and organize communication with the head office in Canada.
"Payroll is a serious challenge for modern businesses; things get even more complicated with international hiring. Automation of staffing and payment management thus turns into a competitive advantage, which most IT businesses can’t afford to miss."
— Amanda Lefio, HR director
Hiring processes were automated with the help of our employer of record platform. The GEOR staff added all newly hired employees to the client’s profile. The platform automatically sent employment contracts with all pre-negotiated terms to the new hires, who signed them electronically. After contract signing, both international teams were registered as active employees of the client, with 100% legal compliance, payroll, and taxation built into the client-friendly interface.
The process of project management, task distribution and performance tracking was set up using our branded ERP platform provided as a complementary service for GEOR clients.
This way, with the help of our recruiting and onboarding assistance, and the client’s registration on the EOR platform, we accelerated the whole hiring pipeline and ensured the complete team setup within the set timeframes. The client also took advantage of the productivity tracking and collaboration tools on the ERP platform to organize work across overseas teams and preserve team cohesion and effective communication.
The client company mastered the principles of flexible and quick team scaling using the EOR platform by GEOR, thus acquiring a strategically important ability to add staff on demand and handle seasonal overloads without straining its in-house resources or losing clients.
Conclusion
The IT company in Canada that turned to GEOR for international staffing assistance has managed to attain tangible benefits across the entire spectrum of its initial requirements and goals. Due to the availability of a ready-made database of 40,000+ tech specialists in multiple areas, GEOR recruiters managed to find relevantly skilled developers in the client’s preferred geographical locations and reduce the team setup turnaround to 4−6 weeks instead of 6+ months of regular recruiting processes.
In terms of international expansion costs, the client company achieved its hiring targets with 70% cost savings (compared to the budget estimated for its full-scale legal entity setup in the target jurisdictions). These gains were achieved along with full compliance targets and without disruptions to the business culture and product development pipelines.
A Canadian IT company turned to GEOR on the subject of a critical talent shortage and a persistent inability to expand its tech staff domestically. The company’s business expansion processes required rapid scaling and growth of its software development capacity. However, the Canada development agency was unable to address these challenges at home, while international staffing was an untapped ground for the company.
The company lacked legal expertise with international staffing on its own because of the complexity of labor laws across jurisdictions and the complicated taxation implications. There was no staff inside the company to handle the additional administrative burden of international hires, while in-house full-time recruitment of overseas staff was also associated with added legal costs and the lengthy process of legal entity setup and compliance arrangements across jurisdictions.
Client’s Requirements and Goals
The client wanted to set up two new remote teams of software engineers, headed by one Project Manager, with a salary cap from $ 48,000 to $ 55,000 per employee. The number of developers was not fixed, ranging from five to seven experts per team depending on their tech stack and experience.
The main goals the client wanted to achieve by engaging the GEOR team included:
1) Establishing development teams in several strategic global locations within a short turnaround.
Due to the pressing lack of tech staff on board and the rising software development loads, the company wanted to reduce the development team setup period from the regular 6−8 months to 1−2 months to meet its delivery deadlines.
2) Reduction of international expansion costs.
The cost of setting up a legal entity abroad was too high for the company, so it looked for alternatives that could cut down the hiring costs without compromising on its staffing needs.
3) Compliant hiring.
The client needed a 100% guarantee of compliant hiring and employee management across overseas jurisdictions.
4) Preservation of core company culture.
The client was also concerned about the potential degrading impact of international hiring on the company culture and sought effective solutions in terms of organizing the communication between in-house and remote teams.
5) Day-to-day assistance with international staff management.
The company’s representatives voiced the need for GEOR to handle the administrative challenges of day-to-day staff management because of their reluctance to add this administrative load to the core operations of the main office.
Solution Offered by GEOR
GEOR experts analyzed the set of requirements voiced by the IT company in Canada and proposed the use of the company’s employer of record (EOR) services for streamlined, effective, and quick staff hiring across jurisdictions. The client had no full-time recruitment staff, so they took advantage of GEOR’s EOR payroll management services and requested the recruitment add-on to delegate the candidate sourcing, screening, and onboarding processes to our staff.
Given the client’s time zone preferences and salary cap, GEOR experts conducted recruiting operations in Eastern Europe, including Poland, Ukraine, and Hungary. We managed to compile two cross-functional, experienced teams of five- six developers with the required tech stack, selected a Project Manager in Poland to head the teams and organize communication with the head office in Canada.
"Payroll is a serious challenge for modern businesses; things get even more complicated with international hiring. Automation of staffing and payment management thus turns into a competitive advantage, which most IT businesses can’t afford to miss."
— Amanda Lefio, HR director
Hiring processes were automated with the help of our employer of record platform. The GEOR staff added all newly hired employees to the client’s profile. The platform automatically sent employment contracts with all pre-negotiated terms to the new hires, who signed them electronically. After contract signing, both international teams were registered as active employees of the client, with 100% legal compliance, payroll, and taxation built into the client-friendly interface.
The process of project management, task distribution and performance tracking was set up using our branded ERP platform provided as a complementary service for GEOR clients.
This way, with the help of our recruiting and onboarding assistance, and the client’s registration on the EOR platform, we accelerated the whole hiring pipeline and ensured the complete team setup within the set timeframes. The client also took advantage of the productivity tracking and collaboration tools on the ERP platform to organize work across overseas teams and preserve team cohesion and effective communication.
The client company mastered the principles of flexible and quick team scaling using the EOR platform by GEOR, thus acquiring a strategically important ability to add staff on demand and handle seasonal overloads without straining its in-house resources or losing clients.
Conclusion
The IT company in Canada that turned to GEOR for international staffing assistance has managed to attain tangible benefits across the entire spectrum of its initial requirements and goals. Due to the availability of a ready-made database of 40,000+ tech specialists in multiple areas, GEOR recruiters managed to find relevantly skilled developers in the client’s preferred geographical locations and reduce the team setup turnaround to 4−6 weeks instead of 6+ months of regular recruiting processes.
In terms of international expansion costs, the client company achieved its hiring targets with 70% cost savings (compared to the budget estimated for its full-scale legal entity setup in the target jurisdictions). These gains were achieved along with full compliance targets and without disruptions to the business culture and product development pipelines.
Team setup turnaround
Reduced to 4-6 weeks
Operational cost savings
70% compared to legal entity setup
Compliance
100% compliant hiring guarantee
Start Hiring Globally
With GEOR's services, you can onboard IT talent anywhere in the world and manage payroll locally while we handle all legal compliance.
With GEOR's services, you can onboard IT talent anywhere in the world and manage payroll locally while we handle all legal compliance.
Alexandra Krasnovskaya
Business development manager
FAQs
Partnering with an employer of record is a wise decision for many businesses in Canada. It gives them access to the international labor market without legal implications, enables faster and cost-effective hiring, and simplifies the full spectrum of payroll, taxation, benefits administration, and HR management tasks. Thus, a business can enjoy a productive workforce without legal risks and misclassification penalty hazards.
When you partner with an EOR provider, you can delegate payroll and tax administration, employee benefits and insurance, new staff onboarding, and all aspects of HR support to this company’s specialists. They act as your staff’s official employer and handle all employment-related tasks on your behalf, holding full legal liability for these operations.
As a rule, you can choose between the flat fee price per employee or the percentage-based price of the hired employee’s payroll. EOR providers typically offer a percentage-based model for hiring high-salary, senior-level executives and specialists, as a higher salary is pegged to a higher EOR remuneration for hard-to-find talent. Flat fee rates are better for standard-complexity positions with low- to medium-level salaries. It’s also better to opt for a flat fee model if you need a few employees to hire and strive for a predictable cost estimation for EOR services because of the limited budget.
When you use PEO services, you enter a co-employment agreement, where both you and the PEO company act as official employers of international staff. When you partner with an EOR service provider, the EOR is the only legal employer of staff, so this company assumes full legal responsibility for the payroll, tax filing, and compliance.