Small and midsized businesses (SMBs) have long faced legal, payroll, and compliance barriers when trying to hire talent internationally, but a new partnership between isolved and Remote aims to dismantle those obstacles. In a recent episode of the podcast "You Should Know," hosted by William Tincup of WRKdefined, Barry Gauch, Executive Vice President at isolved, and Pim Altena, GM for Remote Embedded and VP of Partnerships at Remote, detailed how their companies are collaborating to open global hiring to SMBs.
The discussion revealed that isolved conducted a formal RFP process, narrowing ten potential providers to five before selecting Remote. Gauch explained that customer demand for global hiring had surged, and isolved chose to partner rather than build in-house because "it's not our key competency, but we know we needed to deliver it." The integration allows isolved users to access Remote's three hiring modalities within a single platform: Employer of Record (EOR) for fast market entry, contractor management for flexible engagements, and global payroll for established international teams.
Altena framed the opportunity in personal terms, recalling his experience as a Remote customer trying to hire an Italian candidate he could not legally employ. "You're hiring people for skills, right? Like, that's what you should do, but you're actually constraining yourself often unconsciously by just the compliance capabilities, the legal entity footprint that you already have as a business," he said. The partnership addresses the complexity of international hiring, with Tincup noting that the State Department recognizes 192 countries, each with its own federal, state, and municipal payroll rules. Altena highlighted extreme divergences in labor law, such as pre-employment medical exams being mandatory in some jurisdictions and forbidden in others, and pointed to high employee-protection regimes in France and Germany.
Gauch emphasized that affordability and white-glove customer treatment were non-negotiable criteria for isolved. He also previewed how the integration with ApplicantPro, now fully folded into isolved, will benefit talent acquisition teams and staffing-company resellers seeking a unified platform. The partnership is timely as skill-based hiring accelerates globally. For SMBs, this means they can now compete for top talent without needing to establish legal entities in multiple countries. As Altena summarized, "You should hire people based on skills, not based on where you have a legal entity."
The episode is available now on WRKdefined's You Should Know podcast.
