Ask HN: Why do US companies mostly hire remote workers in USA? Most of Remote OK job posts say "in USA". Why don't they look to hire internationally? |
Ask HN: Why do US companies mostly hire remote workers in USA? Most of Remote OK job posts say "in USA". Why don't they look to hire internationally? |
Typically if companies want remote workers abroad they avoid most of these by hiring an outsourcing company, letting the outsourcing company deal with the local stuff abroad, and all the US company has to do is send them a pile of money.
Hiring US remote worker doesn't solve all of these (e.g. two states in the US might have different employment laws) however it does solve at least half.
In that way, the company doesn't need to care about local employment laws and payroll complexity. Each contractor signs a W8-BEN Form and takes care of its own local tax situation.
Not that any of those Countries are bad, but the complexity for a smaller business that doesn't already have a footprint in that Country is pretty high. For a company that already has a footprint in another Country and may already have formed their own corporation there as a subsidiary then the barrier is far less with respect to Payroll and IP type issues.
Another point, a company in CA that employs a person in say Kansas, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Wyoming etc, will find they can pay people well but still save a significant amount of money over hiring locally. All while having employees close to the same timezone and without any other barriers to overcome. Not to mention a west coast company having east coast employees can help with support and overlap, like wise if you reverse it.
edit: but I would say that the american culture is shouted so loudly at the rest of the world that it's not really an issue in this direction.
Because of NAFTA, the US and Canada share a ton of workers.
There are certain barriers to hiring but it allows you to pick some really great engineers up that would just be impossible to do in San Fran etc without a huge budget.
I think other nations have been added as a "done deal" without advance public notice.
There is a popular myth that the things that are illegal to use in hiring decisions are illegal to ask, which isn't true (this probably comes as a slight distortion from managers receiving legal advice that those things should not be asked because asking them increases the risk to the company, which is true not because they are illegal to ask, but because asking produces the risk that a jury will believe a charge that they were used in hiring decisions.)