What You Need to Know Before Hiring an Employee: Checklist

Global hiring is full of opportunities to find talent that wasn’t available before. It’s also full of compliance requirements, unexpected costs, shifting timelines, and infrastructure you haven’t built yet.

The gap between finding the right person and actually getting them on payroll can be considerable. Each country has its own tax and labor laws, and missing the mark even a little can lead to fines or worse.

This checklist helps hiring teams get ahead of problems before they become costly errors. Learning what you need to know before hiring someone can help prepare you for unforeseen costs and considerations, and how to work through them.

Global hiring checklist

Before you extend an official offer, there are certain things you need to know before hiring an employee. From cost to classification, there are numerous checklist items to consider, which can quickly multiply when hiring across borders.

🗹 Determine how you’ll hire

The first decision you’ll need to make is how you plan to legally hire international talent in a new market. You have direct control when you set up a local entity in the country you’re hiring, but it also takes time, money, and ongoing compliance management. A more efficient route is to work with an Employer of Record (EOR) that provides pre-built hiring infrastructure to ensure your foreign talent is employed compliantly.

🗹 Calculate the cost of each employee

The salary is just the beginning. The full cost includes things like employer taxes, social contributions, mandatory benefits, and region-specific requirements, like the 13th-month pay. In the U.S. alone, for every dollar spent on wages, employers spend an additional 42 cents on benefits. The numbers change a lot based on where and how you hire. For related resources, learn more about what employee costs look like globally.

🗹 Review local labor laws and compliance requirements

Each country has its own rules about paid time off, health care contributions, pensions, notice periods, probationary periods, and severance. According to a survey by Payroll.org, 57% of global payroll teams say local compliance is their biggest challenge. These are not optional policies; they are the law. Keeping up with local rules protects your business and the people you hire. The best EORs alleviate these administrative complexities.

🗹 Classify employees appropriately

The defining characteristics between an employee and a contractor can have significant implications in most countries. While contractors may involve less labor burden, it’s the nature of the work that shapes how talent is classified. Calling an obvious employee a “contractor relationship” on paper puts you at risk of back taxes, fines, and lawsuits. An EOR helps you get employee classification right from the start.

🗹 Verify work authorization and right to work

Before you hire someone, make sure they have the legal right to work in the country where they will be working. Some countries need formal work verification and paperwork that can take considerable time to pull together. It might be tempting to skip this step, but it could extend the hiring process if you run into compliance problems later on.

🗹 Set up your global payroll

Payroll.org’s survey found that only 28% of respondents said their business has a global payroll strategy. This is largely because it involves more than just installing new features or plug-ins on your existing platform. You have to factor in local payment expectations, currency fluctuations, tax withholding, and data privacy rules that are different in each country. The support of a global EOR service that offers global payroll processing can check this box automatically.

🗹 Evaluate onboarding timelines

Depending on how you go about it, hiring timelines vary wildly. It can take months to set up a local entity while an EOR can usually have someone ready to work in a week or two. Over 70% of new hires decide whether a job is the right fit within their first month, and 29% make that call within the first week, according to BambooHR. A slow or disorganized start can cost you the hire even after you have made the offer.

🗹 Safeguard employment contracts and IP rights

When hiring someone from another country, an employment contract needs to be valid in that country as well as your own, which often involves translating to the official local language. You need to check that things like IP protection clauses, confidentiality terms, and non-compete clauses are all enforceable in your jurisdiction. What is normal in one country may not be legal in another.

🗹 Prepare to deliver localized employee experiences

If the onboarding process feels generic or doesn’t fit in with local customs, a strong hire can have a rough start. It is necessary for contracts to be written in the local language. Different areas have different rules about benefits, pay, and communication. Perceptyx data found that engagement rates can vary from below 30% in some markets to over 90% in others, depending on how well local cultural factors are recognized and reflected in the employee experience. Getting these things right is what makes a new hire a dedicated team member.

Final considerations before you hire

A checklist like this is not a one-time exercise. When you open a role in a new market, the rules change: there are new labor laws, different costs, and timelines that you may not be used to. Don’t just file this away after the first hire; think of it as a process that you can follow over and over.

It’s also important to remember that hiring is only the first step. Just as important as the initial onboarding process are keeping payroll accurate, managing benefits, and keeping an eye on compliance.

The companies that get global hiring right are not the ones with the biggest legal teams. They are the ones who ask the right questions early, set up processes that can grow, and pick the right partners to fill in the gaps. If you start with a strong base, the rest will be much easier to handle.

Hire smarter with Pebl

There is an enormous amount of moving pieces that go into international hiring. Just getting the absolute basics down requires research and touching base with a half-dozen different experts. What if there was an easier way?

With Pebl, there is.

Our self-serve portal lets you calculate the total cost of hiring employees across global markets in minutes. No research, no guesswork, just real numbers and the ability to search for whatever role you need to fill. When you like the numbers, you can hire directly through our EOR service. Your talent starts in days, not months, and all without opening a local entity. When you’re ready to get started, reach out.

This information does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal or tax advice and is for general informational purposes only. The intent of this document is solely to provide general and preliminary information for private use. Do not rely on it as an alternative to legal, financial, taxation, or accountancy advice from an appropriately qualified professional. The content in this guide is provided “as is,” and no representations are made that the content is error-free.