How to Hire International Employees: A Guide for US Companies
The best person for your next role might live thousands of miles away. The challenge is figuring out how to actually hire them.
For U.S. companies, international hiring opens access to larger talent pools, specialized expertise, and markets where highly skilled professionals may be easier to find. But crossing borders also means navigating unfamiliar employment laws, payroll requirements, taxes, benefits, contracts, and compliance.
Do you need to open a local entity? Can you hire the person as a contractor? When does an Employer of Record (EOR) make sense? And what does it really cost to employ someone internationally?
In this guide, we’ll break down how to hire international employees, the different employment models available to U.S. companies, and what you need to consider before building a team across borders.
What Does It Mean to Hire International Employees?
Hiring foreign workers means bringing people who live and work in another country onto your team while complying with the employment requirements of the country where they work.
That last part is important. A U.S. company generally can’t assume that its standard U.S. employment practices will apply to someone working in Brazil, Poland, Colombia, or another international market. Local labor laws can determine everything from employment contracts and payroll taxes to mandatory benefits, paid leave, working hours, and termination procedures.
There are several ways companies can structure international hiring and remote work. They can establish their own local entity and employ workers directly, use an Employer of Record (EOR) that becomes the legal employer locally, or work with independent contractors when the nature of the relationship genuinely supports contractor status.
Global hiring also goes beyond the legal employment relationship. Companies still need to recruit the right candidates, understand local compensation expectations, onboard employees effectively, protect intellectual property, and create an environment that makes international talent want to stay.
In other words, hiring internationally isn’t simply about finding someone abroad. It’s about building the right infrastructure around that foreign employee so they can become a long-term part of your team.
The Main Ways to Hire International Employees
For U.S. companies hiring full-time talent abroad, there are three main approaches. The biggest difference is how much of the recruiting, employment, HR, and retention infrastructure the company has to build and manage itself.
Establish Your Own Local Entity
The most traditional option is to establish a legal entity in the country where you want to hire. Your company then employs international team members directly and takes responsibility for local payroll, taxes, benefits, employment agreements, HR administration, and compliance.
This provides significant control and can make sense when a company plans to build a large, permanent operation in a particular country. But establishing and maintaining an entity requires time, legal expertise, local administration, and ongoing investment, which can be disproportionate if you’re initially hiring a relatively small team.
Use a Traditional Employer of Record (EOR)
An Employer of Record (EOR) allows you to employ international workers without establishing your own local entity. The EOR serves as the legal employer in the worker’s country and typically manages payroll, taxes, statutory benefits, contracts, and employment compliance.
This removes much of the administrative burden of international employment, but most traditional EOR platforms enter the process once you’ve already found the person you want to hire. Recruitment, compensation strategy, candidate assessment, team building, and long-term retention largely remain your responsibility.
In other words, an EOR provides the infrastructure to employ international talent, but it doesn’t necessarily help you build an international team.
Build a Dedicated Offshore Team With an End-to-End Staffing Partner
The third approach combines international recruitment with the employment infrastructure required to build and maintain a team abroad.
With this model, the staffing partner custom recruits each position specifically for your company rather than asking you to find candidates yourself or selecting developers from a pre-existing bench. Once you’ve chosen whom to hire, the partner handles the local employment layer — including payroll, benefits, HR administration, and legal compliance.
TurnKey takes this model further by adding two elements that are often missing from international hiring: compensation transparency and proactive retention. Clients have visibility into what their developers earn and what they pay TurnKey as a service fee, while TurnKey’s retention program is designed to address potential causes of turnover before they result in losing an employee.
The result is a model where the U.S. company manages the developer’s actual work and integrates them into its existing team, while the international staffing partner handles the recruiting, employment, HR, and retention infrastructure behind the scenes.
International Employment Compliance: What US Companies Need to Consider
When you hire internationally, compliance doesn’t stop at the U.S. border. Employees are generally subject to employment requirements in the countries where they work, which means U.S. companies need to understand and accommodate local rules.
And those requirements can vary significantly from one country to another. Some of the most important areas to consider include:
- Employment contracts. Many countries have specific requirements around written employment agreements, including what information they must contain and which terms employers can legally enforce.
- Payroll and taxes. Employers may need to calculate and withhold local income taxes, make social security or similar statutory contributions, and comply with country-specific payroll and reporting requirements.
- Mandatory benefits and leave. Paid vacation, sick leave, parental leave, public holidays, bonuses, health coverage, and other benefits can be regulated locally. A standard U.S. benefits package can't simply be replicated everywhere.
- Working hours and overtime. Local laws may establish maximum working hours, required rest periods, overtime rules, and additional compensation for certain types of work.
- Termination requirements. At-will employment is not the global default. Depending on the country, employers may face notice periods, severance requirements, documentation obligations, or restrictions on the circumstances under which an employee can be terminated.
- Intellectual property and data protection. Companies also need appropriate agreements governing confidential information and ownership of work created by international employees, while complying with applicable local privacy and data protection requirements.
The challenge isn’t simply knowing that these rules exist — it’s keeping up with them across every country where your team operates. That’s why the employment structure matters so much. Working with a partner that already has local HR, payroll, and legal infrastructure can remove much of this operational burden while allowing the company to focus on managing and growing its international team.
How Much Does It Cost to Hire International Employees?
There is no universal price tag for hiring internationally. The total cost depends on the country, role, seniority, employment structure, benefits, and the partner you use to hire and employ the person.
The biggest expense is usually salary, but salary alone doesn’t represent the true cost of an international employee. U.S. companies should also account for:
- Employer taxes and statutory contributions: These vary by country and can add a meaningful amount on top of base compensation.
- Mandatory and supplementary benefits: Depending on the market, these may include paid leave, health insurance, bonuses, pension contributions, meal allowances, or other locally expected benefits.
- Recruitment costs: Sourcing and vetting specialized international talent requires local market knowledge, recruiting resources, and time.
- Employment and administration: Payroll processing, contracts, HR support, legal compliance, and EOR or staffing fees all contribute to the total cost.
- Equipment and onboarding: Laptops, software, security tools, and onboarding should be included when calculating the real cost per employee.
- Turnover: Losing an international employee means paying to recruit, onboard, and ramp up a replacement, making retention an important part of the cost equation.
This is also why pricing transparency matters. Some offshore staffing providers bundle salaries and service costs into a single monthly rate, making it difficult to know how much reaches the employee and how much goes to the provider.
TurnKey uses a transparent cost-plus model: clients have visibility into developer compensation and TurnKey’s service fees separately. That gives companies more control over salaries, raises, and overall international hiring costs instead of managing a single opaque monthly bill.
The goal shouldn’t simply be to find the country with the lowest salaries. A better comparison looks at the total cost of building and retaining a high-performing international team.
How TurnKey Tech Staffing Helps US Companies Hire International Tech Talent
International hiring becomes much easier when recruiting, employment, compliance, and retention aren’t treated as separate problems.
TurnKey Tech Staffing helps U.S. companies build dedicated engineering teams across Latin America and Eastern Europe, combining custom recruiting with the local infrastructure needed to employ and retain talent long-term.
Here’s how the model works:
- Every position is custom recruited. TurnKey doesn't simply pull available developers from a bench. Recruiting starts with the client's specific technical requirements, experience needs, company culture, and team structure to find candidates who actually fit the role.
- Compensation is completely transparent. Clients can see what their developers earn and what they pay TurnKey in service fees. This cost-plus approach gives companies direct control over compensation, raises, and the overall economics of their offshore team.
- Retention is built into the model. Hiring a great developer matters only if you can keep them. TurnKey's dedicated talent retention program proactively monitors employee satisfaction and addresses potential issues before they turn into resignations, helping reduce developer churn by more than 50% compared with the industry average.
- The employment infrastructure is handled for you. TurnKey's hybrid Employer of Record model takes care of global payroll, benefits, HR administration, and local employment compliance. U.S. companies don't need to establish their own foreign entities or coordinate multiple local vendors just to employ their team.
The result is a dedicated offshore team that works directly with your company, while TurnKey manages the complexity behind it. You stay focused on your product and your people; TurnKey handles the infrastructure required to hire and retain them internationally.
Hire offshore developers easily with TurnKey
FAQs
Yes. U.S. companies can hire international employees, but they need an appropriate employment structure that complies with requirements in the employee's country. Common approaches include establishing a local entity, using an Employer of Record (EOR), or working with an international staffing partner that handles local employment infrastructure.
Not necessarily. An EOR or an international staffing provider with local employment infrastructure can allow companies to hire employees abroad without establishing and maintaining their own foreign entity. This can be particularly useful when building a team across multiple countries or entering a new talent market.
For companies that don't already have international recruiting and HR infrastructure, working with an end-to-end offshore staffing partner can consolidate much of the process. A provider like TurnKey can handle custom recruiting, local employment, payroll, benefits, HR, compliance, and retention while the client manages the employee's day-to-day work.
U.S. companies can recruit developers across many global markets. Latin America and Eastern Europe are established tech talent regions with experienced software engineers across a wide range of technologies and specializations. The right location depends on factors such as available skills, compensation, time-zone requirements, and the type of team you're building.
TurnKey Staffing provides information for general guidance only and does not offer legal, tax, or accounting advice. We encourage you to consult with professional advisors before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business or legal rights.
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