Norway, Denmark, and Sweden are the land of the northern European region known as Scandinavia. With the Nordic model, these countries are known for high living standards and low-income disparity. According to SCB, the unemployment rate was 7.3 percent in Sweden in 2021. In this article, we’re going to explain how easy to hire talent in Scandinavia and not have to worry about setting up an office or subsidiary in a chosen country. Let’s talk about Employer of Record in Scandinavia!

Let’s dig a little deeper into how the process works.

Methods of International Hiring

If you are hiring global workforce, you may be choosing among several methods of international hiring. The first three are conventional methods of global hiring.

1. You may be working with a freelancer or an independent sales rep. In other words, we call it working with an independent worker.

2. You may work with a local staffing agency.

3. You may open your own subsidiary or own legal entity and then hire your foreign employees through that company.

4. The last method is a global Employer of Record service.

What Does an Employer of Record Mean?

At Swapp Agency, we’ve developed an effective and innovative solution. It lets you employ global workforce around the world in any country you may need, including Scandinavia. This method encompassed all the benefits and eliminated all the drawbacks of the previous, conventional methods of international hiring.

Let’s say that one of our clients, Sweden’s headquartered company, wants to hire an employee in Norway. The first step is to identify the person that they want to hire. Secondly, they need to negotiate what the person’s job duties are and what compensation they want to pay that employee. Once they figure that out, we draft an employment contract for them.

Into that employment contract, we offer letter terms, recommend things like non-compete terms, what type of benefits they might want to offer their worker. We provide them with the employment contract, and we have issued an employment contract to their local employee on the ground in a country.

Now, technically, we’re legally the Employer of Record for that individual in Norway. They’re going on our payroll, but for all purposes and intents, they work for the client.

How We Work

Most of our clients just want to hire one or two people on the ground in each country, so that they could start selling there. And it seems super inefficient because it takes thousands of euros and up to six months for them to plan to start hiring people.

That’s easy to get an employment contract out via us and would just take an hour or two, compared to figuring out how to set up a company in Scandinavia. It takes much time to learn what type of benefits you can offer and if it’s even possible to hire one employee to set that up in a foreign country.

So basically, the employee is on our payroll. Our HR person on the ground reaches out to that employee, introduces themself, talks the employee through any questions in the contracts. It’s a very transparent relationship.

The employer just tells the employee that they’ll be employed through an Employer of Record and it works out really well. The professionals are very happy. The people who work on behalf of our clients are very happy because they just want to be paid and do their job and get their work done.

Impact of COVID-19 on the Employer of Record Industry

With coronavirus, the first thing that was a test for all of us was just the sudden shift with absence of information to a global remote workforce.

The pandemic is impacted all of our lives significantly. But as companies move more and more towards remote work, we find that it’s almost like an acceleration towards the globalization of the workforce.

People are not able to bring foreign talent from other countries into Sweden, for example. So, the Employer of Record industry grows really fast. We have a lot of clients, some of them need a specific language skill to support clients or they need engineers.

Now we see that our clients are just hiring the talent wherever it is, rather than only hiring people in a one-hundred-kilometer radius of the headquarters. And so basically, the Employer of Record industry is going to grow faster than ever.

An Employer of Record works on a country-by-country basis to make the legal, finance, and tax issues in each country manageable and compliant.

The world is just getting more complex with data security, data compliance, and all these issues. That actually makes it more and more likable for clients to use an Employer of Record model because they know they’re putting all the hard things on EOR’s shoulders.

How Is Swapp Agency Managing to Differentiate?

The things that set us apart are we care a lot and invest heavily and ahead of the curve in making sure that our product, our tools, our employees, everyone is united to provide a great client experience. But beyond that, what we do is constantly and infinitely scalable.

It’s a lot easier for a client to put an employee on our payroll and benefits plan in another country and work with our HR person in another country than to get it right from scratch and set up their own company.

Secondly, we have a world-class legal, HR, and finance team built around the globe, which is critical.

Thirdly, we put quality first. The only way Swapp Agency works is to make our clients and our employees happy and create a business that people truly love.

Wrapping Up

With Employer of Record, you can hire employers without the need to open your own foreign subsidiary, for example in Scandinavia. If you have a hiring need anywhere in the world and want to do it fully compliant, fast and cost-efficient manner, request our global Employer of Record solution.