How to embrace your next big advantage – global talent

Global talent is no longer reserved for mega-corporations. Mid-sized businesses, startups—everyone—can now tap into specialized skill sets across borders. Think about it: In a week, you could interview a software developer in Nigeria, a customer support star in the Philippines, and a product manager in Germany.

💡 By the end of this post, you’ll see exactly why companies are embracing a worldwide talent pool, how they’re navigating compliance and culture, and what AI-driven strategies shorten onboarding from weeks to days.

PreScouter executive roundtables:

If you’ve been following this newsletter, you already understand how eye-opening these insights can be. But reading about a concept and discussing it with peers are two distinctly different experiences.

That’s why we’re excited to announce the pilot phase of our new PreScouter Executive Roundtables, a complimentary membership program offering exclusive, live roundtables focused directly on each newsletter topic. Each roundtable occurs the Tuesday following the newsletter’s publication, providing timely exploration and insights.

These 60-minute sessions are led by a PreScouter expert and kick off with a concise, 20-minute deep dive into the featured AI concept. Afterward, we open the floor for robust Q&A and engaging peer-to-peer discussions among corporate leaders. Seating is intentionally limited to preserve an intimate, high-quality conversation.

Upcoming topics and Roundtable dates include:

• How to Build AI-Driven Data Intelligence That Works – Tue 29th April
• AI + How to Triangulate Suppliers Amid Tariffs – Tue 6th May 
• How to Get to the 95% of Knowledge AI Misses (via Experts) – Tue 13th May
• How to Address AI’s Biggest Blind Spot: Local Context – Thu 22nd May

(All sessions are held at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 7pm CET)

We’ll review applications to curate a group of executives with shared challenges and goals. We look forward to taking these insights off the page and into a dynamic, real-time conversation with you!

In the spotlight:

Picture yourself pacing around a cramped kitchen table, finalizing payroll for employees in the U.S., Japan, and Brazil—all via Excel sheets. That was reality for Rick Hammell, who grew an entire global HR and payroll business—Atlas—out of a simple need:

“We’d just hired people in Japan, but our payroll system in the U.S. didn’t have a dropdown menu for Japan—so we had to figure it out ourselves.”

In my conversation with him, Rick shared insights on building compliance solutions, scaling remote teams, and eventually launching Helios—a platform leveraging AI to streamline global hiring.

Compliance is only half the battle:

International expansion can feel like assembling a puzzle with half the pieces missing:

• You realize that normal “at-will” U.S. employment doesn’t exist in many countries.
• Some countries use 13- or 14-month salaries (what does that even mean?).
• And nobody wants to re-key data into spreadsheets for each new hire.

Think of a jigsaw: If just one piece is missing—like local tax forms in Colombia or mandatory health benefits in Germany—the entire picture of global compliance falls apart.

But compliance is only half the battle. Another question looms: How do you build culture, trust, and smooth communication with teams scattered globally? As Rick put it:

“You can’t simply hire talent in Pakistan or Spain or South Africa and ignore local nuances. A single misstep, like missing a 13th-month payment, leads to hefty legal consequences.”

So the tension is real: you want cost-effective, high-caliber remote teams, yet you also want speed and compliance. Do you keep patching solutions together—and risk messing up payroll or alienating employees? Or can you unify everything under one simpler approach?

The global-ready framework:

Below is the core strategy Rick covered—an approach that merges robust compliance with cultural inclusion and AI automation.

1. Adopt a global mindset
   No more limiting your candidate pool by geography.

“When we realized we weren’t stuck hiring only in Chicago, our potential went from 100K people to 6 billion,” – Rick Hammell

2. Leverage compliant hiring mechanisms
   Use a global workforce management system or direct local entities handle complex tasks—like those 14th-month salaries—so you can focus on building your product, not memorizing foreign labor laws.
3. Streamline through technology & AI
   Helios, for instance, automates key steps—upload an employment contract, and AI checks it for local compliance issues, even if it’s in Japanese.

“We want AI to handle the admin side—things like verifying documents—so we can focus on people, not paperwork.” – Rick Hammell

4. Build cultural awareness & inclusivity
   Customize onboarding to local norms. Offer employee portals in multiple languages. Extend trust from day one:

“If you don’t trust people because they’re remote, that’s more about your leadership style than their performance.” – Rick Hammell

5. Prioritize trust & clear communication
   No time-zone or cultural barrier is unbridgeable if you establish consistent check-ins. Transform cost savings from not paying office rents into building team cohesion.
6. Scale strategically
   Plan for each expansion step. Maybe start with a single workforce management arrangement in Germany, then open an entity if your workforce grows beyond those constraints.
7. Learn and pivot quickly
   Mistakes happen (and they’re not the end). Launch pilot projects, gather feedback, iterate. Rick’s mantra:

“Failing fast is the best way to find what doesn’t work—so you can move on to what does.” – Rick Hammell

Where to start, today:

1. Define your ‘North Star’
   Clarify why you want to hire globally: specialized skills, cost efficiency, or entering a new market. That vision keeps your team aligned.
2. Pick the right tools
   Choose a solution that merges compliance, payroll, and AI for speed. If you’re juggling spreadsheets from multiple vendors, consolidation is your friend.
3. Give yourself room to learn
   Roll out a small pilot (maybe 2–3 hires), track metrics, and refine. Overcommitting can create massive headaches later.

Where to look?

You can post your job on global job boards, such as LinkedIn and Indeed. If you want help identifying where to recruit talent from, try this prompt:

Here’s highlights of what I got when I provided our software developer and USA: