Small and midsized businesses (SMBs) have long faced significant barriers when trying to hire talent across borders, but a new partnership between isolved and Remote aims to change that. In a recent episode of the podcast "You Should Know," hosted by William Tincup of WRKdefined, executives from both companies detailed how their integrated solution collapses the legal, payroll, and compliance hurdles that have historically locked SMBs out of global hiring.
Barry Gauch, Executive Vice President at isolved, and Pim Altena, GM for Remote Embedded and VP of Partnerships at Remote, explained that the collaboration originated from isolved's formal request for proposal process, which narrowed ten potential providers to five. A prior referral relationship led to a deeper embedded integration, and Remote's API-first model proved decisive. Gauch noted that "our customer demand for global hiring had picked up," and isolved chose partnership over building in-house because "it's not our key competency, but we know we needed to deliver it."
The integration offers three hiring modalities within a single platform: Employer of Record (EOR) for fast market entry, contractor management for flexible engagements, and global payroll for established international teams. Altena emphasized the importance of hiring based on skills rather than geography, recalling his own experience as a Remote customer trying to hire an Italian candidate he could not legally employ. "You're hiring people for skills, right? Like, that's what you should do, but you're actually constraining yourself often unconsciously by just the compliance capabilities, the legal entity footprint that you already have as a business," he said.
The operational reality behind global employment is complex, with the State Department recognizing 192 countries, each carrying its own federal, state, and municipal payroll rules. Altena highlighted extreme divergence in labor law, noting that pre-employment medical exams are mandatory in some jurisdictions and forbidden in others, and pointed to France and Germany's high employee-protection regimes. Gauch stressed that affordability and white-glove customer treatment were non-negotiable criteria, and previewed how the integration with ApplicantPro, now fully folded into isolved, will benefit talent acquisition teams and staffing-company resellers.
The timing of the partnership aligns with the acceleration of skill-based hiring, as SMBs increasingly seek to compete for talent without geographic constraints. By embedding Remote's capabilities directly into isolved's HCM platform, the companies aim to make global hiring as seamless as domestic hiring. The episode is available now wherever podcasts are heard.
