Choosing the right global mobility provider can directly affect your company’s ability to successfully expand overseas and retain top talent. An effective provider acts as your trusted strategic partner, providing proactive, country-specific guidance as your company navigates diverse regulatory and operational challenges—from compliance to employee experience—in every country in which you operate. Here are the three most essential criteria to consider when selecting a global mobility provider:
3 criteria for selecting an effective global mobility provider
1. Proven expertise in cross-border compliance
If your company is moving employees across borders, you’re likely to run into the full spectrum of regulations and requirements—immigration, tax, social security, and local employment laws—all of which will vary (and change) widely by country. You need a provider that can provide you with both global guidance as well as the local experts you’ll need to help you navigate across jurisdictions.
Look for: The best local experts will have the experience and country-specific expertise to allow you to both understand the changing local regulatory landscape and proactively manage affairs on your behalf. Whether handling visas and work permits, drafting jurisdiction-specific employee contracts and policies, or providing relocation support and helping you meet local HR compliance requirements, an effective provider will help you achieve the critical compliance that shields your company from costly fines and legal penalties.
Red flags: Make sure that prospective providers are appropriately equipped with both the knowledge and the capacity to handle your needs for international markets.
2. Strategic and advisory services to manage your global mobility framework
Mobility workflows involve many moving parts—timelines, documents, tax filings, policy tracking, reimbursements, to name a few. The ideal provider will guide you on how to make entry into new markets easier and more streamlined, and provide both guidance and hands-on support for your remote work setups to ensure that all of your cross-border employee movements are in compliance and managed efficiently.
Look for: An effective provider is equipped with a robust team of in-house experts who can manage the full lifecycle of your global workforce mobility network.
Red flags: Watch out for providers that don’t offer you end-to-end service and support. This will force you to rely on a fragmented system of providers and vendors, making managing cross-border employees more difficult and potentially error-prone.
3. Global advisory services and hands-on local support
Moving employees across borders involves much more than processes or paperwork—these moves involve adapting to new countries, adhering to local regulations, and understanding new cultural and business norms. A trusted global mobility provider should be well positioned to offer global strategic guidance, ranging from best practices for global mobility policies and standardizing existing processes across countries, to creating critical budget and cost projections. As important, the provider should have a robust team of local experts who can provide onboarding support, cultural training, draft legal documents such as employment policies and employee contracts, and conduct tax filings and provide other regulatory support.
Look for: A single provider who can provide end-to-end guidance and support across every country in which you operate (as well as potential candidates).
Red flags: Providers that support a limited number of countries, or who rely on third-party vendors to provide support. These providers may lack accountability and be unable to provide you with needed oversight, consistency, and responsiveness across your global footprint—particularly if you decide to expand to other countries or if problems arise.
The case for end-to-end global mobility solutions
Global mobility can range from short-term trips to long-term relocations. Many global mobility providers break down services into silos: visa support, payroll, tax advice, etc. This fragmentation can create gaps and needless complexity, and it may raise accountability issues.
Opt for an end-to-end partner that is proven to manage the full cycle of global mobility:
- immigration and visas
- payroll and tax compliance
- local HR requirements and employment law
- ongoing compliance and regulatory filings oversight
- a full suite of advisory services designed to help you manage your global team
This unified approach reduces vendor overhead, lowers risk, improves employee satisfaction, and gives you transparency and oversight across all of your global operations. Best of all, you avoid the fragmented system of managing separate vendors for payroll, tax and accounting, legal, and HR—making the process seamless for your HR team and your employees.
Short‑term vs. long‑term overseas employee assignments
Different assignment lengths come with different compliance needs and risks:
- Short-Term Employee Cross-Border Assignments (a few weeks to months):
Short-term employee assignments require pre-assignment tax checks, work-permit (as well as other possible required paperwork) validation, and carefully tracking days abroad. Your global mobility providers should be prepared to manage timers, taxation trigger thresholds, and alternative visa rules to avoid costly penalties resulting from not staying in compliance. - Long-Term Employee Assignments (6 months to years):
These longer term assignments present deeper challenges—your provider will need to manage home and host-country payroll, tax equalization, benefits requirements and coordination, relocation and eventual repatriation support for when the assignment ends and the employee is transferred back to the home country.
A provider that directly handles—without handoffs to third parties—both assignment types can save you time and prevent costly compliance mistakes when assignment types overlap or switch mid-project.
4 Global mobility provider red flags to avoid
Watch out for global mobility providers that:
- Only offer piecemeal solutions (e.g., only payroll or legal)
- Lack a centralized technology platform to support all aspects of your global HR footprint
- Outsource local expertise or other services and leave you managing relationships with multiple vendors
- Don’t support a robust array of countries
This first step is the most important
Expanding globally isn’t just about moving people—it’s about building sustainable operations in new markets. Before you begin researching and interviewing global mobility providers, make sure that you first thoroughly understand your non-negotiables for providers. This first step will ground you and help you evaluate the relative merits of different providers without feeling overwhelmed.
An effective global mobility provider will help you:
- Help you establish a framework that can be replicated and managed effectively across all expatriate assignments. Avoid compliance pitfalls by proactively helping you understand requirements, laws, and deadlines in every country.
- Streamline cross-border workflows through intuitive, centralized technology.
- Create a positive experience for employees abroad through local expertise and effective onboarding.
- Provide both global guidance and local support without outsourcing to third parties.
HSP is an end-to-end global expansion solutions provider focused on helping companies scale their operations overseas effectively and efficiently. We are the only global expansion expert to offer growing companies a full suite of end-to-end solutions designed to help them scale to any size and country.
Our in-country experts have delivered the full spectrum of global expansion solutions—from EoR to entity set-up and management—across more than 100 countries (and counting). HSP brings full payroll, accounting, tax, legal, compliance, and HR services to corporate teams, integrating with in-house staff to both guide and execute across every domain.
Best of all, our technology platform, GateWay GXM, is the world’s first purpose-built Global Expansion Management (GXM) platform designed specifically to help small to mid-sized companies manage their entire global footprint—entities, payroll, HR, accounting, and tax—all in one place.
Contact us to discover how our full suite of global mobility services can help your company successfully operate overseas in any environment.
