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📘 How to embrace your next big advantage - global talent

Using an AI-powered Global Workforce Management System

April 08, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

Hi, and happy Tuesday.

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

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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

  1. 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.

  2. 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

  1. 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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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

Have your own ideas, expansions, or new remote initiatives you’re looking to refine? I’d love to hear your approach.

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:

Please act as a hiring manager with comprehensive knowledge on the talent available globally for a wide range of skills. I want to locate talent for the role of <role>. Please provide the top 5 countries with the highest density of talent for this role, based on the training available in the country from employers and institutions. For each country, please also highlight cultural fit with my country - <country> - considering remote teamwork, language compatibility, and any local nuances I should know. Please also consider the high cost-of-living and compensation differences to my country. Please present the results as a table.

Here’s highlights of what I got when I provided our Software Developer and USA:

Know someone struggling to hire? This issue of the newsletter might be exactly what they need.

Best,

Dino

From Our Interview Series with Rick Hammell

🎯 What you’ll learn:

  • The “aha” moment that inspired Rick to create a global HR solution

  • How the concept of Global Workforce Management System changed international hiring

  • The early kitchen-table wins that led to overnight success

🎯 What you’ll learn:

  •  Why Helios was built with AI-first automation from day one

  • How real-time compliance checks remove guesswork when hiring overseas

  • The difference between Helios’s all-in-one model and big providers like ADP

🎯 What you’ll learn:

  • How remote work can save costs and boost productivity

  • Why trust is the key ingredient in managing distributed teams

  • Emerging global hiring trends—and what they mean for your business

My Interview Notes

I’ve hired hundreds of people across dozens of countries—and it almost broke my back.

Why?

Because juggling multiple HR, payroll, and compliance systems is a mess.

Enter the “Unified Global Operating System” (UGOS) framework that RickHammell and I cover in the latest episode of AI Unhyped.

We discuss how a single integrated platform (powered by AI) can:

  • Onboard people globally—compliantly

  • Automate country-specific quirks (like 13th month pay)

  • Centralize payroll, compliance, and culture-building

If you’re an HR leader, founder, or anyone struggling with global expansion, you’ll want to see how to stop hacking together 10 different tools and replace them with one.

60 SECOND HIGHLIGHTS (SHORTS)