A founder in London can post a job and within two weeks have applicants from Lisbon, Berlin, Warsaw, and Dublin. The talent pool expands. The complications expand with it: where does the contract sit, who runs payroll, which jurisdiction does the labour law come from, what does GDPR say about candidate data crossing borders, who pays the social charges, what visa or work permit applies if any.
These are not abstract questions. Get the contract jurisdiction wrong and your termination clause is unenforceable. Get the payroll structure wrong and the candidate cannot be paid for three months. Get the visa wrong and the candidate cannot legally start. Get GDPR wrong and you are looking at a regulator letter. None of these are theoretical.
This playbook walks one open cross-border role end to end. It assumes you are a UK or EU-based hiring company, you have at least one role you want to fill from a different jurisdiction than your registered office, and you have not done it before.
The playbook covers six jurisdictions in real depth: United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain. These five EU jurisdictions plus the UK are where Picked sees the bulk of cross-border hires in the cohort we serve. Other EEA jurisdictions are referenced at higher level. Switzerland, Norway, and the US are out of scope.
Read the playbook end to end once before the first cross-border hire. Then come back to whichever section you need on the day you need it. Sections 03 (EOR vs entity vs contractor), 04 (work permits), and 05 (GDPR for cross-jurisdiction data) are the three most-quoted by founders.
The Picked funnel runs the same way for a cross-border hire as for a single-jurisdiction hire. What changes is the wrapper: the role brief asks two extra questions, the screen has a localisation step, the offer letter has a jurisdiction decision baked into it.
Stage Owner Cross-border delta ----------------------------------------------------------------- 01 Role brief and rubric You Add location-policy + EOR/entity/contractor 02 Posting and syndication Picked Region-specific boards activated 03 Triage (intake) Picked Work-eligibility check at intake 04 AI screen (voice) Picked Candidate-language localisation 05 Role-specific assessment Picked Same as monolingual funnel 06 Behavioural interview Picked Adapted for time-zone scheduling 07 Three finalists arrive Picked → You Same, with jurisdiction flagged per finalist 08 On-site half-day + offer You In-person travel decision; jurisdictional offer 09 Onboarding across borders You Payroll, equipment, time-zone, equity
The hire takes about 5 to 10 days longer end to end than a single-jurisdiction hire. Most of the extra time is in stage 08: the in-person travel decision plus the jurisdictional offer letter add roughly a week. Picked's stages do not add time; the funnel runs on the same timeline regardless of where the candidate sits.
The most common cross-border-specific failure happens at stage 08, not earlier. The candidate clears the funnel, you make an offer, and the offer is jurisdictionally incomplete (wrong contract type, wrong tax position, wrong start date because the visa was not factored in). Investing in section 03 and section 04 ahead of the first offer prevents this.
Three ways to employ someone in a jurisdiction you do not have a registered entity in. Each has trade-offs; the right call depends on the hire count, the time horizon, the role type, and the budget for operational overhead.
An EOR provider (Deel, Remote, Oyster, Velocity Global, Multiplier, and others) employs the worker on your behalf in the target jurisdiction. They handle payroll, tax withholding, social charges, statutory benefits, and local-law compliance. You pay the EOR a monthly fee per worker (typically 350 to 800 USD per worker per month) plus the worker's gross salary and the employer-side charges.
When to use EOR. The first 1 to 5 hires in a new jurisdiction. Roles where the time horizon is uncertain (the hire might be 12 months, might be longer). Roles where the cost of getting employment law wrong is high (anything senior, anything customer-facing).
When not to use EOR. Once you have more than 5 hires in the same jurisdiction; at that point setting up a local entity is usually cheaper over a 24-month horizon. Roles where the candidate strongly prefers a direct employment relationship with your company (some senior candidates filter against EOR-employment in offer negotiations).
You incorporate a subsidiary in the target jurisdiction. The subsidiary is the employer; you employ workers through it directly. Setup costs vary by jurisdiction: roughly 3,000 to 8,000 EUR upfront plus 5,000 to 15,000 EUR per year in ongoing accounting, payroll, and corporate compliance.
When to set up a local entity. You expect 5 plus hires in the jurisdiction within 12 months. The hires include people you want directly employed by your brand (often the case for senior or customer-facing roles). The jurisdiction has favourable tax treatment for new employers (Ireland and the Netherlands often, Germany less so).
When not to set up a local entity. The hire count is uncertain. The role is a single contractor or specialist that does not need a local presence. The jurisdiction's employer-side burden is severe enough to make EOR-permanent the better choice (France is the most common example; the French employer-side social charges at around 42 percent make direct employment expensive at small scale).
The worker is a self-employed contractor, invoicing your company for services. They handle their own tax and social charges. You pay them on invoice via standard B2B payments.
When contractor is appropriate. Truly independent work; the contractor sets their own hours, has other clients, owns their own tools, decides their own methods. Short-term engagements (under 6 months).
When contractor is not appropriate. A worker who in practice works full-time for you, on your schedule, with your equipment, on your direction is an employee not a contractor; HMRC (UK), URSSAF (France), Belastingdienst (Netherlands), and the equivalent EU regulators all have specific case law on this. Mis-classification penalties are real and back-dated (often 24 months of back taxes plus interest plus a penalty). Do not use contractor structures to avoid setting up payroll for what is structurally an employment relationship.
The candidate either has work eligibility in the target jurisdiction or they do not. If they do, the offer follows the standard process. If they do not, you are sponsoring a work permit and the offer is contingent on the permit being granted. The timelines, the costs, and the conditions vary by jurisdiction.
The post-Brexit replacement for Tier 2. The employer holds a sponsor licence (your company needs to apply for one; about 1,500 to 3,000 GBP and 8 weeks to obtain). The role must meet a minimum salary threshold (currently 38,700 GBP for most professional roles in the 2026 framework) and the candidate must score on a points-based system. Sponsorship fee per visa per year: about 4,000 to 5,000 GBP. Total cost over a typical three-year visa: roughly 12,000 to 15,000 GBP.
Timeline: from sponsor-licence-in-hand to candidate-start, about 8 to 12 weeks. If you do not have a sponsor licence yet, add 8 to 12 weeks for that.
A multi-jurisdiction EU permit for highly qualified non-EU candidates. Each EU member state issues its own Blue Card under a harmonised EU framework. Minimum salary thresholds vary by country (roughly 45,000 to 60,000 EUR depending on jurisdiction). Timeline: 6 to 12 weeks. The Blue Card holder gains mobility rights across the EU after 18 months, which matters if you expect the worker to move between your offices.
The Netherlands and Germany are the two most common Blue Card jurisdictions in the cohort Picked serves. The Netherlands additionally offers the 30-percent ruling for highly qualified migrants: 30 percent of the gross salary is tax-free for the first 60 months, a meaningful sweetener.
EU citizens in EU countries: free movement, no permit needed. UK citizens in the UK: no permit needed. EU citizens in the UK with settled or pre-settled status: no permit needed. UK citizens in EU countries: depends on the country and whether they have residency under the Withdrawal Agreement; check, do not assume.
Triage in stage 03 of the Picked funnel asks about work eligibility. The candidate self-declares. Your job at the offer stage is to verify (in the UK via the Home Office's right-to-work check, in the EU via passport plus residency permit). Do not skip the verification; right-to-work mistakes are personal liability for the company directors.
GDPR applies to candidate data the moment a candidate in the EU or the UK applies for a role. The hiring company is the data controller; Picked is the data processor. The two have separate obligations.
For candidate data captured during the hiring funnel, the lawful basis is typically GDPR Article 6(1)(b) (necessary for the performance of pre-contractual measures at the candidate's request) for the screen, assessment, and interview stages. For the structured-reference stage in the Sales playbook, the lawful basis is consent (Article 6(1)(a)) plus, separately, the references' own consent to participate.
Picked surfaces the lawful basis and a one-page candidate-side privacy notice at every stage of the funnel. The candidate gives consent in the intake step; the consent is auditable and revocable.
All Picked production data sits in the EU (Supabase eu-west-2 London, Cloudflare R2 EU, LiveKit EU, Resend EU). Anthropic Claude inference runs on regional endpoints; OpenAI Whisper transcription runs on regional endpoints. No candidate data is transferred outside the EEA in the normal course of operations.
When a candidate is hired by a UK or EU company and the hiring company exports the candidate's record to its own systems, the hiring company is the controller and must apply the appropriate transfer mechanism (Standard Contractual Clauses, adequacy decisions where they apply). The UK and EU recognise each other's adequacy as of June 2025; transfers between UK-resident and EU-resident systems can rely on the adequacy regulation without additional SCCs.
Candidates who are not advanced have the right to deletion under GDPR Article 17. Picked retains candidate data for 90 days after the close of the role to allow for re-opening (a hiring manager who closes a role and reopens it three weeks later wants to find the candidates again). After 90 days, the data is deleted unless the candidate has explicitly consented to longer retention for future-role matching.
When the hiring company exports the candidate to its own systems (typically only the hired candidate), the hiring company sets its own retention policy. We recommend mirroring the 90-day default for non-hires.
GDPR Article 22 gives the candidate the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that produces legal or similarly significant effects. The Picked funnel surfaces a human-review path on every non-advancement decision. The candidate is told this at the point of decision; the human-review request is one click.
For the EU AI Act high-risk classification (which applies to hiring tools as of February 2026), the additional requirements are: technical documentation, post-deployment monitoring, transparency, and human oversight. All four are documented on the Picked trust hub at /trust/responsible-ai.
When the team spans more than 3 time zones, the role brief and the rubric need to reflect it. A PM in Lisbon working with engineering in Berlin and sales in London is on a 1 to 2 hour offset; manageable. A PM in Lisbon working with engineering in Bangalore is on a 5 to 6 hour offset; a different job.
When the role is cross-timezone, the rubric weights "Async work" and "Written communication" higher than the in-office default. Two adjustments:
Picked runs the AI screen and the role-fit assessment in the candidate's preferred language. The candidate picks at the start of the screen from 25 plus supported languages. The reasoning quality and the rubric calibration are equal across supported languages. Picked has tested for fairness across the 25 most common languages used in our beta; the 4/5ths rule applies per language as well as per protected group.
The hiring-manager dashboard, the finalist card, and the transcripts ship in English at V1. The transcript shows the original-language voice plus an English machine translation side-by-side. This is the right default for a single-English-language hiring-manager team; if the manager team speaks the candidate's language, they can switch.
Picked syndicates the role to region-specific boards as part of the default channel mix. You do not configure this; the role brief's location policy drives the syndication. The region-specific channels below are activated for the relevant jurisdictions.
For the EU at large: EU Remote Jobs, RemoteOK with EU residency filter, Wellfound (formerly AngelList) for early-stage roles.
Three sourcing moves the hiring manager can make for cross-border roles.
The behavioural interview runs the same way for a cross-border candidate as for a home-jurisdiction one: 20 to 25 minute live voice conversation, adaptive, scored against the rubric. Two cross-border-specific deltas.
Picked offers the candidate booking slots that work in the candidate's local timezone. The interview is voice; the manager (or screening AI) is not in the room with the candidate at booking time. There is no "you must come in on Wednesday at 14:00 GMT" pressure.
A candidate in Lisbon, for example, can book a 17:00 local slot which is 17:00 in London; a candidate in Berlin can book a 17:00 local slot which is 16:00 in London. The Picked scheduling is timezone-aware end to end. No one is interviewing at 04:00 their time.
For a cross-border role, the behavioural interview adds one anchor question to the standard five from the Engineering, Sales, or Product playbooks. The added question:
The question is not "are you good cross-culturally" (a question that produces theatre). It is "what did you do, what did you adapt, what failed". Scored on Async work, Communication, and Coachability (if those are weighted in the role).
The finalist card for a cross-border hire has the same six blocks as the home-jurisdiction equivalent (from the Engineering, Sales, or Product playbook) plus one additional block: the jurisdictional summary.
A one-paragraph block per finalist that lays out: the candidate's country of residence, their work-eligibility status (right to work in the role's primary jurisdiction; if not, the visa or permit that would apply), the time-zone offset from the hiring company's primary office, the language overlap with the team, and the country-specific employment cost flag (a rough indication of the employer-side burden: low, medium, high).
You read this block at the point of choosing rank-1 versus rank-2. A higher-ranked candidate with no work-eligibility and a 12-week sponsorship timeline can be the right hire, but it must be a deliberate choice rather than a surprise. The block surfaces the decision; the override mechanism lets you choose deliberately.
Read the headline of all three first. Then the jurisdictional summary of all three (do not skip to rank-1). The jurisdictional context is sometimes the override trigger; rank-2 candidate at the same competency score but with right-to-work in your primary jurisdiction is often the better hire.
Then the competency breakdown of rank-1, focused on the highest-weighted competency in your rubric. Then the discovery-simulation or case-study summary for rank-1. Then make the call. The full process is about 25 minutes for a cross-border read.
Cross-border hires force a decision the home-jurisdiction hire does not: in-person or remote on-site? The right answer is "in-person when you can; remote when you cannot, structured carefully". The wrong answer is "remote because it is easier" without thinking about what the team loses.
Budget: typically 800 to 2,000 GBP per candidate for a one-night EU-to-UK or UK-to-EU trip including flights, hotel, and meals. Worth it for senior roles; less worth it for junior or remote-first IC roles where in-person time is rare.
A remote on-site is structured as a series of 30 to 45 minute video calls with the team, plus one 60 minute deep-dive with the hiring manager. Run them in one day if possible (not spread across three days; the cadence matters). The candidate should meet at least three different team members in their working time zone, not three in three different time zones.
A common pitfall: scheduling the remote on-site at the candidate's late evening. Do not. The candidate is interviewing; their best signal is in their own waking hours. Move the team meetings to overlap with the candidate's mid-day, not your mid-day.
The offer letter is jurisdictionally specific. Three decisions to make explicitly before drafting:
About 28 percent of cross-border offers attract a counter-offer (slightly higher than the home-jurisdiction sales rate of 30 percent, slightly lower than the home-jurisdiction engineering rate of 30 percent; cross-border candidates have less local social pressure to accept counters). The 24-hour-offer-to-listen rule applies; the conversation often reveals jurisdictional friction the offer can address.
Cross-border onboarding has four extra moving parts compared to a home-jurisdiction hire: payroll, equipment, time-zone integration, and the in-person first week.
If EOR: the EOR provider handles payroll. Your job is to confirm the candidate is on the payroll roster at least 5 working days before their start date and that the first pay run includes their starting month pro-rata.
If local entity: your payroll provider in the target jurisdiction onboards the candidate. Confirm 10 working days before start that the local tax-ID has been issued (in some jurisdictions this can take 2 to 4 weeks; in Germany the Lohnsteuerkarte process can take up to 6 weeks for first-time employees).
If contractor: the candidate invoices monthly; you pay via standard B2B payment. Set up the first invoice cycle before they start.
Ship the laptop and accessories to the candidate's address before day one. Cross-border equipment shipment has VAT and import-duty implications; use a service like Hofy or your EOR's equipment-management add-on if the EOR offers one. The candidate should have a working laptop in their hands at least 2 working days before they start.
Set up the cross-timezone working norms in the first week, not the first month. Two decisions to make explicitly with the candidate on day one: which 4 hours per day are core-overlap hours; what the async-update cadence is (daily written update, weekly written summary, both). Write these down; share with the team; do not let them drift.
For roles where the team works together quarterly or more often, fly the candidate to the primary office for their first week. This is the highest-ROI cross-border onboarding investment; the relationships built in the first week compound across the whole tenure. Budget about 1,000 to 2,500 GBP per first-week trip; well worth it for a hire who will stay 18 months plus.
Same structure as the home-jurisdiction equivalent (covered in Engineering, Sales, or Product playbook section 11 of each). Add one cross-border-specific anchor question at the 30-day review: "How are the working-time and communication norms working for you? What needs to change?" Address the answer before day 60; cross-border norm-drift compounds fast.
The whole playbook in one page. Print this section; pin it; come back to it every time you open a cross-border role.
The people building Picked. Method posts, model cards, fairness audits, product opinions. Edited and signed off by the engineering and research leads.