How BambooHR converted a 2,000-customer waitlist into a successful global employment product with Remote

BambooHR is widely recognised as a dependable HR platform for small and mid-size businesses. Designed to help organisations manage their staff, BambooHR has long focused on supporting local teams. As more customers expanded into multinational organisations, however, a gap appeared: the platform that covered domestic needs could not help them hire, pay, or manage employees across borders.

To address that shortfall, BambooHR teamed up with Remote to create a fully embedded Employer of Record (EOR) and contractor management experience, integrating global employment infrastructure into the platform customers already depend on.

The challenge: a global workforce without a global solution

Almost a quarter of BambooHR's customers employed people across multiple countries, yet the platform could not compliantly provide employment, payroll, or benefits to global employees. In the absence of an integrated EOR, customers faced a short list of costly workarounds: 

• Establish legal entities in each country — a costly, time-consuming process
• Combine services from multiple EOR providers that may not integrate with BambooHR, forcing HR teams to re-enter data across systems; or
• Label international workers as contractors and accept the risk of misclassification.

"BambooHR has thousands of customers right now that have employees all over the world. One, they're opening up entities, which is really expensive and time-consuming. Or maybe they're hiring this talent as contractors and run misclassification risk."

Juliet Fletcher, Group Product Manager, BambooHR

Developing an in-house EOR would deliver full ownership on paper, but the downsides were significant: an estimated $100 million in development costs and years before the product could compete. BambooHR's customers required a global employment capability immediately, not in the distant future. Partnering offered a route to market in months rather than years, without shouldering the cost or the continuous work of keeping compliance current across dozens of countries.

The solution: a single platform for global hiring and HR management

After assessing multiple alternatives, BambooHR selected Remote for three reasons: shared values, a firm commitment to compliance, and substantial technical capability. Remote’s ownership of 100+ in-house entities worldwide, instead of relying on third-party sub-processors, proved decisive.

"We wanted to make sure we were working with a partner that had similar values. Compliance was top of mind, and that was obviously non-negotiable. And then we wanted a good technical partner, someone that was robust in their global payroll platform."

Brian Crofts, Chief Product Officer, BambooHR

For BambooHR customers, the functionality appears inside the familiar platform. Remote’s EOR and contractor management tools are embedded directly in BambooHR’s existing interface. Remote manages compliance and payments infrastructure behind the scenes, while BambooHR keeps ownership of the brand and the customer relationship. 

Equally important, Remote does not compete with BambooHR’s core HR offering. The two products complement one another and together deliver a comprehensive global employee management experience for customers.

BambooHR EOR powered by Remote

The embedded global employment experience is integrated directly into BambooHR’s ATS, Onboarding, Access, and Time Off modules, making expansion into any of 90 countries a natural extension of existing workflows. Customers can complete country-specific onboarding using Remote’s comprehensive compliance schemas and hire international employees without ever leaving the BambooHR interface. Once onboarded, these global team members are managed alongside local staff in the familiar HRIS, producing a single, consistent source of truth for the whole organisation.

Remote’s API fully handles the underlying compliance infrastructure. When employment regulations change in jurisdictions such as Germany, Norway, or France, the appropriate data appears automatically inside BambooHR. This native integration lets HR teams deliver a compliant, high-quality employee experience without needing to navigate the complexities of international law themselves.

"We trust Remote's API to serve up the relevant data for hiring an employee in that given month compliantly. We actually don't need to understand all the nuances of those compliance changes. The data is just served up. It maps to BambooHR's design system, and we give that baked-in compliant experience to the customer automatically."

Juliet Fletcher, Group Product Manager, BambooHR

BambooHR Contractor Management powered by Remote

Building on that unified foundation, BambooHR embedded Remote’s contractor management product to deliver a truly cohesive workforce solution. Moving between management of full-time EOR employees and global contractors is seamless, answering the need for a single platform to oversee the entire international workforce. Although the products address different employment needs, the user experience remains completely continuous.

The impact: rapid global scaling

Market reaction was strong from the outset. Before the EOR launched, more than 2,000 BambooHR customers had already joined a waitlist. Within the first year, hundreds of customers and employees had onboarded via the embedded experience, and thousands of new opportunities emerged within BambooHR's existing customer base.

BambooHR reached market in under six months — a timeline that an in-house build could not have matched. The pace of iteration after launch kept step with delivery. When customers asked, only four days after contractor management went live, for the ability to import their own existing contracts into the platform, both teams moved quickly.

"About four days after we launched, we had a bunch of feedback from our customers. Remote's API and SDK didn't support that functionality yet, but we were able to work together and ship that to customers in less than a week from launch."

Juliet Fletcher, Group Product Manager, BambooHR

Today, BambooHR customers can manage domestic staff, international employees, and global contractors all from one place. Global employment specialists can access Remote’s AI knowledge bot to get real-time compliance answers for any country, and support cases are integrated between the two companies so customers receive fast responses without switching platforms.

For Brian Crofts, the partnership’s most telling indicator is simpler than any metric.

"I will tell you, I don't know who works for BambooHR and who works for Remote. Everybody comes with the same excitement around solving big customer problems. Everybody's great to work with and everybody's just mission driven."

Brian Crofts, Chief Product Officer, BambooHR

Ready to expand your platform without investing years in development? [Explore Remote Embedded]