How Zapier hires globally – removing the compliance guesswork, manual data entry, and administrative friction.

Zapier is an AI orchestration platform that helps businesses build and automate workflows, deploy AI agents, and connect systems across 9,000+ apps. From the outset it has operated as an all-remote, distributed company that believes geography should not determine who gets hired. If the right engineer was based in Poland, Zapier wanted the freedom to hire them there or anywhere else.

The challenge: Cross-border compliance risk

Putting that principle into practice meant hiring beyond the small set of countries where Zapier already had legal entities. Each new market brought its own employment laws, tax obligations, and compliance requirements, and getting any of it wrong exposed Zapier to real legal risk. As Laura Del Gaudio, Zapier's Associate General Counsel for Global Employment, puts it, "It's really hard to understand compliance globally across hundreds of countries." Zapier adopted an Employer of Record model specifically to bridge that gap, lowering the risk of misclassification when hiring outside its own entities.

Payroll faced a parallel challenge. As Zapier moved into new markets, entities sometimes went live faster than the lean payroll team could build local expertise, leaving the team exposed to uncertainty about rules and regulations they were still learning.

The solution: A single partner for EOR, payroll, and HR data

Zapier did not want another vendor to manage. It needed a partner prepared to work alongside its team as the company scaled, and found that in Remote, which now underpins three connected parts of Zapier's employment stack: Employer of Record, Global Payroll, and a native integration with BambooHR.

"What we were looking for was a true partner, not just a vendor-customer relationship."

Laura Del Gaudio, Associate General Counsel, Global Employment

Remote Employer of Record

Remote's EOR lets Zapier hire compliantly in markets where it has no legal entity, with Remote assuming contractual responsibility for the employer relationship. That assurance gives Zapier the peace of mind to hire in additional countries.

Remote Global Payroll

In countries such as India and Spain, where Zapier had no prior payroll experience, Remote's in-country teams support Zapier's payroll function directly, guiding it through unfamiliar rules and regulations. A built-in upload feature also processes Zapier's variable payments each month, replacing what had been manual entry.

BambooHR integration

Zapier uses BambooHR as its system of record for HR data, so a native integration with Remote was essential from the start. With that integration in place, updates flow automatically between the two systems: new hires, terminations, address updates, and salary changes all sync without anyone touching a spreadsheet.

The impact: Faster hiring, leaner payroll and deeper automation

With Remote implemented across EOR, payroll, and HR systems, each area of the business experiences different benefits.

Global hiring: from research to reassurance

When compliance questions previously meant hours of independent research, Zapier's legal team can now obtain a clear response quickly from Remote’s responsive team. "Normally, I would have to spend several hours researching; working with Remote, it was less than a half an hour of my time, and I was confident in the information I was getting," Laura says. That assurance stems from more than speed: because Remote is contractually the employer of record, the responsibility for getting it right sits with Remote as well.

"As an solicitor, I like to see that stuff in writing. They took that on. That is their role. That's why you use a provider like Remote."

Laura Del Gaudio, Associate General Counsel, Global Employment

The result: in the last six months alone, Zapier has hired into eight new countries through Remote's EOR, with further entities, including Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, now moving onto the platform.

Payroll: manual entry eliminated, local expertise trusted

For payroll, the upload feature that removed manual data entry has delivered a measurable time saving: Zapier's team estimates up to 80% of the time previously spent on variable payments each month has been cut. "We don't have to do anything manually anymore, which is great," the team says.

That efficiency is paired with a deeper reliance on Remote's local payroll experts, especially in markets Zapier was entering for the first time.

"I speak to Remote’s local teams on a regular basis and get so much help and support from them that I would be truly lost without them."

Fiona Wilson, Senior Global Payroll Specialist

By combining automation with local expertise, payroll is no longer a constraint on where Zapier can expand next.

Integrations: Remote is built to be built on

The BambooHR integration synchronises the core HR data automatically, but Zapier didn't stop there. Its People Ops team extended the setup by building a series of Zaps, leveraging Remote’s open API, to automate their entire expense workflow in days. From review to approval to posting expenses in Remote, the end-to-end process now runs automatically without manual intervention.

"Our people ops team have built a number of Zaps and agents, which allow us to review expenses with a one-click approval. And once they're approved, they automatically sync to Remote with the API. And that means they're automatically in payroll without having to review them."

Fiona Wilson, Senior Global Payroll Specialist

"It's honestly been a true pleasure to work with the Remote team. Just being able to have that confidence is great for our team’s day to day. That's why we wanted Remote, and they've come through for us on that."

Laura Del Gaudio, Associate General Counsel, Global Employment

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