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

BambooHR is widely regarded as a leading HR platform for small and mid-size businesses. Designed to help organizations manage their people, BambooHR has long been exceptional at supporting local teams. As more clients expanded into multinational operations, however, a gap became clear: the system that managed domestic HR had no built-in way to help customers hire, pay, or oversee staff across borders.

To address that need, BambooHR partnered with Remote to deliver a fully embedded Employer of Record (EOR) and contractor management workflow, bringing global employment infrastructure straight into the platform their customers already trust.

The challenge: serving a global workforce without a global solution

Nearly a quarter of BambooHR's customers employed people in multiple countries, yet the platform lacked a compliant way to provide employment, payroll, and benefits to international staff. Without an embedded EOR, customers faced only a short list of costly workarounds: 

• Establish legal entities in each country, an expensive and time-consuming undertaking
• Combine services from multiple EOR providers, which may or may not integrate with BambooHR, forcing HR teams to re-enter data across systems; or
• Classify international workers as contractors and accept the legal 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

Building an in-house EOR meant full ownership on paper, but the trade-offs were steep: an estimated $100 million in development costs and years before the product could compete. BambooHR's customers needed a global employment solution now, not eventually. Partnering meant getting to market in months rather than years, without taking on the cost or the ongoing burden of keeping compliance current across dozens of countries.

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

After assessing several options, BambooHR selected Remote based on three pillars: shared values, an unwavering commitment to compliance, and strong technical capability. Remote's ownership of 100+ in-house entities worldwide—rather than relying on third-party sub-processors—proved to be a decisive consideration.

"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 experience is available inside the platform they already use. Remote's EOR and contractor management tools are embedded directly into BambooHR's existing interface. Remote manages compliance and payment infrastructure behind the scenes, while BambooHR retains the brand and the ongoing customer relationship. 

Importantly, Remote does not compete with BambooHR's core HR offering. The two solutions complement each other seamlessly, delivering a comprehensive global employee management experience for customers.

BambooHR EOR powered by Remote

The embedded global employment experience is integrated directly into the BambooHR ATS, Onboarding, Access, and Time Off modules, so expanding into any of 90 countries feels like a natural extension of your existing workflow. Customers can complete country-specific onboarding built on 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, creating a single, consistent source of truth for the entire organization.

The compliance backbone is entirely handled through Remote’s API. As employment rules change in jurisdictions like Germany, Norway, or France, the relevant data appears automatically within the BambooHR system. This native integration enables HR teams to deliver a compliant, high-quality employee experience without needing to parse every nuance 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 genuinely cohesive workforce solution. Moving between full-time EOR employees and global contractors is seamless, answering the need for a single platform to oversee the entire international workforce. While each product meets different employment requirements, the user experience remains one of complete continuity.

The impact: rapid global expansion

Market reaction was strong from the outset. Even before EOR launched, over 2,000 BambooHR customers had joined a waitlist. Within the first year, hundreds of customers and employees had onboarded through the embedded experience, and thousands of new opportunities were created across BambooHR's existing customer base.

BambooHR reached market in under six months, a timeframe that would have been impossible with an in-house build. The pace of iteration since launch has matched the speed of delivery. When BambooHR customers requested, just four days after contractor management launched, the ability to import their existing contracts into the platform, both teams acted 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 employees, international employees, and global contractors all within a single interface. Global employment specialists can reference Remote's AI knowledge bot for real-time, country-specific compliance guidance, and support cases are integrated between the two companies so customers receive fast answers without switching platforms.

For Brian Crofts, the most telling measure of the partnership 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

Interested in expanding your platform without investing years to build it? [Explore Remote Embedded]