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

BambooHR is widely regarded as a leading HR platform for small and mid-size businesses. Designed to help organisations manage their people, BambooHR has historically excelled at supporting local teams. As an increasing number of customers expanded into multinational organisations, however, a gap appeared: the platform that managed domestic HR tasks lacked a way to hire, pay or manage employees across borders.

To address that gap, BambooHR joined forces with Remote to integrate a fully embedded Employer of Record (EOR) and contractor management experience, bringing global employment infrastructure straight into the platform customers already use.

The challenge: managing a global workforce without a global solution

Almost a quarter of BambooHR's customers employed staff in multiple countries, yet the platform could not compliantly provide employment, payroll and benefits for international employees. Without an integrated EOR, customers faced only a few costly workarounds:

• Establish legal entities in every country — an expensive and time-consuming undertaking
• Combine multiple EOR providers, which may not integrate with BambooHR and force HR teams to re-enter data across systems; or
• Treat international workers as contractors and accept the risk of misclassification.

"BambooHR currently has thousands of customers with employees around the world. Some are opening entities, which is costly and slow. Others are hiring that talent as contractors and taking on misclassification risk."

Juliet Fletcher, Group Product Manager, BambooHR

Developing an in-house EOR would have given BambooHR complete ownership on paper, but the trade-offs were significant: an estimated $100 Million USD in development costs and years before the product could be competitive. BambooHR's customers required a global employment solution immediately, not at some distant point in the future. Partnering enabled a market launch in months rather than years, without taking on the development expense or the ongoing responsibility of maintaining compliance across dozens of countries.

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

After assessing several options, BambooHR selected Remote on three main criteria: aligned values, a clear commitment to compliance, and strong technical capability. Remote's ownership of 100+ in-house entities worldwide, rather than depending on third-party sub-processors, was a decisive consideration.

"We wanted a partner whose values matched ours. Compliance was non-negotiable, and we needed a reliable technical partner with a robust global payroll platform."

Brian Crofts, Chief Product Officer, BambooHR

For BambooHR customers, the experience is presented within the platform they already use. Remote's EOR and contractor management capabilities are embedded directly into BambooHR's interface. Remote manages compliance and payment infrastructure behind the scenes while BambooHR retains the brand and the customer relationship.

Importantly, Remote does not compete with BambooHR's core HR offering. The two solutions complement one another and deliver a holistic global employee management experience for customers.

BambooHR EOR powered by Remote

The embedded global employment experience is integrated into BambooHR's ATS, Onboarding, Access and Time Off modules, so expanding into any of 90 countries becomes a natural extension of existing workflows. Customers can complete country-specific onboarding built on Remote’s compliance schemas and hire international employees without leaving the BambooHR interface. Once onboarded, global team members are managed alongside local staff in the same HRIS, creating a single, consistent source of truth for the whole organisation.

All core compliance infrastructure is managed via Remote’s API. As employment regulations evolve in markets such as Germany, Norway and France, the appropriate data appears automatically in BambooHR. This native integration enables HR teams to deliver a compliant, high-quality employee experience without needing to master the subtleties of international law themselves.

"We rely on Remote's API to supply the correct compliance data for hiring an employee in a particular month. We do not need to understand every nuance of those compliance changes — the data is provided, it maps to BambooHR's design system, and we automatically present that compliant experience to the customer."

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 offer a cohesive workforce solution. Transitioning between full-time EOR employees and global contractors is seamless, satisfying the need for one platform to oversee an entire international workforce. While each product addresses different employment scenarios, the user experience remains completely consistent.

The impact: rapid global scale

Market reaction was strong from the outset. Even before the EOR launch, 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 inside BambooHR's existing customer base.

BambooHR reached market in under six months — a timeline that would have been impossible with an in-house build. The pace of iteration since launch kept up with delivery. For example, when customers requested the ability to import their existing contracts just four days after contractor management launched, the two teams acted quickly.

"Around four days after launch we received a lot of customer feedback. Remote's API and SDK did not yet support that capability, but we collaborated and shipped it 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 in a single place. Global employment specialists have access to Remote's AI knowledge bot for real-time compliance answers on any country, and support cases are integrated between the two companies so customers receive fast responses without switching platforms.

For Brian Crofts, the clearest signal of the partnership's success is simpler than any metric.

"I will tell you, I cannot say who works for BambooHR and who works for Remote. Everyone brings the same enthusiasm for solving significant customer problems. Everyone is great to work with and driven by the same mission."

Brian Crofts, Chief Product Officer, BambooHR

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