How BambooHR transformed a waitlist of 2,000 customers into a flourishing global employment product with Remote

BambooHR is a widely trusted HR platform for small and mid-size businesses. Designed to simplify people management, BambooHR has traditionally focused on serving local teams. However, as more customers expanded into multinational organisations, a gap opened up: the system that managed domestic needs could not help them hire, pay or manage staff across borders.

To address that shortfall, BambooHR teamed up with Remote to deliver a fully embedded Employer of Record (EOR) and contractor management capability, embedding global employment infrastructure directly into the platform customers already use.

The challenge: managing a global workforce without a global solution

Almost a quarter of BambooHR's customers employed people in more than one country, yet the platform could not compliantly provide employment, payroll and benefits for international staff. Absent an integrated EOR, customers were left with a limited set of costly workarounds:

• Establish legal entities in every country, a costly and time-consuming undertaking
• Piece together several EOR providers, which might not integrate with BambooHR, forcing HR teams to rekey data across platforms; or
• Treat international workers as contractors and assume 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

Creating an in-house EOR would have given them 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 needed a global employment solution now, not eventually. Partnering enabled a market launch in months rather than years, without taking on the cost or the ongoing burden of keeping compliance current across dozens of countries.

The solution: one platform for global hiring and HR management

Following a review of several options, BambooHR selected Remote for three reasons: aligned values, a firm commitment to compliance, and robust technical capability. Remote’s ownership of 100+ in-house entities worldwide rather than 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 experience is embedded in the platform they already use. Remote's EOR and contractor management features are integrated directly into BambooHR's existing interface. Remote handles the compliance and payments infrastructure behind the scenes, while BambooHR retains the brand and the customer relationship.

Importantly, Remote does not compete with BambooHR's core HR functionality. The two offerings complement each other seamlessly and deliver a holistic global employee management experience for customers.

BambooHR EOR powered by Remote

The embedded global employment experience is embedded directly into the BambooHR ATS, Onboarding, Access and Time Off modules, so expanding into any of 90 countries becomes a seamless continuation of your existing workflow. Customers can complete country-specific onboarding built on Remote’s comprehensive 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, providing a single, consistent source of truth for the whole organisation.

The compliance backbone is delivered entirely through Remote’s API. When employment rules evolve in markets such as Germany, Norway or France, the relevant data appears automatically inside BambooHR. This native integration lets HR teams offer a compliant, high-quality employee experience without having to master 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 this unified foundation, BambooHR embedded Remote’s contractor management product to deliver a genuinely unified workforce solution. The transition between managing full-time EOR employees and global contractors is seamless, meeting the demand for a single platform to oversee the entire international workforce. Although the products serve different employment needs, the user experience remains completely continuous.

The impact: rapid global expansion

Market reaction was positive from day one. Even before EOR went live, 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 for an in-house build. The pace of iteration since launch has matched the speed of delivery. When customers requested, just four days after contractor management launched, the ability to bring their own existing contracts into the platform, the two 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 in one place. Global employment specialists can access 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 quick responses without switching platforms.

For Brian Crofts, the clearest sign of the partnership's success 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 broaden your platform without investing years in development? [Explore Remote Embedded]