How BambooHR turned a 2,000-customer waitlist into a thriving global employment product with Remote

BambooHR is one of the most trusted HR platforms for small and mid-size businesses. Built to help companies manage their people, BambooHR has long excelled at serving local teams. But as more customers grew into multinational organizations, a gap emerged: the platform that handled everything domestically had no way to help them hire, pay, or manage employees across borders.

To close that gap, BambooHR partnered with Remote to build a fully embedded Employer of Record (EOR) and contractor management experience, bringing global employment infrastructure directly into the platform their customers already rely on.

The challenge: a global workforce with no global solution

Nearly a fourth of BambooHR's customers had employees in multiple countries, but the platform had no way to compliantly offer employment, payroll, benefits to global employees. Without a built-in EOR solution, customers faced a short menu of costly workarounds: 

• Set up legal entities in each country, an expensive and time-consuming process
• Stitch together multiple EOR providers, which may or may not integrate with BambooHR, leaving HR teams re-entering data across systems; or
• Classify international workers as contractors and accept the misclassification risk.

"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 evaluating several options, BambooHR chose Remote based on three criteria: shared values, a genuine commitment to compliance, and deep technical capability. Remote's ownership of 100+ in-house entities worldwide, rather than relying on third-party sub-processors, was a decisive factor.

"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

To BambooHR's customers, the experience lives within the platform they already know. Remote's EOR and contractor management tools are built directly into BambooHR's existing interface. Remote handles the compliance and payments infrastructure behind the scenes, while BambooHR owns the brand and the customer relationship. 

Equally important: Remote doesn’t compete with BambooHR's core HR offering. The two products seamlessly complement each other and provide a holistic global employee management experience for customers.

BambooHR EOR powered by Remote

The embedded global employment experience is woven directly into the BambooHR ATS, Onboarding, Access, and Time Off modules, ensuring that 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 robust compliance schemas, and hire international employees without ever stepping outside 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 underlying compliance infrastructure is handled entirely via Remote’s API. As employment regulations shift in regions like Germany, Norway, or France, the relevant data surfaces automatically within the BambooHR system. This native integration allows HR teams to provide a compliant, high-quality employee experience without needing to navigate the nuances 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 provide a truly cohesive workforce solution. The transition between managing full-time EOR employees and global contractors is frictionless, meeting the demand for a single platform to oversee the entire international workforce. While the products serve distinct employment needs, the user experience remains one of total continuity.

The impact: rapid global scale

The market response has been strong from the start. Before EOR even launched, more than 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 had been created within BambooHR's existing customer base.

BambooHR went to market in under six months, a timeline that would have been impossible with an in-house build. The speed of iteration since launch has matched the speed of delivery. When BambooHR customers asked, just four days after contractor management launched, for the ability to bring their own existing contracts into the platform, the two teams moved fast.

"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 have access to Remote's AI knowledge bot to answer real-time compliance questions on any country, and support cases are integrated between the two companies so customers get fast answers without bouncing between 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

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