Pilot's blog covers startup product development, onboarding and processes, written by the company that helps firms hire and pay remote workers abroad.
HN commenters mention Pilot as a startup that helps companies hire and pay people around the world, in threads about foreign contractors.
>Regarding payments, this has been coming up and we’ll need to pick your brain as we develop solutions.
My contact information is in my profile. I'll forward to some people I know who had several problems with that. The last one I talked with worked with a company in the U.K. with the restriction the "worker" had to have a bank account in their country of residence, not in any other country. Explanations on exchange rates below. They know more about this, and know more people in that situation.
>We’ve also been looking at https://pilot.co/ https://www.boundlesshq.com/ and https://www.letsdeel.com/. Are you familiar with those?
Unfortunately, no.
What I also meant by payment problems is the disparity between the conversion rates in banks and on the streets. The disparity can be huge, so if you wire X euros to someone's bank account, it is automatically converted to the local currency at rate X and they get Y, when they could get 1.6Y or 1.7Y (60% or 70%) more on the streets. A 70% delta is a lot.
Some networks have developed to enable people to get the full "street value" of their money.
>When we call it “the Middle East and North Africa,” we also get feedback that it’s inaccurate.
Well, as someone in Algeria, if I were looking for work and visited the site and it said: "You're in North Africa", that's a fact of geography. It said "Hire the best Arab software engineers", I'll think "I'll forward the link to Arab software engineers I know since they're specific".
There…
Hi! Ahlan! Azul! Really appreciate your bringing these issues up.
Regarding payments, this has been coming up and we’ll need to pick your brain as we develop solutions. For now we are managing payments for companies that hire remotely by wire transferring the funds ourselves. In other words, the companies send the money to our US entity and then we do the transfer. We’ve also been looking at https://pilot.co/ https://www.boundlesshq.com/ and https://www.letsdeel.com/. Are you familiar with those? What do you think? Btw Pilot is also a YC company that initially planned to be a full-time remote work marketplace, but switched to facilitating payments because there was such a big need there.
You’re right of course that in North Africa (the Maghreb) many don’t speak Arabic nor identify as Arab. When we call it “the Middle East and North Africa,” we also get feedback that it’s inaccurate. I wish there were a better word! We’ll keep iterating until we get it right.
PS: My co-founder Iliana has spent lots of time in Morocco and some in Algeria… and can’t wait to go back! She speaks some darija… and picked up a few words of Berber. :)
This is quite similar to how we hire Ruby on Rails developers. We organise two-weeks long Bootcamp where we train people in Rails. At the end we offer some of them to join us as junior developers, with further training during next year. Those who are not hired still win—they receive two weeks of training which helps them find jobs elsewhere. We’ve had some fantastic hires this way over the past two years.
This article made my think that maybe we can do better and provide more assistance to those we do not hire after Bootcamp.
More details about our Bootcamps are available at http://pilot.co/bootcamp.
> You can get away hiring foreign contractors but until there is real legislation to hire people anywhere easily, this is a pain in the neck especially for smaller companies.
This is what PEOs and EOR companies are for.
> Yes Gitlab does it and all but they have cash to spend and circumvent lot of BS regulations with employment and taxes.
They likely use a PEO/EOR for their foreign employees.
These are known issues with known solutions, they're just costly.
Just some of the players:
https://pilot.co/
https://papayaglobal.com/
https://velocityglobal.com/
https://www.trinet.com/
Pilot have contacted me last month and I really like their policy. They only do long-term full-time contracts with reliable companies, and have a flat fee of 30% - you can set whatever rate you like. I am happily employed but I feel it's a far cry from services like Toptal who have opaque, allegedly much larger commissions.
https://pilot.co/
Some more alternatives:
https://github.com/andreis/interview/issues/23
https://github.com/wfhio/awesome-job-boards
I do this, in NZ, for a 15ish person company. I 'contract' but my contract says I get a monthly rate not hourly, and I get holidays, a couple other benefits. I pay taxes myself. My work sends me my 'salary' with transferwise every month.
That said I read about Pilot which lets you be an actual employee. They provide the tax presence that so many companies want to avoid. https://pilot.co/