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Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Hire anyone that lives in the EU with very little restrictions or paperwork.

Hiring anyone at all is a significant hurdle in much of the EU, whether it's from your home nation or another member state. If we're talking about startups just starting to grow beyond the founders here, you're not going to have anyone on board yet who is dedicated to dealing with HR, legal and payroll issues. Those won't necessarily be a full-time job with employee #1 either, but they're already a significant overhead the moment you start looking to hire that person, and if anything unusual or adversarial happens it can quickly become an actual full-time job.

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So don't hire them. Let a payrolling company officially hire them. The payrolling company sends you a monthly invoice and takes care of all the legal stuff. I'm currently doing this in the Netherlands, and it's totally legal.

Here in the UK, there are also a lot of rules around intermediaries and agency workers.

>> "HR, legal and payroll issues"

These aren't issues for US based companies?

I'm sure they are, but as I understand it, the amount of regulation involved in most of Europe compared to the US is on an entirely different level.

For example, in much of the US, employment is typically at-will. Make a bad hire, or simply change direction so an early hire is no longer a good fit, and you have minimal obligations.

In much of Europe, employment immediately or almost immediately involves things like not being able to fire someone without being able to show they are either genuinely redundant or not just really bad at their job but also not capable of improvement to the point they could be useful.

Obviously there are issues of employee protection and fair employment contracts to consider as well, but it's hardly surprising that given the very different employment relationships either side of the Atlantic, small US businesses thinking about taking on their first employees can be much more liberal in hiring new staff because they have much less commitment.

Not to nearly the same degree in the US, particularly for small companies.

It's considerably simpler to hire people initially as contractors in the US. But hiring in general is a lot simpler, not to mention firing.

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