> So they were not really employees, but consultants.
On places where it's hard to fire people, mostly everybody works as consultants and people tend see those positions as normal job positions.
On places where it's hard to fire people, mostly everybody works as consultants and people tend see those positions as normal job positions.
I've worked as a consultant in Germany for 13 years, and pretty much every large project has consultants in it, often half the developers are consultants. IBM, T-Systems, Capgemini and accenture each have around 5000 people doing software consulting, and there'S hundreds if not thousands of smaller consultancies.
So now you hire an engineering consultant, train him/her for a few months on the job and are forced by law to let that person go after 18 months to repeat the cycle.
(To answer the inevitable "was he the right person?": Yes, he was. EMEA was continually our best-performing sales region the whole time I worked there, and he built our EMEA sales infrastructure from the ground up. Some years later, after the company exited, most of the senior people regrouped at another startup. He was in charge of EMEA for a few years, and then he was promoted to CEO.)
However, most UK employers would use a probation period or initial fixed term contract (true employee with a fixed end date), rather than a non employee contractor.
It is unlikely your company hired the guy as a contractor because the set up for becoming a self employed contractor (your bank will hate you, an umbrella company takes 10% of your income, you have to register as self employed abd fill out extra tax forms for ever), would probably kill a hire, if you weren't hiring an existing contractor, who wouldn't hang around to perm.
Maybe it was an initial fixed-term contract.