Your first hire abroad: ten questions to answer before the offer letter

The first international hire usually starts the same way. Someone brilliant is in Lisbon, or Bangalore, or Bogotá. You want them. They want you. The recruiter takes the US offer letter, changes the currency, and sends it. Then the questions start, and every one of them should have been answered before the letter went out.

Here are the ten, in order, because the answer to the first one changes most of the others.

1. Which route are you using?

There are three ways to put someone on your team in a country where you have no entity. You can engage them as an independent contractor. You can employ them through an Employer of Record. Or you can open your own entity and employ them directly. The contractor route is lawful only where the person genuinely works independently, which a full time role on your roadmap almost never is. The entity route takes weeks to months before the first payslip and carries filings forever. For a first hire, the EOR is nearly always the answer, and our EOR vs PEO vs entity explainer walks through when that stops being true.

Decide this first. Everything below depends on it.

2. Who is the legal employer?

If you use an EOR, the EOR's local entity is the employer on paper. It signs the contract, runs payroll, remits contributions and carries the statutory obligations. You direct the work. The employee needs to understand this before they accept, not after they see an unfamiliar company name on the contract. Tell them plainly: you are hired by us, employed through our partner, and your manager, your team and your equity all sit with us.

If you open an entity, you are the employer, with everything that means: registrations, a local bank account, statutory accounts and often a local director.

3. What does the hire cost above salary?

Gross salary is the starting point, not the number. Above it sit employer social contributions, mandatory benefits, leave accrual, any thirteenth month pay, insurance, and the EOR fee if you are using one. The gap between salary and total cost varies enormously by country. A market that looks cheap on salary can be mid table once contributions are counted.

Run the role through the employment cost calculator before you settle on a number, then check the cost section of the country guide. For the markets first hires most often land in, start with Portugal, India and Mexico.

4. What currency, and when is pay day?

Employees are almost always paid in local currency, because contributions, tax and the payslip itself are calculated in it. That means a salary quoted in dollars is a conversion, and the conversion moves. Decide whether the salary is fixed in local currency (the employee carries the FX movement) or pegged to your currency and reviewed periodically (you carry it). Say which in the offer.

Pay date is set by local practice and sometimes by law. Monthly is common, but the day of the month, the treatment of bonuses and the handling of a thirteenth month all differ. The country guide tells you what the market expects.

5. What language is the contract in, and what must it contain?

Many countries require the employment contract to be in the local language, or at least to have a local language version that governs if there is a conflict. Many also require specific terms to appear in writing: job title and duties, place of work, working hours, salary and its components, leave, notice, probation and the applicable collective agreement where one exists. A US offer letter with a signature line does not satisfy this. An EOR issues a local contract that does. If you go direct, have it drafted locally.

6. Probation and notice

Probation is your window to part ways cheaply if the hire does not work out, and it is capped in most countries. The cap differs, and in some markets it depends on seniority or on the collective agreement. Use the full period the law allows, put it in the contract, and set a reminder before it ends. After probation, notice applies, and in many places it grows with length of service. Set both terms deliberately. Do not inherit them from a template written for another country.

7. Leave and public holidays

Statutory annual leave is a minimum you cannot contract below, and in much of Europe it is well above what a US employee expects. Public holidays are set nationally and sometimes regionally. Sick and parental leave are often funded partly by the state and partly by you. None of this is negotiable at the offer stage, so build it into capacity planning now. The leave section of each country guide lists what applies.

8. IP and confidentiality

US contracts lean on work made for hire, which assigns employee created work to the company automatically. That is a US rule, not a global one. In many civil law countries copyright vests in the author and passes to the employer only through a specific written assignment, and some grant employee inventors extra compensation for patents. Moral rights often cannot be assigned at all, only waived. If the person will write code, design product or create content, the contract needs a jurisdiction appropriate assignment clause. Confidentiality and non compete terms are enforceable to different degrees, and non competes in particular often require paid compensation to bind.

9. How will equity be treated?

You can usually grant options to an employee abroad, but the tax treatment is set by their country, not yours. The three questions are when tax arises (grant, vest or exercise), what kind of income it is, and who withholds it. Where tax lands at vest, an employee in a private company owes cash on shares they cannot sell. Decide whether you are granting options, RSUs or a cash equivalent before the offer. Do not promise "the same plan as everyone else" until you know it works there.

10. What does it cost to leave?

This is the question almost nobody asks before the offer and everybody asks eventually. Work it out now. What notice will apply after probation? Is there statutory severance, and how is it calculated? Are there protected categories that cannot be dismissed at all during certain periods? What form must a termination take, and who has to be consulted? Read the termination section of the country guide before you sign, and if the answer worries you, structure the hire accordingly: full probation, a fixed term where lawful, and documentation from day one.

Then send the letter

• Route decided and the reasoning written down.
• Fully loaded cost approved. Not salary. The number with contributions, benefits and fees.
• Local contract ready. Right language, mandatory terms, probation, notice, IP and equity drafted for that jurisdiction.
• Exit understood. Notice, severance and process, before anyone needs them.

Ten questions, one afternoon. It is exactly the work an EOR does for you before the offer goes out.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or immigration advice. Rules differ by jurisdiction and change regularly. Confirm the position for your countries with a qualified adviser before acting. Last reviewed September 2026.

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