Employer of Record
What is an Employer of Record?
An Employer of Record, or EOR, becomes the legal employer of a worker on your behalf in a country where you don't have your own registered entity. It runs payroll. It withholds and files taxes. It manages statutory benefits and keeps the employment relationship compliant with local labor law. You keep the part that actually matters to you: what the person works on, their goals, how they're doing.
Setting up a legal entity abroad can take four to six months in a lot of countries, plus a legal budget most companies don't want to spend just to hire one or two people. An Employer of Record gets you from "found the candidate" to "employee, legally hired, working" in about a week.
How an Employer of Record actually plays out with India
Say you want to build a five-person engineering team in India. Without an Employer of Record, step one alone is registering an Indian entity, which realistically eats two to four months before you've even posted a job listing. Then comes the local bank account, a compliant payroll setup, and enough working knowledge of Indian labor law that you don't get blindsided by something like statutory bonus requirements six months in.
With kaam.work acting as your Employer of Record, none of that happens. Your engineers get hired directly under Indian employment law, paid on time in rupees, and given the provident fund and gratuity contributions they're legally owed. You spend your time on the part that's actually yours to do: interviewing, onboarding, running the team.
Employer of Record vs the alternatives
A Professional Employer Organization needs you to already have a local entity, which rules it out for a first hire in a new market. Setting up a wholly owned subsidiary works too, if you've got several months and a legal budget to spare. Hiring the person as an independent contractor skips the entity question, but only holds up if the relationship genuinely looks like contracting rather than employment, and a lot of "contractor" relationships drift into employee territory within a year without anyone noticing.
An Employer of Record is the option built specifically for the gap those three leave open: hiring someone properly, in a country you've never operated in, without months of setup first.
What an Employer of Record doesn't do
An Employer of Record won't touch your intellectual property strategy. It won't run your engineering roadmap. And it definitely won't manage the people you've hired for you. It handles the legal and administrative side of employment. Leading the team is still your job.
Frequently asked questions
- Is an Employer of Record only for full-time employees?
- Mostly. If you need someone for a short, defined project instead, a properly structured independent contractor agreement usually fits better.
- How quickly can someone actually start working through an Employer of Record?
- Once you've picked the candidate, kaam.work typically has them onboarded and working within a week, since there's no entity setup involved.
- Who actually manages my employees day to day, me or the Employer of Record?
- You do. The Employer of Record handles contracts, payroll, tax, and statutory compliance in the background. Your engineers still report to you.
- What actually decides whether I need an EOR or a Professional Employer Organization?
- One question: do you already have a legal entity in that country? If yes, a PEO is on the table. If no, only an Employer of Record works.
