Establishing a legal entity to tap into a rich talent pool of another country is time-consuming and expensive while engaging remote workers as independent contractors highly risky. We are imaging a new, simple way to hire anywhere at speed with full compliance and a disruptive cost structure.
I was sitting with a friend who was house-hunting and calling various listings on a site – every phone conversation started with ‘Are you a broker or the owner?’ Eventually it got so irritating that I finally had to ask – ‘if it is so important for you to talk only to the property owner directly, can’t you only call listings where that’s clearly mentioned?’ He quipped back: ‘all brokers pose as owners to attract callers’.
The more fundamental question of course is: ‘why not talk to the broker?’ Isn’t that the industry structure – developer or owner produces or lists and the broker sells? Well, think about a time when there were no internet listings and no easy way to gather information about properties – the broker added significant value across several aspects: (1) sourcing (knowledge/ awareness of market landscape), (2) matching (filter properties that fit your preferences and budget), (3) validating (clear title, property condition), (4) executing (agreements, handover), and (5) after-sales support (more important in leases by playing mediator with developer).
The broker was therefore your much-needed bridge.
Technology has disrupted a lot of those pieces and therefore the value added by the middleman is quickly replaced by technology tools performing the same function but in a different avatar. Of course, I am generalizing a bit here and there is significant value added by agents in a cluttered and still somewhat opaque real estate industry – more in some geographies than others. However, my friends who are in real estate will agree that the fundamental nature of how the industry operated has evolved and so have their operating models.
You still need the bridge, a very different looking one however.
If you now try to draw a parallel with what we are trying to do at kaam.work: historically, you needed some sort of a bridge to access talent in places like Bangalore, India – either:
(1) an IT Services or outsourcing umbrella, or
(2) your own captive office / legal entity (or more fancily called Global In-house Centers or GICs), or
(3) independent contractor agreements
There’s a lot that’s evolved over the years on both the company mindset (willingness to build sustainable distributed teams) and talent mindset (desire for meaningful integration into teams, better engagement) that requires for this bridge to look different or rebuilt.
We are imagining and building a truly global marketplace where companies can source, hire, and employ talent, anywhere in the world and - and do this without the long-drawn and expensive process of setting up your own legal entity or the compliance-risky model of engaging folks as independent contractors.
Economically, both sides are significantly better-off as well: most of the dead-weight overhead companies have to pay for today when setting captive centers (excluding the time and energy) is partly saved and partly transferred to the talent, giving them what they truly deserve.
Watch our Employ Anywhere video here for more.