Protecting First-Mover Cloud Advantage
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- November 21, 2022
When Globalization Partners was founded in 2012, the company was created in the cloud as a technology-based solution to the recruiting challenge of organizations sourcing the best talent. It was also a solution for those who needed to set up subsidiary operations in new country markets.
As Globalization Partners enters its second decade, a lot has changed. COVID-19 created new norms around employment, inspiring a backlash against the globalization of supply chains but not necessarily of human talent.
With the movement of people slowed down by the pandemic and remote working widely accepted, the impetus to hire the best talent, no matter where they reside, continues to be a theme for some job descriptions and organizations.
Globalization Partners is also facing a level of competition now that didn’t exist, at least in the digital space, a decade ago. The field of HR Tech has taken off and spawned many innovative new companies which, at various levels, impinge on the niche Globalization Partners had carved out for itself as an early leader.
Technology refresh
The response, according to chief executive Bob Cahill, has been a corporate rebrand but also a technology refresh which is adding new functionalities and pushing the platform's integration with the existing ERP systems of clients.
Since October, Globalization Partners is now rebranded as G-P, but Cahill says that is not the only change customers will see.
“There’s a recurring theme in all of what we have done, and that is to minimize human friction and make our platform self-serve wherever possible”
New features, developed in-house, add new levels of automation to key processes, saving time and delivering scale and driving easier and more accurate compliance in the 180 national markets in which the company operates.
“We are just rolling out a mature version of what we call our employment contract generator, which allows our customers to go in without any human intervention and prepare a fully compliant localized employment contract for those that wish to hire,” said Cahill, who is new to the chief executive role after previous C-suite roles with the company.
“And that dialogue goes back and forth between the candidate and the employer without our intervention, and more importantly, it also allows the customer to respond online if they don't like a particular section of an employment contract,” he explained.
“Rather than having lawyers go back and read things back and forth, we give them options, but it's limited to what's compliant in the region. And generally, our customers aren't domain experts in the countries they're hiring, and that's why they count on us.”
The upgrades play to what has always been G-P’s comparative advantage. The business was built on taking the pain out of hiring and engaging talent in remote markets where a client doesn’t necessarily have a local subsidiary on the ground.
“This technology allows us to do that seamlessly and extremely quickly,” said Cahill.
The candidates are delighted because they receive compliant contracts. "So it's a digital transaction, done and dusted, which is really fast,” he added.
Other new modules are in response to changes in the labor market, such as the growing prominence of contingent workers. Some workers do not fit into the traditional employment model and are not contractors in the traditional sense. The platform caters to the new arrangements between employers and employers.
“We have a separate module that allows our customers to mix and match between full-time employees and contingent workers,” said Cahill.
More work has also been done on integration so that the G-P platform can work with an organization’s already existing HR modules to help manage the workforce faster and better.
“There’s a recurring theme in all of what we have done, which is to minimize human friction and make our platform self-serve wherever possible,” said Cahill.
“If our customers can have a digital transaction that is quick, seamless, and efficient, they prefer to do it that way. And the integrations are helping our customers get a single view of their global workforces across many countries, meaning they don’t have to pull disparate data around to get to an understanding of that single view.”
Evolution of the cloud-native
All of these changes, said Cahill, are a maturing of a company born in the cloud and now moving out of adolescence.
“The internet and cloud allowed us to create this business model,” he said.
“What we do couldn’t have existed before because otherwise, it would have all been paper-based with lots of interactions with lawyers and accountants. We’ve always considered ourselves a technology company and are continuing to evolve our SaaS platform, but we also have HR specialists on the ground in the countries we serve.”
Ten years on, the difference between Globalization Partners and the new G-P is that while technology is at the root of everything, the service approach is “technology when you want it, but humans when you need them.”
The near-term future also promises more technological innovation.
“You think about blockchain and smart contracts and where that’s going, and I think that’ll be a big part of all HR data,’ said Cahill.
“HR data and privacy are huge opportunities for our sector, and we’ll continue to look at those things and evolve our platform to keep up what we think is a leading position in our market.”
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Grafner