The Corporate IT years
The serious part of my career started in the mid 1980's at Volmac, the Dutch market leading corporate ICT consulting firm that later merged into Cap Gemini. Initially worked as developer / designer / technical expert in certain technological domains at client projects in the food-, energy-, utilities-, electronics industries. Next to that, I spent extensive time at Volmac's 'TopTraining' ICT education centre, where I co-developed, hosted and tought a variety of elements of their corporate ICT-focused training curriculum. Not just in Netherlands, but also in surrounding countries. At the time of the merger of Volmac into Cap Gemini, my technical and managerial specialisation made me an ideal candidate to continue my career from the early 1990's at German large system software publisher Software AG, where I started up their Dutch consulting services division. This brought me to work in even more north-west-european countries, adopting to more different business cultures and practices.
The Bridging Years
In 1999 I was approached by a large ICT outsourcing solutions organisation from a far away continent, that was seeking a candidate to help them enter the west-european market. My experience and network in their target market for corporate ICT technology services, combined with my typical Dutch multi language skills, apparently made me their candidate of choice. Interestingly, my first task for them was to help them employ ..... MYSELF! In those years, the concept of EOR was yet to be conceived and born for another 15 years or so. And no alternative solutions were in sight either. Hence one of my first tasks was to setup and register their local legal footprint in the target countries. Including all tasks required to get a company ready to be able to employ locally. Even to employ myself and pay myself a salary every month. My business targets were based on finding as many ICT projects as possible at North-West European corporates, ready for outsourcing to software factories in South Asia. However, the demand I found in my network and during my marketing efforts, came mostly from corporates and multinationals having serious projects, but wanting their teams centralized 'next door' in their European offices. So yes they needed the talent, but wanted it to work integrated in their Europe-based teams. Hence, the need to learn about and to develop practices for labour migration from India to Europe arose, and I had to become a specialist in highly skilled expat migration. Remember, these were the years well before local and EU governments recognized the growing high-tech skills shortages, with no EU Bluecard- or Highly Skilled Migrant-fasttrack solutions in sight for years to come. So procedures for workpermits, visas, residence permits, dependent family member reunion were cumbersome and full of red tape. Forcing me even at some point, to sue the Dutch government's foreign office, on a case of a specialist that got a workpermit in a record time of 10 days (because the demand for his skills by the client were a no-brainer for the labour authority), who subsequently would have to wait for a visa for 6 months due to the Consulate's visa process.... A case we indeed won. However, whilst by 2001 my work for that employer was starting to become truly succesfull, that year brought major change to the world. My Indian employer got heavily hit by the dot.com crisis / Silicon vally collapse early in the year already, and decided to implement cost-cutting by terminating their expensive native EU workers. They did so however, without respecting correct procedures for that as per local employment law. As a result we landed in court, and ultimately they had to pay the price for that. Only many years later, my daughter (and now successor as CEO of Parakar) Pleun made me wonder whether the experience of those 2 years, in a freudian way contributed to what I've tried to achieve with Parakar in the subsequent 25 years.
The Pre-EOR years
So 2001, with both the dot.com bubble bursting and the additional 9/11 events shocking the world and global economy, was not a great year to become unemployed when having an ICT services/solutions background. But, what I had learned in the above 2 bridge-years, was that the global demand for highly skilled talent would perhaps stall only for a moment, but would not go away for long. And that the supply-side of talent for that market (companies in tech powerhouse countries such as India), had and would keep a huge need for 'human logistic' support in the foreseeable future. Hence the concept of Parakar (in its then purposefull form) was born. Parakar, for around the next 15 years, became a successfull umbrella company for expat workers, helping organisations and individuals bring their global talent to Europe. Parakar would sponsor their workpermit, host their employment, support their housing, organize their family reunion, taking care of compliance with all local requirements in terms of immigration, labour law, taxes, social context, insurances, and more...... Services that over time became a lot easier to provide by the way: As a spin-off from sueing Dutch government as mentioned before, that same Dutch government invited me to contribute to a project together with a number of Dutch multinationals, on improving the Dutch immigration process for highly skilled talent and corporate executives. A project that ultimately resulted in the Dutch Government's 'Orange Carpet Service' for visa services, it's famous regional 'Expat Centers', and the still famous Dutch HSM (Highly Skilled Migrant) residence permit system. A system of which Parakar became one of the very first certified utilisers. Long before by 2008 the EU instituted the EU Bluecard on somewhat similar basis.
The Early EOR years
It took till 2014/2015, for a next major development affecting the world of global employment solutions. Although in some countries the concept of domestic Umbrella Service companies was seriously developed (in UK it was a known concept, France had its Portage model, Netherlands had its concept of 'payroll companies', the US had its 'PEO-model'), most umbrella service companies had an expat-focus: hosting expats on a local payroll so that they could compliantly work in-country, for local employers / on local projects. In the mid 2010's however, a number of bright minds, started wondering if these umbrella companies could also allow foreign companies to employ local nationals via their in-country payrolls. A line of thought that in practice, resulted in the true concept of Global EOR. Given its experience with Employment Hosting for Expats for the previous 15 years, Parakar was perfectly capable to answer 'yes, we can' to the question in the previous paragraph. And from there, our EOR services have not stopped growing for the next 10 years. From 2015-2019 in a fairly manageable way. For as much you can claim that tenfolding a business volume in 4 years time is manageable.
The EOR Explosion years
The year 2020 however brought a huge change to that already impressive growth the EOR industry was taking. In the early weeks of 2020 the world, including that of EOR, held its breath, wondering and fearing how the COvid '19 pandemic would impact the world of global work. Few probably would have predicted, that the pandemic would cause the global EOR market to explode. The causes for that explosion? On the one side demand for EOR grew, as it enabled repatriated expat workers (that could not go back to work as COVID forced their employers to close their offices) to keep working remotely for their foreign employers, from their home country. But even more, since the Covid crisis boosted the world's capabilities for remote work. The technology of ZOOM and TEAMs, allowed teams to work fully remote. A fact which in essence took away the borders from the global employment world. Companies experienced they did not need to have their talent in or nearby their offices, but could work with whole teams working remotely from home. Which in turn gave them the option to recruit not just in their local surroundings, but could use the whole world as their recruitment hunting ground. Not just for the talent they could not find locally. But also very much so to reach far-away markets they could not reach before without going there themselves. They just needed ....... an infrastructure service (EOR) that could help them employ their staff in the country/location they lived and worked.
EOR 'coming of age'
For the whole of the EOR industry, the end of the Covid '19 pandemic, also brought somewhat of a halt or slowdown to the huge market-pull on EOR services the way it existed in the preceding 2 years. The world was open again, and - -
The 'What Next' for EOR
Which brings us to today's era.