Deel's Growth From Global Hiring

This was the moment global hiring changed from an edge case into a default operating model for startups. Before 2020, hiring abroad usually meant opening a foreign entity, paying an EOR to employ whole teams, or wiring contractors one by one through tools like PayPal or Wise. COVID made distributed work normal, while rising U.S. labor and health benefit costs made domestic hires more expensive, so platforms like Deel turned international hiring into a much cheaper, faster workflow.

• The old options were slow or expensive. Globalization Partners and Velocity Global helped companies employ people abroad, but that model was built for whole teams and came with service heavy economics. Deel's contractor first flow let companies hire core contributors quickly, often before they ever set up local entities.
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• The real product shift was turning messy contractor payments into payroll software. Instead of spreadsheets, tax forms, invoices, and local payout logistics scattered across tools, global payroll platforms bundled compliant contracts, onboarding, recordkeeping, and local currency payouts into one dashboard.
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• The cost gap was large enough to change behavior. In 2020, average family employer health premiums were above $21,000, and BLS put employer health insurance costs at $2.73 per hour worked in private industry. That made contractor based international hiring materially cheaper for many roles, especially for startups scaling fast.
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Going forward, the winners in payroll will be the companies that make employment type feel secondary. Global contractor pay, EOR, and domestic payroll are converging into one system of record, which is why Deel, Rippling, Gusto, and newer specialists are all expanding toward the same borderless HR and payroll stack.