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by e12e 3818 days ago
OT: Why the USA, Canada and UK only - and not EU/EEC as well (or at least other Commonwealth contries, but maybe that's not a (tax/business)thing any more..?) [Ed: Or does UK really mean anyone with the right to work in/through the UK, and not anyone actually in the UK?]
1 comments
grayfox 3818 days ago
We were acquired by IBM last year. As we adjust to their HR systems, we have to limit our hiring range.

Each region needs to have a "proxy" manager to take care of the employees within that region. As we had Canadians and folks from London with us at the time of the acquisition, we were set-up respectively.

We hired an excellent engineer out of Germany before we were clear on the processes, and it's added a significant amount of time to getting him into the the swing of things.

To avoid this discomfort, we're narrowing the region.

Hopefully, this is something that will ease in the future - it stings every time we have to turn away someone potentially brilliant from places like Brazil or Israel.

For your edit: The former is correct. Anyone with the right to work in/through the UK. You can work _from_ anywhere you'd like! I prefer at home in my jammies.

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e12e 3817 days ago
Thank you for your reply. But I'm a little confused (perhaps the EU/EEC labour marked is more complicated than I thought (or your German hire wasn't a German citizen?): Surely a German is entitled to work in the UK?

Would you need/want EU hires to relocate physically to the UK - and if so, why? (Seeing as you're remote-first anyway)?

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mrkurt 3817 days ago
This is mostly an IBM process problem. Employees need to have "in country managers". We didn't have anyone in Germany, thus we had to scare someone up to have the new person report to on paper despite working with us. IBM itself can hire in basically any country, but for a lot of really irritating and well entrenched reasons, we're further limited by internal org structure and finance.

In theory, had the person relocated to the UK it would have been easier because we do have in country managers that know what we're up to there.

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