A message we get quite a lot, always from the employee rather than the company:
“My future employer wants to hire me but has no legal entity in the country I live in. He told me to look at something called an EOR. Where do I start?”
Short version of what is happening. Your future employer wants you, but they have no company registered where you live, so they cannot legally put you on a payroll there. An Employer of Record is a company that already is registered in your country. It hires you on a local employment contract, runs your payroll, pays your taxes and social contributions, and invoices your employer for all of it. You work for your employer every day. On paper, someone else employs you.
That is a normal and legal structure in most of Europe. It is also one where the person with the least information in the room is usually you.
Do not start by reading about EORs. Start with a name.
Twenty articles explaining what an Employer of Record is will not move you forward. You already know what it is, roughly: a company that can legally employ you where you live and invoice your employer for it. What you need now is a shortlist and a way to tell the good ones from the rest.
The useful part of this situation is that you are the one doing the searching. Your employer has handed you the criteria by default, which almost never happens. So set them properly.
When you contact a provider, the first question is not about price, because your employer pays that anyway. It is this:
Which legal entity will sign my employment contract, and is it yours?
Ask for the registered company name and its registration number. The answer separates the market in one move.
Some providers own an entity in your country and employ you directly. Others sell a long list of countries, hold entities in only some of them, and subcontract the rest to a local partner company. In that case the partner becomes your legal employer, and the name on your contract will be a company nobody mentioned during the sales calls. That is not automatically bad, but you are entitled to know how many parties sit between you and your payslip before you agree to anything.
Ask it in your first email. A provider that answers plainly in one line is a good sign. A provider that redirects you to a features page is telling you something too.
Once you have the entity name, spend twenty minutes doing what nobody expects a candidate to do.
Check the national business registry. Is the entity registered in your country, when was it incorporated, and does it file accounts? A company set up four months ago with no filing history is a different proposition to one that has been running payroll for years.
Check LinkedIn. Does anyone work there locally? An HR person, a payroll person, someone who speaks your language. Or is the entire team three time zones away in a sales function.
Search the provider’s name next to words like payslip, late payment, termination, registration. Client reviews are easy to find, because providers publish them. Employee reviews are the ones worth reading.
Message two people who list that company as their employer. Most will reply. That single step will tell you more than any brochure or pricing page.
Ten questions worth asking before you sign
- Is my contract governed by local labour law, and is it indefinite or fixed term? If it is fixed term, ask why. Most European countries limit both the duration and the number of renewals, and a fixed term contract offered without an objective reason is often the first sign of a provider cutting corners.
- What happens to me if my employer cancels its agreement with you? This is the one people skip and later regret. The commercial contract between your employer and the provider usually has a short notice period. Your employment contract does not work that way. Ask them to walk you through it out loud, step by step.
- Am I registered with the state pension and health system from day one, and can I verify it myself? In most countries you can. Do it after your first month, not after your first year.
- Show me a gross to net breakdown, or a sample payslip. Then ask who explains it to you when something changes.
- Which parts of my package sit in the employment contract, and which are promises from the client? Bonus, equity, extra leave, home office budget, learning allowance. If it lives in a side letter rather than the contract, you want to know that before you accept, not eighteen months later.
- If I receive equity, who reports the tax and when? Vesting and exercise can both create obligations. Ask during onboarding, not after the grant.
- Who do I call for sick leave, holiday approval, parental leave, or a bank asking for proof of employment for a mortgage? A named person, or a ticket queue.
- What do the non-compete and IP clauses say, and are they enforceable here? Some countries require the employer to pay you throughout a non-compete period. Others void the clause entirely if certain conditions are missing.
- If my employer opens its own company here in two years, what happens to me? Is there a transfer path, and does my accrued service carry across.
- Which language is the contract in? If your country requires a version in the local language, you want both, and you want them to say the same thing.
Red flags
Being asked to invoice as a freelancer “just for the first few months while we sort the entity out”. Misclassification starts as your employer’s problem and becomes yours the moment somebody audits it.
A contract under foreign law for work you perform entirely in your own country.
Vague answers about termination, especially the phrase “at will”, which does not exist in most of Europe.
Salary paid from abroad into your personal account with nothing reported locally.
A provider that cannot immediately name the entity that employs you.
An hour with a local employment lawyer costs less than most people assume, and reading a draft contract is exactly the kind of thing they do quickly.
Global EOR platform or local EOR provider: the difference nobody explains to candidates
A global EOR platform sells a long country list. In many of those countries it does not own an entity, so it subcontracts to a local company, and that local company becomes your legal employer. That gives you four parties: you, the local partner, the platform, and your employer. Two of them you have never heard of. Your employer gets a clean dashboard. You get a support ticket, a time zone gap, and a generalist reading a script when you ask about local sick leave rules.
A local EOR provider is registered in the country you actually live in and employs you directly. Shorter chain, fewer handoffs. Someone who speaks the language, knows which institution to call, and can physically go there. They answer during your working hours because they live in your hours.
The trade-off is that local providers are harder to find, and that is a marketing budget story rather than a quality one. The global platforms own page one of Google in every language and every market. So go to page two and three. Search in your own language rather than in English. Try the local terms for payroll outsourcing and employment agency, add your city. Look for companies licensed for that activity in the national registry. Ask in local professional groups.
In this case you are the one running the shortlist, which puts you in an unusually strong position. If you come back to your employer with a local provider that is cheaper, faster to onboard and physically present in your country, that is a straightforward recommendation to accept. Even where the employer has already chosen a platform, plenty of them switch once someone shows them the local option actually exists.
If the country is Croatia or Serbia
We run employment in both markets as the direct legal employer, with our own registrations, so this is the part we see up close.
Verify your own registration. You do not need anyone’s permission.
In Croatia, log into e-Građani, open the Rad category, and request the Elektronički zapis o radno pravnom statusu (e-radna knjižica). It lists every registration and deregistration held by HZMO, and it arrives by email in seconds. In Serbia, you can check your registration directly on the CROSO portal. Do this after your first month.
We say this because we have been called in to clean up the aftermath of a Croatian provider that took the client’s money and never registered the employee at all. From the employee’s side, everything looked normal: a signed contract, a monthly transfer, a payslip PDF. The problem only surfaces later, when someone needs proof of pension service or a bank asks for it. Two minutes on e-Građani would have caught it in month one.
Fixed term contracts in Croatia are more restricted than most foreign employers realise. Under the Labour Act, a fixed term contract requires an objective reason stated in the contract, cannot exceed three years, and you can be given a maximum of three consecutive fixed term contracts with the same employer within that period. Separately, once you have worked six months and completed any probation, you have the right to ask for an indefinite contract, and the employer must give you a reasoned written answer within 30 days.
A Croatian non-compete costs your employer money. It is only valid if your salary at signing is at or above the Croatian average, it cannot run longer than two years after termination, and it binds you only if the employer has contractually committed to paying you compensation of at least half your average salary from the three months before you left. If the clause in front of you takes the restriction but skips the payment, you are looking at a template somebody copied, and it is worth saying so before you sign.
In Serbia, registration must happen before your first working day. The single registration through CROSO has to be filed at the latest before the employee starts work, not within a few days after. A provider that treats the start date as something to tidy up retroactively is telling you what the rest of the year will look like.
The mistake we see most often from the employer side, and it lands on the candidate as a withdrawn offer: budgeting against the net salary. The real cost of employing someone in Croatia or Serbia sits above the gross, not above the net, and the gap is large enough to change a hiring decision. If your future employer quotes you a number and then goes quiet for two weeks, that gap is usually why. Asking for a gross figure early saves everyone the awkward conversation.
If you are being hired in Croatia or Serbia and want a second pair of eyes on the contract before you sign, send it over. No pitch attached, and no obligation to use us. We would rather the market had fewer horror stories in it.
FAQ
Is an Employer of Record legal? Yes, in most countries, including Croatia and Serbia. The EOR is a properly registered local employer that hires you under local labour law and meets the same obligations as any other employer.
Who is my real boss under an EOR? Your day to day manager works for the client company. Your legal employer is the EOR, and it is the EOR that signs your contract, runs payroll, and files your registrations.
Do I lose employee rights if I am hired through an EOR? No. You hold the same statutory rights as any other employee in that country: notice, leave, sick pay, parental leave, pension and health coverage. What changes is which company those rights sit against.
Can I check whether I am really registered? Yes. In Croatia, through the e-radna knjižica in e-Građani. In Serbia, through the CROSO portal. Do it yourself and do it early.
What if my employer later opens a company in my country? This is common and usually planned for. Ask before signing whether your contract can be transferred and whether your accrued service carries over.
