Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: If you think about HCMS today, they were most of the time built for one use case, which was, hey, I want to help this company run their business, I want to help them scale in the country. And to some extent we did the same. It's just for another use case, help you go global. So by design, our use case was global. So we had to learn how to build the muscle to do this right.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Welcome to a new episode of the what Works podcast series. Today we're diving into the complexities and opportunities of global hiring with Alex Bouaziz, CEO of Deal. In this episode, Alex shares his insights on navigating the diverse legal and cultural landscapes that come with hiring talent across borders. We'll explore how companies can effectively integrate global talent into their workforce, ensuring compliance and fostering a seamless experience for both employers and employees. Let's take a listen.
[00:00:58] Speaker C: Alex, welcome to the what Works podcast.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Hey, thank you so much. Super excited to be here.
[00:01:04] Speaker C: So, before we jump into who Deal is, tell us who Alex is.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: So, grew up in Paris and most of my life lived abroad. So spend some time in Israel, in the us, in the uk, in a few other countries, mainly for school at the time. But throughout my career, I met a lot of amazing people and realize how big the world is and how a lot of people don't get the opportunities that we all want because they sometimes were not at the right location. Which kind of drove us to build dill, which we're going to talk about today. And I'm an environmental engineer that fell into payroll and hr.
[00:01:38] Speaker C: Wow. So tell us about that.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Throughout meeting all of those amazing people in my life, when I went back home, we kind of faced the same problem but from different angles, which was, you know, my best friends were from Albania and Croatia, coming out of really nice engineering schools, could not stay and work in the us, had to go back home and couldn't really work for the companies that they wanted to. And similarly, you know, Sho built her first company in China, and hiring people outside of China was very complicated when the HQ was there. So combining those two infrastructure and these two ideas of, hey, how do we help people work for the best companies in the world? How do we help companies, regardless of location, hire the best people in the world? How do you build infrastructure so that a company can seamlessly, compliantly, and whilst giving an amazing experience, hire people around the world and bring the best talent to them?
[00:02:25] Speaker C: I know everybody who is listening in probably can relate to that problem. We are not a big company, but we have people all over the world as, as you said too. And so we have people in Greece and we have people in the Netherlands with people in India and of course in the US and Canada and Australia and kind of around the world. And it's challenging, especially for smaller companies, but even for big companies, I mean, I've worked for very big companies to expand into a new country.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: The very early permissive deal kind of came about how to help the companies hire the best people in the world. And then from that we grew a lot. And one of the things that's very interesting about deal is we're only five and a half years old but had pretty decent growth.
[00:03:06] Speaker D: You've had such phenomenal growth in your company. You are now 4,500 employees. You are in over 100 countries and in a very short time. So how have you grown so quickly in such a short time?
[00:03:19] Speaker E: Yeah, I think it's a pretty, it's a pretty loaded question. First of all, I would take, you know, the culture of the company, you know, the culture of the company is very centered around our principles. We really genuinely care about our customers. We want to move and we want to build really fast. And that helped us and guide us a lot in terms of the product we built, which led to how generally the company grew. It always been very driven by our customers. And what I mean by that is we didn't just build products, right? We build products while talking to our customers. And if you think about how we build products and the journey of deal as a company in terms of the suite of products that kind of came one after the other, then you can really see a site, you can really see how our customers guided us. And what I mean by that is we started as a contractor management platform and then our customers came to us and said, but we want to hire people as employees in different countries. So we built our employee off record platform and then, you know, eventually they wanted to be employed and running on their own entity. So we started building a payroll infrastructure and then we realized everybody was there, so we started building an HR infrastructure. So the way we kind of work with our customers has always been what really drove us forward.
[00:04:29] Speaker C: So how do you do this? How do you simplify this?
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I'm an engineer by background, like we were saying, and so is my co founder. So, you know, building process, building solutions and technology is really what we were born with, right? It's what we know. And this is how we, this is how we see the world. But at the same time, you know, one of the amazing Realization we had through building payroll infrastructure and HR infrastructure is how needed the people are as well. Because when you're entering a new country, you know, like building an engine in Korea, like you need to understand the law, you need to understand compliance, you need to understand payroll and bridging those two things so that we have the in house experts, we have the compliance internally, but at the same time bringing the smartest people in the world to build the technology that goes with that is really, that has always been our focus. I think one thing is if you think about HCMS today, they were most of the time built for one use case which was, hey, I want to help this company run their business, I want to help them scale in the country. And to some extent we did the same. It's just we thought for another use case, we thought I want to help you go global. So by design, you know, when most companies are always focused on one country, one very unique use case, we had the same. It's just our use case was global. So we had to learn how to build the muscle to do this. Right. And we got a little lucky in the way that, you know, we also solved our own problems. Right. Because if you think about it, everything about deal solves what we need which is, you know, 4,500 people company across 105 locations. We got to do it right for ourselves. Right.
[00:06:05] Speaker C: So you're the customer zero of your like with, with your company. Right.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: You know, it's a blessing and a curse. One of the things we've been very lucky at the company is being able to hire the best talent because we can tap into any talent. We get the best, best people in the world. Right. So building the right tool so that their peers, their neighbors, their family are able to work for great companies after that really aligns everyone into one mission which has really helped us in the delivery and the growth. Right. Like if you really believe what you want in what you want to achieve, then you know, you move significantly faster.
[00:06:38] Speaker C: Yeah. So I think this is so great.
Where do you see yourself fit in this like HR tech infrastructure?
[00:06:48] Speaker A: You know, the way I look at it is obviously we started as a NEO provider, right? It's really where we got started and it's where we've quote unquote, kind of like taken the market by storm in terms of the experience that we wanted to provide in that customer obsession. But if you think about us today, we do significantly more than that. Right. We are able to provide you a full stack HTM solution that's very Geared towards international like if you go until today, you'll be able to set up time off policies for all of your employees in any countries under your entity and you'll be able to literally start and run payroll in any country countries you'll be to more able to ship laptops thanks to DLIT in any of the different countries that your teams are right or at the same time to more you can decide I want to run, you know, a learning course, a performance review where we understand whether or not you know this type of question you should be asking within that country based on the different laws that you have. So you know one customer I love talking about is Klarna. So Klarna, maybe you know them, they're pretty. At some point they were the largest private company in Europe and we really helped them reshape their full ecosystem. When we started working with them, they had over a hundred people on the payroll HR side. They had 50, 60 plus different vendors that they were using for payroll, for HR, for EOR, for contractors, subcontractors. They had this beautiful infrastructure that really needed some taken care of and we really worked with them into reshaping a lot of that where bridging AI, which they've worked really heavily on. And they're very, very talented at with bringing the Dell platform as an underlying infrastructure for them to be able to scale. We've managed to reduce that to only be using the Dell platform for everything that they need. So I want to say that in the market where you work with a lot of the different companies out there, it's super important to one, have open APIs, be very friendly, let companies work with your system. If this is what the stack of the HR leader you're talking to or CFO is preferred and you make sure that you serve your customers. And as you build up your brand, as you build on more products, maybe there's more adoption or maybe they'll just keep using only one product.
[00:08:51] Speaker C: So you start with the EUR product and then people can expand from there. Or do you start in another area too?
[00:08:57] Speaker A: Whatever you want. You can start with performance reviews, you can start with sending one laptop in a country, you can start with one eor, you can start with payroll in Japan. Whatever you want. I'll have a solution for you.
[00:09:09] Speaker C: How do you stay up to date with all the changing laws, regulations, rules like all of that around the globe?
[00:09:17] Speaker A: I don't think there's a secret, there's a magic one to this. The truth is we have people internally whose job is to make sure, we stay compliant, whatever. We expand into a new country. We have a legal person in house, we've got an HR person in house, we've got a payroll person in house, multiple of them. As we grow into a country, most of the time we have a local cfo, we call them country finance managers, and they help us make sure that we stay compliant first, because something goes wrong, it's our responsibility. So by virtue of this, we invested very heavily into building the infrastructure so that we can from then not only make sure that we're always in the right, we're always at the edges of technology and of infrastructure from a compliance standpoint, and sometimes even maybe a little too much, because we roll out stuff much earlier than the law even comes into place, just to be on the safe side into being able to take that function and leverage it for all of the other things that we do for our customers, like global payroll, like HCM compliance, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:10:19] Speaker C: Let's talk a little bit about AI, because everybody wants to know what's the role of AI in general in your offering, but then also, how is generative AI changing anything?
[00:10:30] Speaker A: So, you know, when you're using generative AI today, you're reliant on OpenAI's knowledge base, what they're trained on. We actually built a team that works with our stakeholders locally to create all of the content internally, tens of thousands of articles so that we stay on top of compliance. And because we build that knowledge base, we're able to layer on top of this, you know, an OpenAI or clone or whatever technology to really understand the content we built, we wrote and start giving answers to our customers. And then beyond that, I think on the ACM side, there's so much you can do with generative AI. I mean, the idea of that you can query all of your data in a way that makes sense and kind of like brings everything together. Like we're working on some of those things. Imagine being able to say, you know, give all of the people that earn more than X are located in that country, did X and Y and Z courses on your learn on the learning platform, and at the same time outperform more than X interviews this year. Like the ability that you can have into querying that data and being able to actually generate interesting content around it and valuable content for you as a manager, for you as an HR team.
[00:11:36] Speaker C: Generative AI has been such a, such a game changer for many companies. We have our own generative AI assistant for our knowledge base, similar to how you Created your knowledge base. We've created our knowledge base of HR practices and leadership and learning and development and employee experience and you name it, basically how to do this with many, many examples. And now we put Generative AI on top of it and we call this Galileo. It's just fantastic because it really helps HR practitioners that are just trying to solve problems to ask about it in a natural way, in a conversational way, you could just say, well, I'm trying to hire somebody in Croatia and it's a software engineer with this kind of skill set. What should I think about? And then I think you could probably give them the answer and they could also ask Leo then saying, well, how do you generally engage software engineers? And then we say we have our knowledge base. Basically how you work on engagement, retention, specific of software engineers. Do you provide deal AI to all of your customers themselves or is it more for your internal people to support you? The customers?
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Both. Yeah, all our customers can just literally go on dill. There's a little button that says Deal AI and now it's coming more and more into your workflow. So you're going to see it more and more. And again, compliance is why we're here. And in building compliance within workflows, making sure you're on top of things, making sure you feel comfortable and that, you know, you just, I don't think set and forget is the right exact idea because I want you to know what you're doing when it comes to those things. But you know, to some extent the idea of like feeling like you have a trusted partner on this is what we want to do.
[00:13:28] Speaker E: And you know, I think insights at.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: The right timing thanks to Generative AI is going to help a lot.
[00:13:33] Speaker C: I know you're always acquiring companies, building and expanding your footprint. So where are you going to go next?
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Last year was a very intense year for us. We've done about 10 plus acquisitions in the last year. So integrating all of this into one platform takes quite a bit of work. And rebuilding all of the infrastructure inside of there has been really fun for us. Right now there's kind of like two strongs. The first from one is really making sure the experience of our customers is really great as you're onboarding throughout your product, but also across all of the ecosystem together so that things really work well for you and that you're able to really get those insights. You know, this is what we're talking about. The data and really things makes things work really well together has been a really fun challenge. So that's One thing I'm looking forward to diving more and more into this year, obviously doubling down on all of the AI investments we're doing, because it's just wonderful to be able to use such technology into helping our customers day to day.
[00:14:28] Speaker D: So you mentioned you're going to build a global payroll system. And I know this is super challenging. I mean, this is not an easy task. I know many companies have tried to do this and are trying to do this. What do you see as the challenges and how you're going to address them?
[00:14:43] Speaker E: Yeah, I think, you know, to answer this question, you kind of need to look at a couple things that Dale has always tried to do from the very beginning of the company. And when we started building products, I think one of the big revolution we brought to the EOR market was the idea that we wanted to own the full stack. So we went from, you know, a market that generally was an aggregator market of local vendors into going very deep in understanding and building internally. And what I mean by that is, you know, we opened entities everywhere. We hired in house, hr, finance, payroll, legal, in every single country. And you know, one of the things that Bill has been kind of known over the last few, few years for being very strong in M and A activities. One of the things we realized quite early on is payroll is something that you, you don't really just wake up one day and decide you're going to do payroll. It doesn't really work that way. There is real need for deep, deep, deep expertise of people that have understood the problem, delivered things at scale and saw it through every single lens possible. So we kind of started our journey and said, okay, what's the best way to get to that? Well, maybe let's see if there's a great company out there that could help us. And we talked to everyone and most of the solutions we saw were either single country solution, maybe a couple more, or there were aggregation of multiple engines, which meant the underlying infrastructure was never the ones that we dream of. The idea of having an engine that really works at scale across different countries until we met the base based team. And for context, the base based team is an amazing company based out of South Africa. Amazing founders that had been building to some extent exactly what we wanted for the last 15, 20 years with such incredible experience and, you know, similar to us actually they kind of grew organically because they started in South Africa and then realized, well, South Africa is a bit of a smaller market and if you operate in South Africa, you need to operate in other countries in Africa started Covering a significant amount of countries in Africa, where they become one of the best companies in the world, actually to if, if not the best to run payroll in Africa. And then decided similar to deal to start going global, started looking at Brazil, the uk, Dubai. So when we met them and we saw their underlying technology, we realized, well, you know, this is like a match made in heaven. Amazing experience. An engine that can already run in 45 plus countries. We need, right, we can justify the need of building the engines in other countries. Plus those guys know how to do this. We just need to augment their skills, bring them in house and start working with them into building, you know, that one engine to roll them all, right, like that one payroll engine to really roll them all. Which got us really excited. And this is really what we decided to do. And if you look at, since we've onboarded them since the acquisition, we already started working on adding four new payroll engines this year. And those guys, they know how to do this. I wish, maybe in a few years, but I wish I had the knowledge and the experience they have because they understand payroll in a way that, you know, that amazes me, right? Being able to do payroll for small companies, but for 50,000 plus people is something that, you know, we need to learn. At Dill, we're not at like, you know, we've tried to accomplish it, we're doing decently, but being able to execute the way they've done this is pretty incredible. So, you know, when we see the infrastructure that they have, when we see the resources that we have, when we see the need that we have in our customer base, going one layer deeper into not being a great tool that has, you know, the experts in house, aggregation in house, but being able to own the actual infrastructure, being as close to the metal as possible, being very close to the technology and building on top is, you know, what I think differentiates Deal in terms of what type of company we want it to be in 5, 10, 20 years.
[00:18:37] Speaker C: Just learned more about Deal and what you're doing it about yourself as well. So was a pleasure. Thank you.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:18:45] Speaker C: It was great.
[00:18:48] Speaker D: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the what Works podcast. I talked with Deal CEO Alex Buses about his vision to innovate globalization. Alex shared how Deal is building the infrastructure to enable companies to hire the best talent worldwide, regardless of their location. We also talked about his own journey to founding the company, what challenges and opportunities companies have when they're expanding globally, and the balancing act between compliance and employee experience. We also talked about how technology can transform the way organizations connect with talent globally. We hope you found this episode valuable and insightful. Stay tuned for more episodes where we explore innovative solutions and strategies in the world of work. Until next time, keep pushing the boundaries of what works.
