Reimagining Global HR Management: How People Leaders Can Drive Smarter Business Expansion 

When your CEO starts talking about international expansion, the conversation will probably center on one thing: total addressable market.  

How big is the opportunity? What’s the revenue potential? How does this affect our valuation?  

These are important questions, driven by investor expectations and board priorities. The market size looks attractive, the business case seems solid, and momentum builds quickly. 

But here’s what often gets overlooked when you’re looking to grow your market presence : the practical question of how you’ll actually execute in that market. Can you hire the people you need there? Does that talent even exist in the location you’re targeting? What will it cost, and how long will it take?  

These aren’t just implementation details to figure out later. They’re strategic questions that determine whether the entire initiative can succeed. 

This is where HR leaders have a genuine opportunity to add strategic value.  

By bringing talent intelligence into the conversation early, you can help leadership make more informed decisions about where to expand, how to structure operations, and whether alternative approaches might better achieve business objectives.  

How global expansion is changing 

To understand why HR’s role has become more strategic, it helps to see how global expansion itself has fundamentally evolved over the past decade. 

For many years, companies expanded internationally for one primary reason: to reach new customers. You went where the markets were. If you wanted to grow your business in Southeast Asia, you established presence there, built sales teams, and served local customers. The total addressable market framework made sense because you were literally going after addressable markets. 

Employment complexity was part of that equation, certainly. You needed to hire people in those markets, navigate local regulations, and build HR infrastructure.  

But those challenges were essentially costs you absorbed to get market access. The strategic question was about customers, and talent was how you served them. 

Two major shifts have changed this equation in ways that create new opportunities for strategic thinking. 

The rise of economic nationalism 

For years, many business leaders assumed national rules and regulations would gradually converge toward global standards, making expansion progressively easier.  

Instead, the opposite has happened. Countries are asserting more regulatory sovereignty and creating more divergence, not less.  

This makes the traditional approach of establishing market presence to serve local customers both more expensive and more complex than it was even five years ago. 

Economic nationalism has made traditional market expansion significantly more complex. Tariffs are the visible part, but the real friction comes from regulatory barriers. Countries are creating more distinct compliance requirements, divergent standards, and local rules that don’t align across jurisdictions.  

Tech solutions enabling closer cross-border collaboration 

At the same time, technology has genuinely transformed how companies can access talent globally. The collaboration tools we have now mean that a specialized engineer in Tel Aviv or a data scientist in Singapore can contribute as effectively as someone in your headquarters.  

Video conferencing, shared development environments, and project management platforms have made distributed teams genuinely productive rather than just theoretically possible. 

This creates an interesting asymmetry. It’s harder than ever to expand into new markets for customer access, but easier than ever to access specialized talent wherever it exists globally. Many companies have recognized this shift and are now going global primarily to find people, not customers.  

Think of it like this. You’re not expanding to Tokyo to serve Japanese customers. You’re expanding there because that’s where the robotics engineer you desperately need happens to live. 

How the best HR leaders manage global expansion

Lee Burrow, Chief People Officer at TopSource, explains the 3 key ways that HR leaders can play a pivotal role in boosting their company’s global growth

• Get expert compliance advice early to avoid frustration and stay aligned with local regulations.

• Balance localization and globalization to build a cohesive, adaptable culture.

• Adapt HR and people practices—from policies to engagement surveys—to different cultural settings for lasting success.

Read the full ebook

 

Why it’s time to rethink your global HR strategy 

The changing nature of globalization creates a fundamentally different problem – and create  

When companies expand for market access, the questions leadership naturally asks are market focused.  

How big is this market? What’s our path to market share? Who are the competitors? What’s the revenue opportunity? These are the right questions if your goal is serving customers in that geography. 

But if your actual strategic goal is accessing specialized talent, which increasingly it should be, you need to be asking different questions.  

What specialized skills do we need that we can’t find domestically? Where in the world does that expertise concentrate?  

Can we actually hire those people in that location? What’s the most efficient employment structure to access them without building full market operations? 

Here’s a concrete example of how this plays out. Say your CEO wants to expand into Japan because it represents a large market for your product. The TAM analysis looks compelling. But when you dig into the talent landscape, you discover that the specialized engineers you need are extremely difficult to hire in Japan.  

They’re in high demand, prefer working for domestic companies, and command premium compensation. Even if you can hire them, the timeline is eighteen months, not six.  

Conversely, you might find that the AI capabilities your company needs to build actually concentrate in Israel, not in the Southeast Asian market the CEO is considering.  

You can access that talent through targeted hiring in Tel Aviv without needing to establish market presence, and you can do it faster and more cost-effectively.  

The result? You’ve achieved your business objective, but thanks to HR’s buy-in, you’ve used a talent-focused approach rather than a market-focused one. 

This is where HR leaders can genuinely shape strategic thinking – by ensuring talent reality informs decisions before resources get committed. 

How can HR managers bring their expertise to the table? 

The specialist knowledge required for international employment has always been important. But the changing nature of globalization means HR leaders have a chance to deliver value like never before.  

Understanding entity structures, navigating compliance requirements, managing local HR infrastructure, these have been part of global operations for as long as companies have expanded internationally. Any CEO who opened an office in Tokyo or Singapore needed to solve these challenges. 

In the traditional model, employment was one component of a larger market footprint. The strategic decision was about market entry, and HR expertise came into play during execution. 

In the emerging model, you might need to employ five specialized engineers in three different countries where you have zero intention of selling products or establishing market operations.  

Suddenly you’re not building market infrastructure. You’re trying to access specific capabilities as efficiently as possible. 

This makes the choice between setting up full entities, using employer of record arrangements, or structuring contractor relationships strategically important in new ways.  

An EOR arrangement might let you access talent in Tel Aviv within weeks rather than months, without the overhead of entity setup. Or you might find that strategic outsourcing achieves your capability objectives more efficiently than employment altogether. 

These aren’t just implementation details anymore. They’re strategic choices that affect speed to capability, cost structure, and organizational complexity. And they need to be part of the decision conversation, not afterthoughts once the expansion decision is made. 

How to design an HR-driven global expansion strategy 

When your CEO starts exploring international expansion, here’s how you can contribute strategically rather than just operationally. Think of this as a framework for bringing talent intelligence into strategic conversations in ways that help leadership make better decisions. 

Step 1: Gather talent intelligence before entering a market 

The first step is gathering talent intelligence before market entry decisions get made. When leadership starts talking about expanding into a new market, your immediate priority should be understanding the talent landscape there. Does the talent your company needs actually exist in this market? 

This poses other questions. What’s the competitive landscape for that talent? Are you competing with tech giants who can outbid you, or are there cultural factors that make foreign companies less attractive employers? 

 What’s the realistic cost and timeline? Don’t just focus on pure market data: ask yourself what it will take to hire and onboard the people you need.  

Step 2: Evaluate the cost of talent acquisition 

The typical TAM analysis focuses on market size and revenue potential. You can add tremendous value by building frameworks that layer in the cost of acquisition. 

•  Be realistic about the timeline to build the team required.  

•  Understand employment structure costs, whether that’s entity setup expenses, employer of record fees, or compliance overheads.  

• Account for risk factors like potential regulatory changes or compliance exposure. 

Step 3: Use your talent insights to rethink business objectives 

This is where you help leadership see connections they might otherwise miss.  

If the business objective is accelerating your company’s AI capabilities, your talent intelligence might reveal that the AI researchers you need concentrate in Tel Aviv or Montreal, not in the Southeast Asian market under consideration.  

Alternative employment models like EOR mean you can access that talent without building market presence; indeed the ROI might be greater because you avoid the overhead of full market operations.  

Plus, you might get the capability faster because you’re not building infrastructure. You’re showing that the business objective can be achieved, potentially more effectively, through a talent-focused strategy rather than a market-focused one. 

Step 4:  Define your strategic alternatives 

With talent insights and different employment models in hand, you’re almost ready to present leadership with options they can evaluate properly.  

But before you do, you’re going to need to map the different employment models onto your existing HR strategy.  

Let’s look at an example.  

Setting up a full entity might make sense if you’re employing fifteen or more people or establishing genuine market presence. It has higher setup cost and compliance overhead, but provides more control.  

By contrast an employer of record arrangement might be more efficient for accessing specific talent, perhaps five to ten people, without market operations. It offers lower overhead, faster setup, and less complexity.  

Whatever option you take, you’ll need to draw up a strategy that includes  

• Cost structure 

• Timelines 

• Localised compliance considerations,  

• Wider HR, payroll or operational considerations 

• How your chosen route of expansion maps to the business objectives.  

You’re not making the decision for leadership, but you’re ensuring they can make informed choices when the time comes.  

Step 5: Present your strategy your C-suite 

If  you’ve done all the work we’ve outlined above, you’re ready to present your findings to your C-suite.  

Your presentation to the C-suite should cover:  

• The business objective you’re trying to achieve  

• The current talent landscape in key markets, with salary benchmarks and an analysis of supply and demand 

• Your recommended expansion strategy, with clear rationale,  

• An implementation plan including timeline, resources and key risks in-market.  

• Success metrics so everyone knows how you’ll measure whether this is working (these will typically ensure time to hire, cost per hire and whether you’re getting the capabilities you need.  

How HR leaders can enable truly cost-efficient global growth 

The companies that will succeed in global expansion are recognizing the fundamental shift from market-seeking to talent-seeking strategies.  

Within those companies, it’s often HR leadership that has the clearest view of this shift because you understand both where capabilities exist globally and what it takes to access them practically. When leadership is thinking about total addressable market without considering talent accessibility, you can help them see the complete picture.  

When they’re excited about market size, but lack understanding of hiring timelines or employment complexity, you can provide the reality check that prevents expensive mistakes.  

When they want to adopt the traditional approach of entity setup and market presence, you can introduce alternatives that might achieve objectives more efficiently. 

The CEO who thinks only about TAM expansion will make decisions that prove difficult to execute. The CEO who integrates HR’s strategic guidance will have the tools to build a truly sustainable global expansion strategy.  

It’s the difference between reacting to a strategy and shaping it. This is how HR leaders can deliver smarter global growth.