HR Tech Interview with Karen Ng, Regional Head of Expansion & Market Lead Hong Kong, Singapore, ASEAN, India at Deel

Journey into Tech

Hi Karen, Welcome to our Fintech Interview Series. Please tell us a little bit about your role and responsibilities in your current company. How did you arrive at Deel? 

As the Head of Expansion in Asia and Market Lead for Hong Kong, Singapore, ASEAN, India at Deel, I oversee the business’ development across Asia, Greater China and India, working closely with our in-market teams to drive Deel’s expansion strategy across the region.

Prior to joining Deel, I’ve taken on various leadership roles in organizations across the Tech and Hospitality industries. I experienced firsthand the challenges that come with managing and scaling globally distributed  teams – especially when it comes to navigating the complex and oftentimes confusing labor laws operating in different countries. It was only natural for me to jump on this exciting opportunity with Deel and put my experience to the test by helping organizations solve the most pressing HR challenges today through technology.

What is Deel and what are your core offerings? Which industries benefit from leveraging your platform?

The way we work is going global, with businesses hiring people distributed all over the world. But until now, no HR platform has been built with this workforce in mind – with the ability to handle everything, for everyone. From using different payroll software for every region to different platforms for international teams, background checks and direct employees – some teams have to piece together 16 different tools to make it work.

With that in mind, Deel, a global HR company, has built a comprehensive suite of HR solutions on our all-in-one platform, to simplify every aspect of managing a global team, from culture and onboarding, to local payroll and compliance.

Our four main products include:

• Deel Employer of Record (EOR) – An EOR service that helps our customers hire onboard, manage and pay employees on their behalf, compliantly and within minutes.
• Deel HR – The first global-first Human Resources Information System (HRIS) with everything needed to compliantly manage an entire global workforce–from local employees to international workers and everything in between. Deel HR is free for businesses with fewer than 200 employees – accruing ~$20k savings for companies.
• US Payroll – With automated payroll in Deel, companies can manage and pay global employees all in one place. Deel now covers 100+ countries with their own infrastructure and in-house payroll experts–no outsourcing or extra fees.
• Deel Engage – A set of HR Slack and Microsoft Teams plugins connected to Deel HR to help distributed teams build a stronger culture, increase team collaboration, manage time off request.

Any and every organization can reap the benefits of a cost-optimized and highly qualified international workforce by leveraging our solution, no matter which industry they operate in. These benefits are amplified in highly competitive industries such as Finance, Technology, and Sciences, where talent scarcity and increased workers’ demand in terms of package and work flexibility have exacerbated the hiring challenges in these sectors.

In fact, we’ve walked the talk by leveraging our own platform to expand globally. Today, we’re a $12bn business with 2000+ teammates across 100 countries, and have recently surpassed $295m in annual recurring revenue. We serve over 15,000 customers from SMBs to publicly traded companies,  and have seen many successfully and substantially bring down their hiring costs, leading to increased return on investment.

For the sake of our readers who could be new to the whole employment data analytics —please tell us how you collect and analyze data to identify workforce opportunities around the globe?

Deel’s 2023 State of Global Hiring report pulls together aggregated data from Deel’s 260k+ teammate contracts, 15,000+ customers across more than 160 countries, as well as over 500,000 data points from third-party sources including Microverse. All countries, states, and cities in the report have at least 50 worker contracts on file as of December 2022. For payments data, all countries have at least 100 worker withdrawals as of December 2022, and percent changes are reflective of new contracts signed.

Topics covered include what roles are in demand around the world, what countries are most popular for remote workers, how remote workers are getting paid, and how terminations are impacting the global talent pool.

What are the biggest challenges you found in your recently published “State of Global Hiring” report?

The global economic headwinds saw slowing economies with higher terminations and lower average salary across many markets. Global workers suffered a 107% increase in terminations in 2022 with the UK, Mexico, Spain, Portugal and the US recording the greatest percentage increase in terminations. Furthermore,  Nigeria, Mexico, Netherlands, US, and Argentina saw a decline in overall average starting salaries, with roles such as Accountants, Customer support, Consulting, Product, and Design roles recording the biggest salary decreases across new worker contracts globally.

However, it is heartening to see that while the outlook of the economy has dimmed, hiring across borders has continued to grow, far outpacing any downsizing trends. We’re seeing businesses double down on international hiring as a means to alleviate inflating talent costs while strengthening the competitiveness of their workforce. In fact, APAC companies hired globally at the fastest rate of all regions – with Australia, Singapore and India emerging as the top three countries by number of organizations hiring internationally.

At the same time, workers are also seeking more opportunities from global companies, an undertaking that is now easier thanks to global work solutions. In APAC, the top three countries by number of workers being hired are the Philippines, India, and Pakistan – with Software engineers, Sales, and Product roles emerging as the top three most popular roles.

How could CEOs and HR leaders take better control of their talent pool and reduce employee churn in the long run? How does Deel help organizations reduce employee churn? 

Employee churn can be a costly problem for business, as significant time and resources are invested in training an employee for the job. Beyond the sunk costs and inefficiencies as the employee upskills, the consistent departure of coworkers could also result in dampened employee morale.

McKinsey & Company found that leading factors of employee churn include: lack of career development and advancement (41%), uncaring and uninspiring leaders (34%), lack of meaningful work (31%), and unreliable and unsupportive people at work (26%), to name a few. This is particularly the case for remote employees who might not be physically located in the same office as their peers and encounter challenges in assimilating to the way of work at their organization.

That is why we’ve launched Deel Engage, a suite of employee engagement solutions that helps organizations build and maintain a stronger company culture, increase team collaboration, and reduce burnout through specially-designed plugins for distributed teams.

For instance, with our Connections plugin, remote teams can launch interest surveys based on common interests and kickstart conversations with each other. This creates more opportunities for virtual socializing and water cooler conversations that are instrumental in fostering genuine team relations and a sense of community.

To better understand and address employee’s concerns and career progression needs, managers can utilize the 1-on-1s plugin to schedule regular catch ups with employees. This can inform their employee management programs – be it chartering career development pathways that align to their employee’s career goals, carving more meaningful work for their roles, or establishing channels that help resolve workplace conflicts. The Pulse Surveys plugin can be deployed in tandem to monitor employee feedback on their job experience and satisfaction regularly, helping businesses to evolve their workplace policies to better address those needs.

Could you tell us more about your work at the Deel Lab? What are your immediate concerns that you would like all business leaders to address?

Deel Lab for Global Employment, Deel’s research and policy consortium, taps on our network of industry experts and respected academia, alongside Deel’s proprietary employment data and machine learning algorithm to help institutions better understand global employment policy, contribute to the policy discourse on rights for global workers, and explore ways to expand the reach of benefits reserved for traditional employees – such as healthcare, workplace insurance, compensation, and taxation.

What stood out in our State of Global Hiring Report was the observation that the global worker model remains resilient, and is evidently the preferred option for many organizations, even in uncertain economic times. Organizations seem to like the ability to hire from a wider talent pool at pay levels that accommodate the needs of their businesses. In fact, a new group of workers representing a key driving force for countries seeking economic growth has emerged – including Accountants, Therapists, Teachers and Lawyers, to name a few. Accordingly, there is a need for a global policy infrastructure to facilitate global hiring, but also to recognize the existence of this emerging workforce and formalize its legal status, along with universal workers’ rights and benefits.

Deel is committed to being a strong proponent for employee rights advocacy, and we’re deeply excited to be a part of this movement by contributing our expertise and technology.

Do you think AI augments workplace experience and employee engagement? 

Imagine this: A candidate has gone through multiple rounds of interviews before finally landing the job – only to discover they might not be the right fit for the company or role. The result is a disengaged or dissatisfied employee. The cost? Inefficiencies or underperformance, and in the worst cases, employee churn.

At Deel, we believe that employee experience and engagement are instrumental in ensuring that happy employees translate to happy (and productive) organizations. That starts with hiring the right people for the role.

By leveraging automation and AI, recruiters can better assess a candidate’s qualification and job fit by extracting and analyzing important information from a much broader range of sources beyond their resume and LinkedIn, and support accurate predictions of what skills a candidate has, regardless of whether they have specified them.

Additionally, AI provides near instant insights and predictions on employment market trends and movements across industries, functions and regions. Combining in-depth and up-to-date information on a candidate with accurate analysis of the current market trends can enable recruiters to make a truly accurate assessment.

AI can also be applied to the candidate assessment process by using increasingly intelligent algorithms to provide objective and reliable information of how well a candidate’s skills match those needed for the role. Beyond recruitment, AI and automation can also help organizations automate routine tasks and free up employees’ time to focus on more creative and strategic work. This can lead to increased job satisfaction and engagement, as employees are able to use their skills and expertise in more meaningful ways.

Your recommendations to business leaders looking to change their hiring strategy: What lessons can they take from the APAC market?

The chronic talent crunch has been a pervasive challenge for the APAC market. Coupled with the global recession prompting organizations to take a more prudent approach to cost optimization, it’s no surprise that our State of Global Hiring Report found APAC to be the fastest growing region in hiring workers abroad.

This is because international hiring allows for qualified workers to be deployed immediately from any location in the world, and companies can find high-caliber skill sets that are unavailable locally, with the potential for more cost effective rates.

Nonetheless, managing a distributed workforce comes with its own challenges. Beyond a work-from-home option, employers must consider how and where they hire, how they bring new team members onboard, and also how they integrate, pay, and manage an increasingly hybrid workforce. With complicated labor laws operating in different countries and payments made in different preferred currencies, managing this process can a tedious undertaking.

The good news is that there are now all-in-one HR solutions such as Deel’s,  that can help companies do so easily and compliantly.

From an efficiency and profitability perspective, leveraging such automated solutions can enable organizations to consolidate disparate HR tools often needed to manage an international workforce, while providing significant cost savings by eliminating unnecessary administrative overheads. This in turn empowers staff to focus on more strategic tasks that can drive business value. For companies expanding overseas, this also means that they can save cost when it comes to hiring local personnel to take care of local admin issues.

By adopting a global hiring strategy, business leaders can effectively solve the challenges of a tightening labor market by accessing a global talent pool to hire the right person for the role, and provide flexible work arrangements that works for both the talent and business without sacrificing output.

Thank you, Karen! That was fun and hope to see you back on HR Tech Series soon.

[To participate in our interview series, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com