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When most people talk about “building your offshore team in Europe,” the conversation still gets stuck on engineers. But if you’re an IT leader chasing audit trails, a finance lead burned by surprise freight bills, or HR Ops tired of Day-1 laptop delays, you know offshore hiring is no longer just about code.
What matters now are the basics that keep teams running: compliant hiring, fast provisioning, and airtight asset management. In this guide, we’ll look at the models you can use, why Europe makes sense, and the operational traps to avoid.
And because you’ll need more than theory, we’ll also share a bonus platform recommendation to get you started right away.
The way you structure your team (like customer support, finance, marketing, or operations beyond software development) has a direct impact on speed, cost, and compliance.
Hire employees directly: either by setting up your own local entity or working through an Employer of Record (EOR). The EOR becomes the legal employer and handles payroll, taxes, and compliance. You still run the day-to-day.
It’s a popular model because you get full control without needing to establish a legal entity in every country.
💡Earnest Analytics ran into a problem with a similar work setting.
With more team members in the EU, shipping delays and inconsistent VAT handling added weeks to the onboarding process. After switching to Firstbase, their tiny IT team got real-time visibility into remote assets, faster returns, and compliance they could prove.
“Firstbase addresses the needs of a global company in an efficient manner. The procurement team at Firstbase is able to purchase assets at highly competitive rates. As a result, this reduces internal overhead on our part.”
– Francis Calata, VP of Corporate IT
In this model, you offload a function (say, Tier 1 support) to a third-party provider. It’s fast and can be cost-effective, but you give up visibility and oversight. What happens when a contractor quits or needs new hardware? That becomes a gap, not just for IT, but also for Finance and Compliance. So, you’ll need a lot of planning before you settle down for this model.
Agencies hire and assign people to your team. These workers are legally employed by the agency but embedded in your operations. It feels like co-employment, and that means shared risk. Who’s responsible for hardware provisioning? Whose audit trail counts? They can accelerate hiring, but rarely handle hardware logistics or compliance in your name.
When you really need to scale fast but not commit long-term, you can use a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model, where a vendor sets up and runs your European team, then hands it over once it’s stable. Co-managed models are similar, where your team and a vendor share responsibilities and operations. It’s common in support and ops functions.
That said, it’s up to you to choose a model that fits your headcount, operational procedures, and location. Across these models, Firstbase acts as a neutral infrastructure layer. No matter who owns the contract (your entity, an EOR, or an agency), your provisioning, asset tracking, and offboarding stay consistent.
Firstbase handles everything from zero-touch laptop setup to 97%+ retrieval rates (compared to the industry’s 30-50% average retrieval rate) and device turnarounds in under 30 days.
That translates directly to budget protection and fewer compliance headaches.
If you're hiring beyond your headquarters, Europe is a smarter option. Here’s why.
Europe is not just a hub for offshore developers. The region offers professionals with technical expertise across departments who understand regional markets and speak multiple languages.
In remote roles, salary differences can be striking. Take a virtual assistant role, for example. An Eastern European virtual assistant with years of experience costs roughly $1,700-2,000 per month compared with $4,500-6,000 for a similar US‑based assistant, with cost savings up to 60%.
These cost differentials allow companies to scale up general business functions without sacrificing quality.
European teams naturally overlap with both the U.S. and APAC, ideal if you're supporting global customers or want to avoid 3 a.m. escalations. That’s why companies like Prezi lean on European hubs to support a “follow-the-sun” approach covering 18 hours a day.
The labor market remains fluid, with a 2.4% job vacancy rate in Q1 2025. This healthy, fluid labor market means active hiring pipelines across major European cities. That’s part of what makes it attractive for long-term investment.
And from a compliance standpoint, Europe brings stability. Under GDPR, personal data isn’t just about what’s stored in your CRM: it includes what's on an employee's laptop. If that device goes missing or isn’t wiped properly at offboarding, you’re exposed.
Firstbase helps you provision and ship laptops to new hires across the EU within 48 hours, using local staging centers to avoid customs delays and VAT blockers. Each device is tracked from order to delivery and linked to an employee (not just a shipment ID), so your Finance and IT stay aligned.
Not just that, with Firstbase, you‘ll meet GDPR and audit-readiness standards with NIST 800-88–compliant data wiping, Certificates of Destruction auto-uploaded to the asset record, and full lifecycle logs from day one.
Because Firstbase operates EU-wide with regional staging centers, you avoid VAT and customs gridlock and hit SLA-backed turnaround times for onboarding, device recovery, and even secure redeployment when employees exit .
In other words, Europe gives you a strategic edge, and Firstbase helps you make the most of it.
Behind every successful offshore development team in Europe is a mess of fragmented systems, freight delays, surprise bills, and compliance risk. These challenges don’t hit one team; they hit everyone: IT, product development, Finance, HR, and data security.
There’s one platform that helps you tackle all these challenges head-on. Yes, Firstbase handles device logistics, so your teams don’t have to. You get real-time tracking tied to actual employees, not shipment IDs; regional fulfillment that avoids customs snags; and audit-ready asset records that CISOs, Finance, and IT all trust.
It’s how Cresta saved 250+ hours of IT time while scaling headcount from 160 to 300 without adding staff.
“The biggest benefit of Firstbase is the time it saves us. Tasks like recovering a machine, shipping it, receiving it, testing it, and performing QA used to add up significantly.
Firstbase streamlines all of this, which has been invaluable for our team.”
- Allenbrand, Head of IT, Cresta
Whether you're hiring in Berlin or Budapest, Firstbase keeps remote operations clean, fast, and audit-proof across 150+ countries. Take a virtual tour now.
Seven-step roadmap to do it right.
Start by deciding what roles you need (software developers, customer support, finance) and where you want control. Are you comfortable opening a local entity, or will an EOR suffice? Will you outsource certain functions? Based on that, you’ll choose from the models that we discussed earlier.
Next, tackle compliance. Engage local lawyers or use an EOR for payroll, tax registration, contracts, and project management. Pay attention to GDPR and country‑specific privacy laws.
Document how you destroy data and confirm hardware returns. Because ignoring this led to the US$35 million fine for Morgan Stanley.
Where should you hire? Look at language skills, talent pools, costs, and internet connectivity. Many firms choose Dublin or Berlin for customer roles because of English proficiency, while Eastern Europe offers cost‑effective support teams. And don't forget to consider time zone differences to maintain consistent coverage.
This is where product companies quietly bleed time and money. Approximately 5+ hours per employee per year is wasted on logistics like shipping, provisioning, and retrieval. That’s 500 hours for a 100-person web development team.
And Firstbase slots in as your global operations layer here. The platform handles device sourcing, staging, and zero-touch setup for hires across Europe, all without involving your internal team on the ground.
Onboarding sets the tone for retention and productivity. Organisations with a strong onboarding process improve new‑hire productivity by 50%. Provide clear documentation, assign buddies, and ensure employees have their laptops on day one.
Verse used to spend 10-15 hours weekly on manual equipment ordering and shipping; after integrating Firstbase, their HR team gained that time back and could focus on creating engaging onboarding content. Plus, tools like ABM, Intune, or Jamf can plug into Firstbase so that security policies are enforced before a laptop leaves the box.
After onboarding, devices need maintenance, replacement, and eventual retirement. By this stage, you’re likely managing multiple assets in multiple geos. Visibility becomes non-negotiable. Firstbase lets you track each asset down to the serial number, link it to a user, and proactively schedule refreshes so you don’t scramble when gear dies mid-quarter .
You’ll have dashboards showing where every device is and when it’s due for refresh. In fact, Verse automated 75% of lifecycle tasks, and the platform’s retrieval system delivers near‑100% return rates with devices back within 30 days.
GDPR audits aren’t theoretical. If you can't prove a device was wiped, you’re exposed to data threats. So, monitor compliance metrics, track retrieval rates, and measure how quickly replacement devices reach employees.
And for that, you need one shared view across HR, IT, and Finance. Firstbase gives you a full audit trail with status, location, user, and compliance flags, all searchable. That means fewer surprises, cleaner reporting, and fewer “Where’s this laptop?” threads.
Offshoring doesn’t have to mean patchwork solutions or risky handoffs. When done right, Europe gives you access to global talent, better unit economics, and a timezone advantage without the usual compliance misses. But the real value you get here is treating IT logistics as a strategic layer, not an afterthought.
Firstbase gives you that. This platform is the difference between chasing shipments and scaling with control.
For growing teams of 50 or global organizations of 5,000, Firstbase gives you one platform to deploy, retrieve, and refresh hardware backed by 99% customer satisfaction. Book a 30-minute demo to see how it works in your exact setup.
