HR Outsourcing, Payroll & Employer of Record in Egypt

HR outsourcing in Egypt is usually pitched as a cheaper way to buy labour, which is rarely what the buyer is actually paying for. The companies that get value from it want two things: employment administration out of their own managers’ hands, and a partner who is contractually accountable for whether the work gets done. London Trade sells those two together, because the party that employs the people is the only one that can fairly be held to what they produce.

An overseas company can have a team working in Egypt without establishing its own Egyptian entity, payroll and HR function. Under an employer of record arrangement, London Trade is the legal employer: the contracts, the payroll, the statutory filings and the personnel file sit with London Trade in Egypt, while the people work full time for the client, to the client’s standards, reporting into the client’s managers. If that client later establishes an entity of its own in Egypt, the team can be transferred onto it rather than recruited again.

Egyptian companies come to London Trade for a different reason. Payroll runs, social insurance filings and personnel records are monthly, deadline-bound and unforgiving of small mistakes, and in most companies the work rests on one person who knows how it is actually done — a single point of failure that only becomes visible the month that person is not there. London Trade runs that administration in Egypt as a standing operation with named owners and cover, rather than as something the domestic finance team squeezes into the last week of every month.

London Trade employs and manages more than 3,000 people on client accounts across Egypt, including more than 40 stores it runs as a franchise partner of Vodafone Egypt. Paying and administering the staff of one office is a different problem from doing it for people spread across governorates, who have to be supervised, covered and replaced locally. Distributed frontline staffing is the harder version, and it is the version London Trade has been doing since 2015.

Recruitment is the part of HR outsourcing a client feels first. London Trade recruits in Egypt against the client’s own role specification, and the binding constraint in high-volume hiring is rarely the advert — it is the number of screened candidates who actually start. London Trade keeps a standing pipeline for the frontline and field roles it hires most often in Egypt, which is what lets it staff a new requirement faster than a company starting from an empty list. Where a client would rather hand over the hiring function than fill vacancies one at a time, London Trade runs it as recruitment process outsourcing against agreed service levels.

Employment compliance in Egypt is not a checklist that can be completed once. The forms, the portals and the documentation expected of an employer change, and they are administered locally rather than uniformly, so what satisfied a requirement last year may not be what is asked for now. London Trade does not ask a client to track that: it keeps the contracts, filings and records of the staff it employs on that client’s behalf current, and it is the party that answers for them.

Companies in Egypt that already have a team can move it across rather than start again. London Trade can take on an existing Egyptian workforce as the employer of record, keeping the same people in the same jobs while the employment, the payroll and the records move onto London Trade’s side. The client keeps the work, the standards and the relationships; what leaves is the administration.