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Job Hunt Diary 2023: Regarding PEOs

Posted on February 16, 2023February 22, 2023 by Greg Bulmash

It’s been a busyish week. I finished interviews for one role, but like I’m transparent they’re not the only ones I’m talking to, they’re transparent I’m not the only one they’re talking to. Should have a decision next week.

It’s hard to think that I might be the reason someone gets declined for this role, even harder because I know how I’ll feel if they get chosen. I’ll survive. It’s not like the first time I got dumped and spent a week wallowing in every break-up and loneliness song in Level 42’s catalog (they have a lot of them). But I might need to take a long lunch of junk food and Netflix. Oddly, that’s also how I might celebrate an offer.

The recruiter chat for the other role was nice, but it turned out they did not have the budget to set up the necessary infrastructure and processes to support a remote employee in Washington. This is an interesting problem.

Some companies that do not have internal HR or do not have enough employees in a foreign country will contract a lot of that out to a Professional Employer Organization (PEO). My last two employers used PEOs, one for all its employees (including those working in-office), one just for its remote employees in the U.S.

PEOs process payroll, handle benefits (medical, dental, paid time off, etc.), and help keep the employer compliant with tax and reporting requirements for the state in which the employee performs their work.

But if a company has built a sufficient HR infrastructure for their existing employee footprint and isn’t using a PEO, then there’s an expense involved. Whether expanding their HR knowledge and processes to support that new state or hiring and integrating a PEO, it costs money.

Maybe you noticed during lockdown that your employer had a rule that you couldn’t just up and go work remotely in another state (or country) without clearing it with HR. That’s why. If they didn’t make sure all the paperwork and remittances were handled for that jurisdiction, they could face some big fines.

Meanwhile a newish friend (Developer Relations person I met and hung out with for a bit at a conference on the cusp of August and September 2022) reached out about some freelance work. For a long time, I was always too busy to moonlight/freelance. Now, I’m open to possibilities that put off having to sell investments in a down market to pay expenses.

It’s a really odd experience to quote a price for freelance work. I haven’t done it in about 16 years. I don’t want to price myself out of the opportunity but I don’t want to underbid and leave myself potentially working for sweatshop wages if the amount of work turns out to be much bigger than I estimated.

It’s a competitive market out there. Last year I had perm role offers on the table within 6 weeks of officially going on the market … twice. But if you’re not building and engaging your network as part of your job hunt, you’ll be stuck with sending out resumes, saying yes to being stuffed into clown cars*, and praying for the random legit “passive” contact (you put out a public resume and let it generate inbound contacts) as your only options.

Good luck! More news soon.

*I used to call the recruiters spamming out open contracts “boiler room” recruiters with “cattle call” contracts, but I’ve started using an umbrella term, “clown cars.” It’s because they are opportunities where every recruiter qualified to submit applicants will submit as many as they can stuff into their submission packet, like the car that rolls out into the spotlight at the circus and then a seemingly endless flow of clowns comes out.

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