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Firecell: A developer in India, hired in days not months
Firecell, a French open-source 4G/5G core network start-up, needed a developer in India — fast. With immigration delays blocking the standard path, RemotePeople onboarded the hire in days and kept the product roadmap on track.
Sectors Telecom · Open-Source 5G · Network Software
Challenge Onboard a critical developer in India without waiting on a work permit — and without breaking compliance.
Location
France
Industry
Telecom
Company size
20+
Founding Year
2021
With RemotePeople since
2021
We handle global payroll, compliance, and HR while you build your team.
Meet Firecell: France’s open-source 4G/5G telecom startup
Firecell is a French tech start-up that develops, packages, and distributes the world’s first open-source 4G and 5G core network and Open-RAN compatible radio access network software suite.
This technology simplifies and streamlines network operations and maintenance in order to improve network reliability in remote or underserviced locations, to create public shared networks or private networks, to overcome the limitations of WiFi, and to precisely track and geofence company tools, products, or vehicles.
Firecell’s clients are large-scale enterprises in tech, industry, and education.
It’s a company that develops and deploys high-tech solutions, a task that requires top talent no matter where in the world those talents are.
Firecell’s hiring challenge: a great candidate, slow immigration
Immigration is not always a smooth process. Sometimes it takes time. In the world of employment, schedules are often crunched — candidates do not have the luxury of taking time off work while immigration paperwork is processed. This is what Firecell faced when they identified a software developer in India with suitable niche skills.
Due to normal immigration timelines, bringing this candidate to France was not an immediate option, and employing him as a contractor wasn’t ideal either; it could have created an employee misclassification risk for Firecell, and wouldn’t have given the employee the benefits that come from being a full-time employee.
[Read more about the difference between employees and contractors]
In order to secure the candidate, Firecell needed a fast and compliant local employment solution until the candidate could join the HQ in France. That means they needed to know and comply with international tax laws as well as local Indian employment laws — no small feat when time is of the essence.
RemotePeople can onboard employees in as little as 48 hours, anywhere. Since Firecell had already identified an employee, the process to hire them onto RemotePeople’s India entity was simple, straightforward, and fast: a perfect solution for the problem they faced.
In the case of Firecell, all official documents were collected from the employee via RemotePeople’s HR management platform and used to create an employment contract that was compliant according to Indian employment law. The employment contract was signed, and the employee was able to begin compliantly working for Firecell with minimal time lost.
Even better, the HR management for that employee was also centralized on RemotePeople’s platform. This means that essential HR admin like national holidays of India, leave requests, expense reporting, and document records were all available in one secure cloud location, at any time it was needed by the employee or the company. Such a platform is key for the success of asynchronous, globally distributed teams.
[Check our other tips for successful remote-friendly working environments]
The best part of this story? Eventually, the employee was able to join the home office in France after securing a French work visa.
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