Lisa Raaijmakers

Recruiting Across Borders: How Platforms Are Changing the Game

Temp & flex

Platforms

Dec 5, 2025

Who opens the newspaper sees it daily: discussions about labor migration, expats struggling to connect, and the fear that we’ve ‘become addicted to cheap labor’. But behind those headlines are people. People with knowledge, motivation, and a need. It's up to employers and intermediaries to put exactly that at the forefront, especially now that the labor market is more international than ever. At the Internationalization of the Dutch Labor Market by Werf&, Sepp Haans explained how platforms help with this.

The Platform Era

We live in an information economy where learning, working, and living increasingly happen via platforms. Labor market strategist and platform specialist Sepp Haans cites some figures: “In 2023, about 50% of millennials and Gen Zers in the US did freelance work. In Europe, we expect a 52% growth in platform work. Platforms offer the speed and autonomy that new generations need. For employers who want to deploy international talent, platforms provide a perfect match for nationality, including language, culture, and expectations.”

The Relevance for Mediators and Employers

Every organization now operates with a Modern Workforce Ecosystem: a mix of permanent employees, temporary workers, freelancers, and international laborers. “For all these people, the same applies: you need to recruit, engage, and retain them,” says Sepp. “If you do that well, the total value someone adds to your organization increases, even as an ambassador.” In other words: the Employee Lifetime Value (ELTV). But that presents a challenge.

Automation without Cohesion Creates Noise

Recruitment and HR are becoming more automated. That sounds efficient but often leads to fragmentation in practice. “We see separate tools that do not interact well, data that gets scattered, and candidates and employees being shuffled from system to system,” says Sepp. “This is not efficient for anyone and causes frustration, which can even result in losing candidates and employees.”

One Platform Ecosystem Provides Simplicity

One platform ecosystem ensures that technology and systems work together. “Candidates can easily apply, smoothly onboard, manage their profiles and skills themselves, directly upload documents, language tests, or certificates, and gain insight into terms, salary, and planning,” explains Sepp. “As an organization, you gain more control over your processes, data, and quality with one system.”

Internationalization Requires Clarity

Employers recruiting internationally face additional questions. From our own client research, we mainly see these four challenges:

How do I reach the right international candidates?
How do I objectively assess skills and language level?
How do I arrange onboarding and compliance without hassle?
How do I remain transparent about salary, expectations, and terms?

The Cocoroco platform shows how this can be done smarter.

Cocoroco: International Recruitment of Customer Service Talent

Cocoroco emerged from 5CA, an organization that provides multilingual customer service worldwide. While 5CA matches with the involvement of recruiters, Cocoroco does this entirely self-service via a platform. They connect support staff from around the world with organizations such as Picnic, Parkos, and Felyx.

What the platform does:

Supports 17 languages, including assessments to objectively measure language level
Streams onboarding, allowing candidates around the world to start
Automates compliance and payroll through partners
Matches candidates on skills, language, and hourly rate
Provides transparency: candidates see exactly what they will earn and under what conditions

Since 2021, 72,000 candidates have successfully gone through onboarding. The platform takes over much of the work from recruiters and lowers barriers for international talents.

What we learned:

Language is a barrier unless you deploy technology against it.
Transparency builds trust, especially internationally.
Objective matching ensures both speed and quality.
Platforms enormously increase your reach without additional recruiters.

Platformization and Internationalization Strengthen Each Other

International recruitment requires more nuance than a multilingual job page. Sepp: “An Italian candidate searches differently than a Dane. An American values different terms than a Dutch person.”

With a platform, you can:

offer vacancies in multiple languages
personalize content based on country or culture
base matching on skills and motivation instead of assumptions
automate onboarding so distance doesn’t matter
use data to continuously improve

What Can Employers and Mediators Do Now?

Make your candidate journey multilingual, not just your job texts.
Objectively measure skills, for instance, through assessments or ratings.
Use platforms only to remove barriers, not to add more steps.
Ensure transparency in wages, terms, and planning.
Look at proven solutions, such as Cocoroco, Deel, Remote, or Parakar. You don’t have to build everything yourself.