Oyster HR Reviews: 4.4/5 — Solid Choice

One of the things Oyster does well is onboarding and offboarding. Their lawyers and/or accountants dealing with the labor laws in the countries you are hiring are stellar. They will guide you, and you can trust them and avoid the cumbersome reading of foreign laws and requirements.

By far, the worst aspect of Oyster is their support. You can be left waiting for a support query for weeks, and when the answer finally comes, it is about 50/50 if they even read the question carefully or checked your account, or you just got some FAQ answer that has nothing to do with your situation at all. The platform is honestly pretty bad. It is very poorly designed, and various third-party integrations are terrible. They are very limited in what you can or cannot do with them, and you must rely on support a lot. Which is an issue as support is their worst aspect. You cannot trust 100% to pay taxes and social security contributions without mistakes, so employees have to keep an eye on it and open tickets for corrections, again leading to interactions with support. It makes employees frustrated and annoyed.

We want to hire the best people around the world but do not have the subsidiaries worldwide to do so. Until (or it might never happen) labor laws around the world adapt to the digital world where you can easily employ foreigners these services are the only option to access the markets and offer your employees the benefits of employment (otherwise B2B is the only viable option).

Oyster has an intuitive platform for managing global payroll. Adding employees is simple, and the assistance provided during the onboarding process is warm and attentive. Their tools and calculators, and resources about each country profile are very helpful. Their direct debit feature makes everything even easier.

After the sign-up is complete, the customer experience nosedives. Waiting over 48 hours for a response to an important and time-sensitive question is not acceptable. Offboarding employees is also a problem and seems not to have been given much thought. The lines of communication are not made clear and there are no ressources explaining the process or the order in which things are supposed to happen. This resulted in an extremely messy situation in our experience and is definitely an area I would hope to see Oyster improve in. There also seems to be a general lack of attention to detail in the company, which is very disconcerting. Examples include, being sent an invocie still maked as 'draft,' a fired employee being asked to submit a letter of resignation, and employee expenses not being included in an invoice despite being added on time — also disparity between customer literature deadlines and actual deadlines for payroll changes. I am sure these are just teething issues and not a reflection of the company as a whole.

Oyster enabled us to employ people in countries where it was not in our company interest to set up a local entity seamlessly, giving our valued workers the security of an employment contract and our fully remote company peace of mind.

Great onboarding team and account dashboard

Slow support replies and payroll mistakes.

They helped us hired our employees from Europe and US, as well we have been paying our contractors via their platform.

Easy to use and I can manage all aspects of my employees compensation and expenses

I haven't yet experienced any except the rather steep % they charge on top

Managing contractor contracts

Nothing to share. The Remote.com app is much more user friendly.

I received conflicting & inaccurate information re country termination rules which cased significant friction and costs.

Hire outself of country of origin.

The option it provides to employ people working in different countries, The Country profiles The employer cost calculator The portal is easy to use

Customer service Unclear and misleading communication Lack of flexibility in amending contracts

Not sure

I can hire talents remotely and get help abroad.

Wrong invoice amounts, change in oyster personnel requiring us to repeat ourselves.

Not having to put up entities in all countries or know local regulations

The product idea is great and the the platform in itself has a good UX and design

The staff is making A LOT of errors which is dragging down our experience. More than half of our invoices are wrong, our contracts are not being followed up on, they change out point of contact often.

Being able to expand internationally