How To Retain Top Talent in the Post Pandemic Era

Dive into the future of HR tech with our latest guest Sagar Khatri, co-founder and CEO of Multiplier, a revolutionary global employment platform. Discover how Multiplier’s software as a service is transforming the hiring landscape, allowing companies to tap into a worldwide talent pool with ease. With recent funding success and a valuation of $400 million, Sagar shares insights into market trends, expansion plans, and the evolving post-pandemic workplace. Don’t miss this conversation!

Discussion Topics: How To Retain Top Talent in the Post Pandemic Era

• Introduction
• What are the business challenges being addressed?
• What is Multiplier’s market expansion plan?
• What does the post pandemic workplace look like?
• Wrapping up

Transcript: How To Retain Top Talent in the Post Pandemic Era

Sriram: Hello, all, and welcome to yet another edition of, HR tech talks, where we talk to subject matter experts on all aspects in the realm of HR and HR tech. Today, we are very happy to host Sagar Katri, co-founder and CEO Multiplier. Multiplier is actually a global employment platform, which allows employers to hire anyone anywhere in just a few clicks using their workflow, that is automating compliance, payroll, and payments, right? And all of these are offered as software as a service. Multiplier has been helping companies reduce compliance costs for cross border employment and get companies access to a wider talent pool. And recently Multiplier raised 60 million in a funding round that was co-led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital.

So this latest investment actually brings Multiplier’s total funding to 77 million and its valuation to a whopping 400 million. Thank you very much for joining us today, Sagar, and congratulations again on that milestone.

Sagar Khatri: Hey, hi Sriram. It’s a pleasure to be here. And hello, everyone. Fantastic.

Sriram: Let’s dive straight into the first question. What business and talent challenges are your clients facing that you aim to address?

What are the business challenges being addressed?

Sagar Khatri: It’s a great question. We started Multiplier, to help companies really get access to a broader set of talent. If you think about what the world was like before, we will always think about hiring somebody in a particular geography. Let’s say if you’re hiring a digital marketing manager, you’d think about, or you’d also put on LinkedIn that we are hiring a digital marketing manager in Singapore, Indonesia, India, and so forth.

But we’ve never thought about, Hey, what if instead of hiring the best talent for that role in a particular country, if we can hire the best talent for that role anywhere in the world, like the best talent period. That’s what we wanted to make happen, right? If you think about countries like Singapore, US, Japan, China, UK, and Germany, these are all developed markets and they have lots and lots of well paid opportunities, but they don’t have enough talent and our goal, or our ambition is always to make sure that these companies, no matter where they are incorporated, now can get access to talent globally, which are best in class. which are well paid, and can really accelerate the growth of these companies

Sriram: Which market trends do you believe will accelerate the adoption of Multiplier?

Sagar Khatri: So I think, a lot of people talk about, it’s COVID. Obviously, COVID has helped proliferate remote work, but this, the core driver of our business is way beyond COVID, right? The core driver of the business is talent crunch if you think about it.

Today, we have roughly 160, 170 people across 35 countries with 52 nationalities and we build that team in one year. If we had to do that in Singapore, it would be impossible. So really the core driver of our business is talent crutch countries don’t have talent. They need talent to grow fast and hence they should be able to tap the talent everywhere.

The other two trends that have really helped this industry are the proliferation of remote working tools. If you think about working out of anywhere or in a developing country in 2010, You only had access to Skype and it did not work, but today when you have Zoom and you have Slack, when you have loom, the, manpower is really equipped to work from anywhere, without really hampering the quality of work.

So that has really helped the other factor, which is, not very encouraging, but has really helped this is growing nationalisation, right? If you think about America first or Singaporeans first kind of culture where. It’s difficult to hire foreigners. Not every country in the world is very kind enough to host foreigners, which has really truncated immigration. So not having to, not having the ability or quota to bring people over, proliferation of remote work and really talent grants are three top drivers for our industry.

Sriram: What is Multiplier’s proposed plan for market expansion?

What is Multiplier’s market expansion plan?

Sagar Khatri: We were based in Singapore and we found this area is based in Singapore. So we are only as Asian as we happen to be based in Singapore. Today we have clients in more than 50 countries. A lot of our business comes from the US, UK, Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, India, Indonesia, and so forth.

So I would say we are in the category where you need to be global from day one and hence, if you think about our people, people are in 35 countries and as I said, 52 nationalities, right? How are we going to use capital? So primarily three levers where we’re going to really allocate capital to grow fast.

One would be scaling our go-to market. So we’ll hire a lot of sales people across the globe so that we have feet on the street. We’ll also hire support functions in sales and, generally, scale the go to market so that we can reach more and more customers. We can knock on more doors. The second would be, and, primarily coming from Asia, you’re not good at doing PR.

So really emphasising and doing activities to enhance your brand and PR activities. People not just in Asia, but across the globe know what multipliers do. They should understand what our solution is. And they should know that we have the best solution to offer in the entire industry.

The third topic would be enhancing the product scope. So obviously, we provide the EOR, PEO, insurance and so forth. The idea is to get to a scale where you have tens of thousands of logos working with you. And then build out a full product suite to target. the existing customers that you have.

Sriram: Fantastic, that was my next question on what your product roadmap was. So that gives them a good perspective of what you’re planning to do both from a market expansion perspective and as a product roadmap. What is the post pandemic workplace like?

What does the post pandemic workplace look like?

Sagar Khatri: It’s a very interesting question at least the trend that we are seeing or forecasting today is you need to be an employer that provides choice to their employees, right? What we have seen is there’s a section of people who really want to work from wherever they want to.

They want to work from home and so forth. Some people want to work from, some exotic countries like Bali and so forth. So really the idea is if you, and we are in an era today. Where it’s an employee market, you have to be a really friendly employer to attract great talent.

So if you really want to grow fast and hence by virtue of that attract great talent, you need to be an employer that is giving choice to the employee to be able to work from wherever. They prefer now that it could be, if you’re an employer based in Singapore, that could mean they would want to come and work from Singapore in an office that should be fine.

Or that could also mean that if they’re from Vietnam, they want to work from their hometown in Vietnam, and that should also be okay with you. So really the idea is as an employer. but today you are not in charge of dictating terms to employees of where they should work from. and that also talks about a broader shift in the mindset of employers where the future really.

forces you to think not from an input or a number of hours perspective, but really an outcome driven workforce. So as a CEO of Multiplier, I can never really concentrate on Hey, who showed up on Slack at 9am or who woke up on time today. All I focus on. Is this what the, as we decided as a company, are we hitting them or not?

So really shifting the mindset from input driven input parameters to really what outcomes you desire as a company that will position you for growing faster. I’ll give you a quick anecdote. If a company anywhere in the world says that, Hey, we want the employees to come back to the office. We have a talent acquisition team of 10, to 12 people.

Whose sole job is to go and target those companies and say, Hey, we give you the choice to work from anywhere. And that we’ve been able to scale up business so fast because we really tap into talent who really want to do that. And we see that, and, we attract some really great talent and, in the interview or the discussion with me, at least they’ll always talk about this.

Hey, I love this opportunity. I’m able to spend more time with my family. or I don’t have to move to, there, or, and if your team is fully distributed, then there is no, what we call FOMO in your team, where they’ll say, Hey, half of your team is located in a centralised building.

Half of your team is working remotely. Are we missing out? So really the idea is you have to be an employer of choice, to be an employer of choice. You have to give the choice to our employees to work from wherever they want to.

Sriram: Fantastic. Be an employer of choice. You need to give the choice back to your employee, right? That’s a great way to end the conversation. Thank you very much for taking time, Sagar, for this conversation and we really wish you the very best on your journey ahead with Multiplier and more milestones to you and Multiplier.

Sagar Khatri: It was a pleasure to be here.

Our Guest: Sagar Khatri

Sagar Khatri is the CEO | Co-founder at Multiplier. He comes from IIT, Bombay. He worked with Nomura as an Investment Banker and Hmlet as VP of Growth and Expansion – Led Series B raise of 40M USD, Led Expansion in Australia and Japan, Led JV with MEC in Japan. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Multiplier.