Why should the place we were born affect our chances of succeeding in life? A big question that you might think has a far-off solution. But you’d be wrong.
In our last Debrief with Sagar Khatri, the Co-Founder and CEO of global employment platform Multiplier, we discussed why a fully integrated global workforce management solution is a revolutionary proposition.
In today’s edition, we highlight the company’s mission to expand opportunity to all—and the effect it will have on how we work.
The world without limits
Multiplier’s mission is easy to sum up. “We have this concept of the world without limits—a borderless world where boundaries don’t undermine opportunities,” says Sagar.
That applies equally to companies and people. “Where an individual is born should not determine which job opportunities they have access to. Similarly, where a company is registered should not determine the talent pool it has access to.”
Sagar’s ambition to move from a world where you find the best talent in your local environment to one where you find the best talent anywhere is driven by his personal experience.
“I’m originally from India, but I had to move to Tokyo just to access opportunities,” he explains. “I worked in investment banking in Tokyo because I could get the opportunity. If I’d stayed in India, I may not have ever made that kind of money.”
Today, he lives in Singapore, which makes him even more keenly aware of disparities in global pay. “If an accountant lives three miles away in Indonesia, their salary is one-fifth of what they might earn here—despite them doing exactly the same job. If businesses were instead able to get the most qualified person globally, there would be pay parity.”
The Multiplier model
Multiplier was created to solve exactly these issues, and Sagar attributes the company’s success to practicing what it preaches. “We started the company in Singapore, and we’ve scaled a lot in three years. But if we only had a Singaporean office building and hired exclusively in Singapore, we would have never been as successful.”
This distributed model was the only logical choice for his first company. “A fully distributed setting is the only way I know how to build a business,” he explains. “If we didn’t have Janko from Serbia and Farhad from Mumbai, as well as Eyra from Singapore, we wouldn’t have been as successful.”
That’s particularly true owing to the diverse customer base the company has cultivated. “We have customers in 60 countries. Could we have developed a product that people in 60 countries can use by only hiring people in Singapore and operating with a purely Singaporean perspective? Absolutely not!”
As much as he believes the model is the cause of Multiplier’s success, Sagar also thinks this is how companies worldwide should work. “In today’s world, because demand has gone global, the customer base is global. From day one, it’s important to have talent from global countries so that they can also give you input on what people in Sweden use, what people in Australia use, what Indonesians use.”
The customer perspective
Previously, only large enterprises like Coca-Cola or Unilever have been able to access these global perspectives—chiefly by setting up captive centers in places like the Philippines or India. That was only possible because they had know-how and capital far out of reach of smaller businesses. Multiplier’s ambition is to change that.
“A mid-market SME will never have the kind of volume to be able to put in a full captive center. We expand access to global talent to SMEs and mid-markets by dealing with the costliness, clunkiness, and compliance for them.”
Companies taking advantage of Multiplier’s offering typically fall into two camps.
“There are always two scenarios in which customers are talking to us. One is a time of growth, growth, growth, with companies putting their foot on the accelerator. When you’re growing fast, you need A-class talent to support you. But A-class talent is not concentrated; it’s distributed—so you need skills and expertise from all over the world.”
The other situation is when people are cutting costs and streamlining their operations. “In that scenario,” Sagar explains, “you want talent at the right price. If you’re a San Francisco-based company with developers on a $400,000 salary, your only path to profitability might be to streamline headcount and get the same skills in Greece, Ukraine, or India for a fraction of that cost.”
The future of work
While more and more are taking advantage of global talent’s benefits, Sagar still sees the industry as being in its very early stages. Multiplier, therefore, has an opportunity to set a precedent for the future of work.
It starts with an expansion of opportunity. “We are creating large-scale formal employment, where people from tier two and three cities in developing economies can access opportunities from developed markets. Similarly, in developed markets, talent can now access opportunities without moving,” Sagar explains.
Multiplier is also broadening access to the workplace for women—an underutilized resource in many countries. “In places like Indonesia, India, and Japan, the percentage of the female population in the workforce is still very low. For these countries to achieve their promise of becoming a superpower, women will have to become more involved in the economy.
“With remote work, it becomes easier for women to participate—because they can work from home and still access opportunity without sacrificing their family or job commitments.”
A distributed, global workforce
The final change Multiplier is spearheading is the freedom to work how you want. “I spent some time working in Jakarta last week,” says Sagar. “If I had to commute into Jakarta five times a week, it would be very painful. That’s why the future of work lies in flexibility.
“Everything we do is to enable people to work from wherever they want, for whichever company they want, in whatever time zone they want—so they can be the most productive.”
Companies can only expect to have their pick of the best employees by providing that level of freedom. “If you want to be an employer of choice, you must enable your employees to work however they want to.
“I’m based in Singapore, in the office. That’s my personal choice. I like to be in an office; I don’t like working from home. But I also like to work globally. I don’t need to see my colleagues in person daily. Similarly, if you work best from a cafeteria or a library, you should be empowered to do that.”
Achieving a new global employment reality with Multiplier
As quickly as this future is becoming a reality, however, there is not yet enough awareness in the working population that their next opportunity could come from anywhere in the world. So what needs to change?
“We need to get to a stage where everyone, when they choose their next career, thinks about this,” says Sagar. “They wake up, wherever they are, and say my next opportunity will be for an AI company in New York or a semiconductor company in Taipei. The only way that’s going to happen is if the mindset changes. And that’s why we’re trying to build a world where you can do the job you love without leaving the people you love.”
Multiplier is here to help businesses scale their global workforces and access the skilled workers they desperately need. Ready to boost your productivity with global talent but need help figuring out where to begin? Talk to our experts.
