The Product Was Localised. The Job Was Not.
A business development manager submits an expense claim. Dinner and drinks with a prospective partner, receipts attached, the kind of evening that, in his market, is not optional and is how the deal gets done. Finance in Europe sends it back with a question: why is the company paying for a night out? Then a request for a written justification, line by line, for a single receipt.
That manager was hired three months earlier at high cost, specifically because he understood a market the company did not. He is now writing reports to defend the thing he was hired to do.
This is not a story about expenses. It is a clear example of a pattern seen constantly from the recruitment side, and it costs operators far more than they realise.
What operators already get right
Companies get several things right. When a CEO calls to say they are entering a new market next quarter, and the good ones call three to six months ahead, they almost always ask for the same first roles: business development, then marketing, then CRM. And they ask for seniors. Not because seniors sound better, but because they are honest with themselves that they do not understand the market they are about to enter. They want someone with management experience, someone who arrives with their own network and can open deals immediately, and someone who can lead a team once the market matures. For a profile that matches ninety percent of that brief, the market rate runs up to eight thousand US dollars a month. Those searches fill in about four weeks.
So the diagnosis is correct, and the money is real. Companies genuinely understand that a new market requires local judgment, and they pay for it.
The template that follows them across the border
Then they take that person and run them through an employment model built somewhere else entirely.
The expense policy is one instance. In most of Asia, and particularly across the Chinese-speaking markets, relationships are built over long meals and social drinking, and the budget for that is a cost of doing business rather than a perk. It is not something a company can opt out of because it does not fit their culture. Yet the policy that governs it was written for a market where a coffee is sufficient, and nobody thought to revisit it before hiring.
Why the hire is gone within a year
Office location is another, and it is the single most common reason people leave within the first year. Someone joins, and a few months in, the company announces that it is relocating – not to another district, but to another country. The employee had no idea this was coming. They usually accept that the business has its reasons, but they expect the package they agreed to remain in place, and it rarely does. Since the pandemic, expectations around where work happens have moved permanently, and moving a person across borders is now a real risk rather than a routine request. If someone is hired in Taiwan, keep them in Taiwan. If they are in Hong Kong, keep them in Hong Kong.
The third instance costs nothing to fix, which is what makes it frustrating. People leave because the manager will not listen. Someone is hired precisely because the company saw value in them; they arrive with a view on the market, they raise it once or twice, and the answer is that there is no time for this conversation. That is the moment the value the company paid for stops being available to it. Alongside that sits the absence of any communicated vision. When nobody explains what the company is building, a senior hire in a new market has no way to feel part of it, and concludes they do not matter.
Put those together, and the outcome is what shows up in the inbox about nine months later. The expensive, deliberately senior local hire, the one bought for exactly the market knowledge the head office lacked, is looking again. The network they brought goes with them, usually to a competitor in the same market. The company records this as a recruitment problem. It was not. The hire was right. What failed was everything that happened after the contract was signed.
The common thread is simple enough to state and apparently very hard to act on. Operators and providers have learned to accept that players in different markets behave differently, and they build for it: local payment methods, local promotions, local support hours, local language that reads as if it were written rather than translated. They accept the cultural difference on the player's side without argument. They will not extend the same acceptance to their own employees. Localisation stops at the customer.
The role nobody hires in time
In market after market, the last position anyone thinks to fill is the local HR manager, and it is often not filled at all. It is understandable why. HR is treated as a low priority in most industries, not only this one. But in a market entry, it is the function that does the translation work every other department needs, and its absence is why the three failures above keep happening.
An experienced local HR manager knows the employment law the company is now subject to, what registering and operating a company actually requires, and which obligations to staff are not negotiable in that jurisdiction. They handle hiring budgets, which matters more than most companies expect, because entering a market with an ambitious headcount plan and no local cost sense is how first-year budgets disappear. They sit between head office policy and local norms and make both sides bend a little, which is exactly what the expense argument needed and did not have.
They do something else that is less obvious. Candidates in Asia and the Middle East are being asked to leave stable jobs for a foreign brand nobody in the market has heard of yet. A local HR presence lowers the perceived risk of that move. It is the difference between a company that has arrived and a company that is testing.
There is a cost argument here too. When clients approach recruitment agencies wanting to fill live dealer or customer service roles, agency recruitment is often not the most appropriate solution, and not because those roles cannot be filled. Agency fees on volume junior hiring are the wrong tool. A more effective approach is often to hire a strong HR manager and build those teams internally, while using a specialist recruitment agency for the senior searches where it adds real value. That approach does not cost relationships. It has repeatedly saved clients money in a year when they are already carrying the risk of a new market.
Hire fewer people, and hire them senior
The final consideration for a CEO planning a market entry is sequencing, and this is an area where thinking has evolved.
Start small and senior. A handful of key people first: product, project, brand, CRM, a marketing lead. Get them aligned in direction, then extend the team around them. Ambition tends to arrive as a headcount number: fifty people, a hundred people, and the instinct to slow that down is correct, because the first hires are the ones who set the culture everyone after them inherits.
Five years ago, mid-level candidates might have been suggested as a way to save money on those hires. Today, the focus should be on genuinely senior candidates. The difference in salary between a mid-level and a genuinely senior hire is often three to five thousand dollars a month, and what the company buys with it is vision: someone who has seen enough to think past the current quarter, who will get their hands dirty because they already know how the market works, and who can train the mid-level person hired alongside them into the senior one the company will need next year. Saving costs is a legitimate goal. Saving it only in the current quarter is not the same thing.
Author Bio: Chris Lu is CEO of Usobi, an iGaming recruitment agency and hiring platform working with operators and providers entering markets across Asia and the Middle East. She spoke on cross-border hiring at SPiCE Bangkok.
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