What We've Learned and What's Changed Since We Started

When we started Onboarded, we thought we were solving an American compliance problem. We were wrong.

Yes, the U.S. is a maze of paperwork — 50 states, each with its own rules, forms, and deadlines. 

But it turns out this is not America's burden alone. It's a universal problem, just wearing different clothes.

From the EU's layered legal frameworks to India's biometric identity systems, from Quebec's language-specific notices to Australia's superannuation complexities — the challenge of helping people legally start work exists everywhere. And everywhere, it's just as tangled.

The Hidden Architecture of Work

Here's what surprised us most: HR compliance isn't just messy. It's multi-dimensional. The closer you look, the more complexity you find.

Take something simple — hiring someone in California. You need a W-4 for federal taxes, a DE-4 for state taxes, labor posters in the right languages, wage notices with specific formatting, I-9 verification within three days, and E-Verify submission in markets with federal contracts. Miss one deadline, use the wrong form version, or forget a signature, and you're facing penalties.

Now multiply that by every state, every country, every industry-specific requirement. The complexity doesn't just add up — it compounds.

Why Borders Don't Matter Anymore

Early on, we mapped compliance requirements state by state. But modern work doesn't respect borders.

Consider a real scenario we encountered: A Canadian company hiring through a US subsidiary, employing a French citizen living in Texas, working remotely for clients in Singapore. Whose rules apply? The answer: potentially all of them.

Today's employment landscape includes:

• Remote workers crossing state lines without telling HR
• Contractors in one country serving clients in another
• EOR arrangements that make the "employer" a legal entity in Ireland while the work happens in Brazil
• Platform workers who aren't technically employed by anyone but still need tax forms

We stopped trying to master individual jurisdictions. Instead, we started building systems that could navigate the relationships between them.

The AI Moment That Actually Mattered

We launched just before ChatGPT arrived. Like everyone else, we initially thought AI would just make things faster. We were thinking too small.

Here's what actually happened: 2-3 engineers are shipping products that previously would have required 15-20 people. Not because AI replaced developers, but because it eliminated entire categories of work — boilerplate code, test writing, documentation, basic debugging.

But the real breakthrough wasn't speed. It was flexibility.

Traditional compliance software is rigid because it has to be. Change a tax form field, and you need a developer to update the system. But when you can generate and validate code in minutes instead of weeks, software can actually adapt to rule changes as they happen.

We're not claiming AI makes everything perfect. It doesn't. But it does change what's economically feasible to build and maintain.

The 12+ Tool Problem

Here's a number that haunts us: The average HR team uses 12+ different tools to onboard one person.

We watched companies try to stitch these together with Zapier, custom APIs, and spreadsheet workarounds. It works until it doesn't — usually at the worst possible moment. A background check gets stuck, payroll enrollment fails, someone starts work without proper authorization, and suddenly you're in crisis mode.

The integration approach made sense when each tool did one thing well. But compliance isn't modular — it's interdependent. Your I-9 verification affects your E-Verify submission. Your tax elections influence your payroll setup. Your contractor classification determines which forms you need.

We realized we weren't facing an integration challenge. We were facing an orchestration challenge. The difference matters.

Employment's Identity Crisis

Ten years ago, you were either an employee or a contractor. Today? The taxonomy of work has exploded:

• Traditional employees still exist, but now they might be remote, hybrid, or distributed across time zones
• Contractors range from true independents to economically dependent workers who look a lot like employees
• EOR workers are employed by one company but managed by another
• Platform workers set their own hours but follow algorithmic management
• Outsourced teams blur the line between vendor and staff

Each category comes with different compliance requirements. Misclassify someone, and you're not just facing penalties — you might owe years of back taxes, benefits, and overtime.

The real challenge isn't keeping up with these categories. It's building systems that can handle the gray areas between them.

The Human Paradox

Here's something counterintuitive: The more powerful AI becomes, the more important human judgment gets.

AI can conduct deep research and but it can't make judgement calls across subjective EU regulatory interpretations. Many will say, "yes it can", we say not yet. It can flag a compliance risk, but it can't weigh the business context. It can generate a form, but it can't determine if requiring that form is ethical.

We've learned to design for this paradox. AI handles the mechanical work — scanning, sorting, routing, flagging. Humans make the calls that matter. The best systems know the difference.

What This Means

We started by trying to fix forms. We discovered we were actually fixing trust.

Every time someone starts a new job, there's a moment of faith. The employer trusts this person can legally work, will show up, won't create liability. The worker trusts they'll get paid, get benefits, get treated fairly.

Compliance is what makes that faith unnecessary. It's the infrastructure that lets strangers work together.

But here's the thing: that infrastructure is failing. Not because people don't care, but because the world changed faster than the systems designed to support it. Remote work exploded. Borders became suggestions. Employment itself splintered into dozens of new systems.

The old answer was more paperwork, more tools, more process. But complexity doesn't solve complexity — it multiplies it.

We're taking a different path. Instead of adding layers, we're building systems that bend without breaking. That can handle a contractor in Colombia and an employee in Colorado with equal intelligence. That know when to be rigid (tax withholding) and when to be flexible (local holidays).

Most importantly, we're building for the world that's emerging, not the one that's fading. Where work happens everywhere, in every form, all at once.

It's harder than fixing forms. But it's the right problem to solve.