Almost every company hiring in Latin America for the first time starts the same way: find someone good, put them on a contractor agreement, pay by invoice, revisit later. It is fast, it is cheap, and it is the single most expensive shortcut in international hiring.
Misclassification risk
Classification is not determined by what your contract says. It is determined by how the work actually happens. If someone works full-time hours, follows your schedule and reports to your managers, local authorities can reclassify the arrangement as employment regardless of the document both parties signed.
When that happens the bill is retroactive: back taxes, fines, and the benefits that should have been paid from day one. On a full-time engineer engaged for two years, that reaches six figures without difficulty.
And the rules are not one set of rules. They are five.
Brazil
The CLT regime mandates a 13th salary, a vacation bonus and FGTS deposits, with severance rules that assume an employment relationship exists.
Mexico
Recent labor reform tightened worker protections considerably, and PTU profit-sharing is a statutory obligation rather than a benefit you elect.
Colombia
Social security and pension contributions attach to the relationship.
Argentina
Sector-level collective agreements can apply on top of national law, and several sectors are covered by default.
Chile and Uruguay
More predictable regulation, which cuts both ways: predictable also means consistently enforced.
The trap is that none of this surfaces while things are going well. It surfaces at termination, at an audit, or when the person you have treated as a contractor for eighteen months decides they were an employee.
Zero misclassification risk
Combine offers three models, and the compliance question is answered differently in each. Choosing deliberately, up front, is the whole point.
Outsourcing
The professional is engaged through Combine rather than as a contractor of yours. We handle hiring, payroll and, if it comes to it, contract termination and replacement. You get the capacity without adding permanent headcount and without opening a local entity. This is the model for full-time, long-running roles, which are precisely the ones where contractor arrangements go wrong.
Direct hire
The professional is employed on your own legal entity. Here you are the employer, so we advise on what that market requires before you make the offer, covering the statutory costs above, the contract structure and the severance exposure, and then handle sourcing, vetting and placement.
Executive search
The same structure as direct hire, applied to leadership roles, with discreet outreach and no public job post when the transition is sensitive.
What does not change across the three is the sequencing. The employment model is decided during discovery, against how the person will actually work, rather than after an offer has already been made and the arrangement has to be reverse-engineered to fit.
