Models
Agency hire
Agency hire is a hire sourced by a recruiting agency where the agency is not the ongoing employer unless you separately buy EOR. The agency’s job ends, or shrinks, when the person starts.
Also called recruited hire
How it works
Pay for the search. Put employment somewhere real: your entity or an EOR. Keep the two invoices labeled. Founders blur them and then cannot tell whether last month’s charge was a restaff or a Desk fee. A good agency will refuse to leave the worker on a contractor invoice ‘for simplicity.’ Simplicity is how misclassification starts.
Example: $2,400 search, person starts on EOR at ₱60,000 loaded plus $400. Two vendors, two jobs. If the agency also runs EOR, still keep search and paper as separate lines so year-two cost is visible.
How it differs
Managed employment is the paper. Placement fee is the search. Body leasing is the agency pretending to employ without files.
Common errors
Letting the agency stay on the WhatsApp thread as the worker’s real manager six months later with no contract for that.
In practice
Treat Agency hire as a week-one operating object. Name the employer on the contract and the manager in Slack. If those two names cannot both be true at once, the model is theater. Write an owner - founder, local employer, or worker - and a date you will look at it again: first cutoff, first holiday, or first miss. If nobody can show a contract clause, a payslip line, a calendar block, or a checklist box, you do not have agency hire yet. You have a conversation. Convert the conversation before the person starts, while changing the deal still costs a paragraph rather than a resignation. Re-read the worked example above against the actual hire in front of you. If the numbers in that example cannot be swapped for this seat’s pesos, hours, and start date, the brief is still unfinished.