Global Mobility — How You Win and Keep Talent

Christine van Hoffen ran Tracksuit's people function, growing the team from around a dozen people to two hundred, across four continents, in three years. Most of what she built at Tracksuit traces back to something she'd personally lived through. Tracksuit's return-to-work policy came out of her own negotiated part-time comeback after having a child, and her MBA thesis on pay transparency and the gender pay gap became the spine of the company's compensation policy. Global mobility was the one area she hadn't lived through first-hand, which is exactly why it took longest to get right. Today global mobility has become a lever fast-growing companies actually compete on. Your best hires tend to be the most ambitious ones. These are people who chase opportunity, especially in markets that are challenging yet promise both personal and professional growth. Nailing your global mobility strategy may be the difference between keeping your best employee through an international move or losing them to whoever offers it first. Between owning a new market with someone who already understands your business or hiring from scratch.

Now, as Head of People and Growth Operations at Concord Visa, Christine watches how global mobility is shaped across dozens of fast-growing companies. We talked about who ends up owning it when nobody wants to, what a well-run move actually asks of a company, and the mistakes that repeat almost identically wherever teams try to cross a border.

It's an ownership problem

Where most companies fail in creating great global mobility programs is in ownership. Mobility sits at the exact seam between legal, finance, and HR:

"I think it can be confusing because it comprises so many parts and you need legal, finance, compliance — all those people, you need their buy-in anyway."

In practice that means it belongs to whoever happens to be holding the adjacent paperwork. Legal inherits it because it needs incorporation documents, then finance jumps in because half the file is payslips, and HR gets handed whatever's left. Teams simply don't want to manage it, yet it's a process that can't be undone if done poorly. In Christine's view, the best people to craft and weave it into the company's overall employee experience policy are the HR teams.

"It's such a crucial moment for employee experience. It's make or break when it happens. You don't get a second shot usually."

Treated as a retention tool, mobility becomes something worth owning — not something to pass down the corridor. It's an employee experience with the highest stakes possible. This could be the move that cracks open new international markets by sending your highest performer to the frontlines. Or it simply means retaining that early hire who practically built the foundations of the company — their context, IP and breadth all practically impossible to train into a new hire.

What does good look like?

Asked on what a well-run move actually feels like for the person going through it, Christine reaches for two words: supported and excited. Both of these words point towards one thing — transparency. Moving across the world is no easy feat and things can sometimes go wrong. A visa delay, or unexpected documents needing to be sent — a good leader talks about them up front and doesn't leave them in the background waiting to be a problem.

"Even if you can't say for sure 100% this is what will happen, just showing some idea of how you'll be supported or what you need to anticipate — because I think people do forget it's a huge life move. Sometimes you're selling your house and you're pulling kids out of school. I personally think it's always worth it for the opportunity. But if you're not talking about the potential issues, I think it's sort of short-selling everyone."

Relocation is a layered process. To do it above and beyond, you need to think beyond just the move itself. A company Christine sings the praises of is Lovable. They have been moving most of their talent in-house to Stockholm. Lovable views relocation less like a process and more as a wholesale household transformation.¹ There's pre-arrival and post-arrival — two separate but equally important halves of creating a good experience. Lovable has created dedicated co-working for spouses of relocated employees. Things like Slack channels and recommendations on where to go in Stockholm all present a cohesive, comforting post-arrival experience for the entire household. It's employee experience that reaches past the employee. Culture that a spouse and kids can feel too.

Where good intentions break down

Even well-intentioned companies keep tripping on the same two mistakes when it comes to global mobility. The first is the chain of events before you can file for a visa.

"Sometimes they haven't really finished setting up their entity, or they don't have a bank account. You need all of those things for basically any employer-sponsored visa. No government is going to take a company's word that it can pay someone without the paper trail behind it."

There are many details that get swept under the rug from the standard feel-good relocation story but it's the company's burden to manage these expectations. From watching plenty of companies embark on this journey, Christine believes most mistakes are made when the process is simply underestimated. The second common mistake is human error. An unfortunately not-uncommon scenario is managers thinking it's easier to relocate an employee because they've done it before. No two employee relocations will be the same. Differences in visa applications, immigration laws, household circumstances, and even whether someone has a degree can all change the fate of someone's relocation journey.

"Managers will tell me they just did this visa for someone else, it's basically the same, and then they'll sign off on it. Then they come to us and it's not actually the same. This person doesn't have a degree."

One quiet variable can flip a routine case into an improbable one, and the person least equipped to spot which variable matters is usually the one who already made the promise. By the time the mistake is revealed, someone has told their family a date, maybe even started looking at apartments. That employee experience has marked with a false promise and becomes something the company can never take back.

The last few years taught everyone that the best person for a role could live anywhere — remote work made the entire world a hiring pool overnight. But the pendulum is swinging back. Companies are rediscovering the value of being in the same room, the same building, the same time zone. What hasn't changed is the appetite for that global talent in the first place. Companies aren't willing to give up the range of experience and thinking that came from hiring without borders. As Christine puts it:

"There's potentially going to be an interesting time for global mobility where people are still wanting the international talent... but then they want to be in person... you need to sponsor visas, you need to import those people or export them and put them where they need to be."

Global mobility isn't what's left after remote work receded. It may just be the only way to keep the talent you fought to access, now that you actually want them across the table instead of the screen.

Wanting your global talent in the room is one thing. Getting them there is another. Concord Visa specialises in that second part.