Build a Chilean team that reports to you.
The hard part of hiring in Chile is not the contract. It is settling who employs the person, who directs them, and how that sits in an organisation whose managers are in the United States. We handle the structure and the paperwork underneath it — under your own company, or with us as the legal employer.
Who employs the person is not who manages them.
This is the distinction that makes a Chilean team workable, and the one most foreign companies arrive without. Chilean law cares about which entity holds the employment relationship. It does not require that the person giving instructions sit in Chile.
The employer
Your Chilean entity, or us acting as employer of record. It holds the contract, runs payroll, makes the withholdings and answers to the labour authority. A legal position, not a management one.
The manager
Your function head in the United States. They set priorities, review the work, run one-to-ones and decide promotions. Nothing in Chilean law requires that person to be in Chile, or to be Chilean.
The local anchor
Someone in Chile who can sign, receive official notices and deal with what physically happens here. Us, in the early months; often a local lead once the team is large enough to need one.
The structure breaks when the company directing the work is not the company employing the person.
A parent company that engages someone in Chile directly as an independent contractor — full time, invoicing monthly, taking direction from a manager abroad — has built precisely the arrangement Chilean authorities reclassify as employment. The consequence is retroactive: social security contributions for the whole period, fines, and severance calculated as though the person had been an employee from the first day.
The fix is structural rather than contractual. No wording in the services agreement cures it. The person has to be employed by an entity registered in Chile — yours or ours — and from there your managers can direct the work from anywhere.
General information, not legal advice for a specific case.
