How Kaleidos hired their first Andorra employee compliantly when their existing EOR had no coverage

About Kaleidos

Kaleidos is a Madrid-based information technology company founded in 2011. The company incubates and operates its own open-source products, with a focus on free software technology built for a global user base. Its main product is Penpot, the first open-source design platform built for design and code collaboration. With a team of 11 to 50 people and an explicitly people-first culture, Kaleidos hires internationally to bring in the right expertise regardless of location.

The challenge

When Kaleidos decided to hire one employee in Andorra, the first obstacle wasn’t the hire itself: it was their existing EOR provider.

Kaleidos was already working with an EOR for international hires across other markets, and those arrangements had worked well enough. But when they brought an Andorra request to their provider, the answer was no. Andorra fell outside what they could support.

That mattered because Andorra is not a country where a company with no in-country experience can improvise. As Marta Ardizone, Kaleidos's People and Culture Lead, described it: "Every country has its own employment rules, and Andorra is quite particular, complicated, and difficult. We needed someone who really understood how everything worked."

Kaleidos's HR team had no prior exposure to Andorran employment law and no in-country contacts. Researching local regulations and managing the hire independently would have taken significant time, with no guarantee the candidate would still be available at the end of it. A local entity for a single hire was not on the table.

They needed a second EOR provider. The search led them to Rivermate.

What was at stake

Andorra is not an EU member state. It operates under its own employment framework, the Llei 31/2018 de relacions laborals (Andorra's Labor Relations Law), and its own immigration system. Neither automatically mirrors the frameworks of its neighbours, France and Spain.

For a non-resident employee, working in Andorra requires an Active Residency Permit: a combined work and residence authorisation issued by the Servei d'Immigració d'Andorra. The process is employer-led. The Andorran employer (in an EOR arrangement, Rivermate) must demonstrate a genuine job offer and justify why the position cannot be filled by a local candidate. The application includes the signed employment contract, the employee's qualifications, and supporting documentation. Andorra operates an annual quota on foreign worker permits, meaning availability is not guaranteed and timing matters.

On the employment side, all contracts must be in writing and in Catalan, the official language. Employer social security contributions flow to CASS (Caixa Andorrana de Seguretat Social), covering healthcare, maternity, and pension.

There was also a second compliance moment later in the partnership. Kaleidos had a question about employee conditions that needed a clear, accurate answer: what was legally possible, what the risks were, and how to handle it correctly.

“Whenever we had questions about local employment law, we always had someone to guide us. We had a delicate situation about some employee conditions, and Rivermate explained exactly what was possible, the risks, and how to do it in a compliant way,” as Marta mentioned.

Why they chose Rivermate

Two things made the decision. The first was coverage: Rivermate could operate in Andorra when Kaleidos's existing EOR could not, through a combination of direct entities and in-country partners that allows Rivermate to reach markets other providers can't always serve.

The second was the quality of the initial conversation. From the very first contact, Rivermate walked Marta Ardizone through how the hiring process would work, how long it would take, what complications they might encounter, and how those complications would be handled. For a team with no prior experience of Andorran employment law, that level of specificity mattered: it removed the uncertainty of working with an unfamiliar jurisdiction and an unfamiliar provider at the same time.

The detail that stayed with her most was not about Kaleidos at all. Rivermate offered to speak directly with the employee before onboarding began, explaining the process, the timeline, and what the individual would need to navigate on their side. For a people and culture lead whose role is the experience of every person Kaleidos hires, an EOR that extended that care to the hire themselves was a meaningful signal.

“I don’t feel like I’m just another customer. Even if I’m a small client, because I only have one country and one worker, I don’t feel like Rivermate makes a difference between us and customers with a lot of workers,” said Marta.

What Rivermate did

Karl van der Weert, who leads the Customer Success team at Rivermate, led the engagement from May 2025. The team coordinated both tracks of what an Andorra hire requires: the employment contract under local law and the Active Residency Permit for the employee. Rivermate's in-country partner network handled the local elements on the ground.

From there, the working relationship settled into something Kaleidos had been looking for: short lines, fast answers, and no unnecessary process. As Marta described it, “It was very easy. Karl was there whenever we needed him, and he didn’t create any unnecessary meetings or endless email chains. Communication was quick, straightforward, and exactly what we were looking for,”

Later in the partnership, a compliance question arose about the employee's conditions. Rivermate's team explained what was legally possible, the risks, and how to proceed within the local framework.

What this means for similar companies

If you use one EOR provider for your main markets and then hit a hire in a country outside their coverage, you're facing the same situation Kaleidos faced. The options tend to feel bad: find a second provider, navigate local law independently, or lose the candidate to the delay.

Andorra is a specific example of a broader pattern: jurisdictions that are legally distinct, sparsely covered by large EOR platforms, and difficult to navigate without genuine in-country knowledge. Rivermate's mix of direct entities and in-country partners across 180+ countries is built to reach exactly these markets.

For open-source technology companies and other internationally minded businesses hiring across markets where local employment law expertise matters, the model is the same: one point of contact, local knowledge already in place, and a team that treats a single-hire client with the same attention as its largest accounts.