Four takeaways as Atlas’ new CEO shares his top priorities, EOR consolidation and what he’s most excited about

The Employer of Record (EOR) technology vendor Atlas has a new leader at the helm.

Industry veteran Jim McCoy took the reins in late December.

Fresh into his tenure, we sat down with the former ManpowerGroup veteran to find out what direction he wants to take Atlas and what the HR Leader customers need to know.

1. Tackling HR Leaders’ biggest rocks: Acquisition and HCM

Atlas currently supports HR departments via its workforce management platform that enables a company to hire, onboard, manage and pay talent in over 160 countries.

So, where next? And what are the biggest challenges that McCoy sees as being top of mind, that he wants to tackle over the next year?

“First and foremost, when I look at what our clients are asking for, it’s ‘We want more data, and more knowledge, to help us make informed decisions about where we hire people, and why.’

“And so that’s one of the key things I want to tackle is to be able to enable our clients with a number of tools around what should they be paying for when looking for people in the market? What is the availability for a particular skill set? How do I kickstart a recruiting process in the market now? Atlas is not meant to be in the business of recruiting. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t have data that can help our clients to do that effectively, or have partners that would be able to do that for our clients.”

In addition to shoring up data to enable HR departments to find answers on talent acquisition, McCoy spoke about his aim to increase Atlas’ HCM (human capital management) capabilities.

“HCM technology is emerging very quickly,” he says.

“We have some of our own that we built in house. And we are also looking at best in class services that would augment those that we offer. For instance, as benefits get more sophisticated, we want to be able to offer stock options…It’s an important part of compensation, especially in the technology sector we support.”

He added: “The other thing is making sure that our talent within Atlas and our core employees are up to speed on regulation, particularly with so much data privacy regulation set to really impact the way we all work.”

McCoy says he intends to invest in internal education and resources working on data regulation.

“In fact, today I’ve got 15 people just on global risk management practices. Risk management is such an important aspect of what we deliver for our clients.”

2. Bringing learnings from his recruitment career to Atlas

McCoy was previously SVP of Enterprise Solutions at ManpowerGroup, the third-largest staffing firm in the world behind Swiss firm Adecco and Dutch firm Randstad.

He says that this experience stands him in good stead to understand many of the specific problems Atlas’ customer base are facing.

“What I learned in the recruitment space, which is very much applicable to Atlas, is how you manage that blend of being an employee, but working on behalf of a different end customer. And managing that relationship so that you’re not creating any compliance risk is critical,” he says.

“And then, also, I grew my business really, really fast. And I had to figure out how to scale and Atlas is in hyper growth mode now as well. So, I’m here to see what are the systems and the operational norms that we need to put in place in order to be able to reflect that growth aim?”

3. M&A not currently on the horizon

UNLEASH asked whether McCoy envisaged M&A as a tool he intends to use in the short-term to scale Atlas.

“I think we would be opportunistic,” McCoy says.

“We don’t have anything on the horizon at the moment. Certainly what we’re looking to do is acquire technologies through companies. But in terms of actually acquiring another company, it’s definitely not off the table. But it’s not the number one priority.”

However, an area where Atlas could be tempted is employee benefits.

“I think that’s a really interesting area, because right now, our uptake on benefits is not where we would like it to be. Atlas offers them in all the countries where we support our clients, which is 160. And we sponsor visas in about 85 countries as well. But on benefits specifically, we have about a 20% uptake.”

McCoy speculated that some reasons for this could be people getting benefits via a spouse, or using nationalized health care in the market in which they work.

“Still, we’re hoping to kind of evangelize the value of having more robust health benefits and retirement benefits for our worksite employees.”

4. Being reliable in a market facing consolidation

UNLEASH’s rationale for asking about M&A will be obvious to many in the EOR (Employee of Record) space.

Consolidation has been a trend in recent years.

Notable examples in the last two years include Papaya Global acquiring Azimo for a reported $150 million-$200 million. (Competitor Deel was then said to be “contemplating an acquisition of Papaya” eight months ago.)

And Deel completed its acquisition of PayGroup at the close of 2022.

UNLEASH asked McCoy what his message is to Atlas customers on the topic.

“It’s understandable to think about this. And I think my response to that would be to look for the players who’ve been around the longest. Look to the ones that are profitable, and that are the best funded. If you look to the independent analyst reports, we’re always in the top three for providers, reliably.”

He added on Atlas’ competitive landscape:

“A lot of our company competitors in this space are aggregators. Essentially, they’ll aggregate the services of multiple EORs. And what happens is your hand-offs are very clunky for your clients.

“From HR Leaders, what we’re seeing now is almost a second generation of buyers saying ‘We want a more consistent experience. We want consistent reporting, and we don’t want to work with many different EORs in different parts of the world.’

So, that’s actually creating an opportunity for us. I’m excited about what the future holds.

“We have an investor group that’s in there for the long haul. And we’re very happy about that.”