Europe isn't one market. It's 40+ countries, each with its own hiring laws, cultural norms, salary expectations, and unwritten rules about how business gets done. Yet time and again, companies enter with a single playbook, a headcount target, and the assumption that what worked at home will work here.
It won't. Not without the right preparation.
Liz Hajjar, Oyster VP of Global Sales, has lived this firsthand: a decade building sales teams in North America, six years leading European operations from London. Joanna Ekebom, Talent Manager at Avomind, a global recruitment firm with deep roots in European go-to-market hiring, has watched the same patterns play out from the candidate side.
Together, they recently sat down to share the five mistakes they see most often, and every single one is avoidable.
Watch the full on-demand recording here →
Mistake 1: Treating Europe As One Market
Germany is not France. The Netherlands is not Italy. The UK is not any of them.
This sounds obvious until you're three months into a hiring process, confused about why your London offer structure isn't landing in Berlin, or why your sales rep is taking four months to get started when you expected four weeks.
Notice periods alone can derail timelines. The average across Europe is around two and a half months. In Germany, for senior employees, that can stretch to four. If you want someone in seat next month, your hiring process should have started months ago.
Salary benchmarks don't travel either. What's competitive in one city may be underwhelming in another, and getting compensation wrong doesn't just lose you the hire. It affects motivation and retention long after.
Mistake 2: Hiring The Wrong Profile For The Market
The instinct is to replicate your best performer. Find someone with the same track record, the same skills, a similar comp package: and assume it transfers.
What you're missing is everything that made them successful: the brand recognition, the inbound pipeline, the team around them, the internal support structure. None of that exists yet in a new market.
The first hire into a new country is a zero-to-one challenge. Not everyone is wired for it. Before you think about hard skills and numbers, ask: has this person built from scratch before? Do they actually thrive in ambiguity, or do they need established infrastructure to perform?
Beyond that, cultural fit to the local market matters just as much as fit to your company. In some markets, candidates also expect things like a local entity and a proper employment contract before they'll seriously consider you. If that foundation isn't in place, you've already lost some of your best candidates before the conversation starts.
Mistake 3: Underestimating Compliance And Employment Complexity
Two paths companies often take when entering a new market: spin up a legal entity, or hire contractors.
The entity route takes months, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and involves enormous internal resources: all before you've hired your first person. The contractor route is faster, but misclassification is a real risk. Several European governments actively monitor for situations where someone is working as a contractor but functioning like an employee. In Austria, for instance, this is a known enforcement area.
There's a third option many companies overlook until they've already learned the hard way: an Employer of Record. An EOR like Oyster becomes the legal employer in-country on your behalf - handling local payroll, employment contracts, and compliance: so you can hire quickly and compliantly without the overhead of entity setup. If the market doesn't develop the way you hoped, you're not stuck unwinding a legal structure.
Candidates notice this, too. A qualified candidate in many European markets who receives a freelance contract doesn't see "flexibility." They see a company that hasn't committed to the market. Employment structure is a trust signal and it's read immediately.
Mistake 4: Ignoring Culture And Go-To-Market Differences
Sales cycles in Germany are longer, more process-driven, and involve multiple stakeholders. Trust is built over time; rushing it doesn't speed anything up - it kills deals. Spain moves differently. The Netherlands values directness. Italy leads with relationships.
A sales rep who thrives in Amsterdam may struggle in Milan. That's not a performance problem, it's a market fit problem. And it's a problem you create by applying the same playbook everywhere.
The companies that expand successfully come in with a hypothesis, not a fixed strategy. They treat each market as a learning curve and stay willing to adapt. Buyers across Europe can tell the difference between a team that's present in a market and one that's actually part of it.
Mistake 5: Not Thinking Enough About Retention
You spent months and significant money getting your first hire in the door. They started strong. Six months in, they feel unsupported. They can't see the company's commitment to the market. They start looking.
Twelve months in, they're gone.
When Avomind conducts replacement searches, the story is nearly always the same: the person wasn't underqualified. They could do the job. They understood the product. But they'd never built from the ground up before. Or they came in expecting more structure than the company could provide at that stage. Or what felt like a strong offer at signing no longer felt competitive in a faster-moving market.
These situations are preventable but only if you catch the misalignment before you hire, not after.
The Through Line
Every one of these mistakes connects. Treating Europe as one market leads to wrong profiles. Wrong profiles create compliance shortcuts. Shortcuts damage trust with candidates. Cultural blind spots misalign go-to-market strategy. And all of it, when not caught early - eventually shows up as attrition.
The good news: every one of these is avoidable with the right preparation, the right partners, and a genuine willingness to treat each market on its own terms.
