As we talked to platforms building global hiring into their products, one question kept coming up: how do I make global hiring look and feel like my own product without building my own Employer of Record?
So far we shared two ways to bring global hiring into your platform: a co-branded Quick Link that gets you live in an afternoon, and Embeddable Modules that drop fully functional components into your UI in days. Both give your customers a global hiring experience using UI we already built for you.
But some platforms want to go further than a pre-built component. Oyster’s APIs let you build exactly as much of the experience as you need. Customize a single workflow, launch a fully white-labeled platform under your own brand, or anything in between.
What does building on Oyster's APIs mean?
Oyster offers compliant hiring, payroll, benefits, time off, and offboarding as API endpoints across the full employment lifecycle. You decide how much of the UI and workflow to build on top of them.
This isn't all-or-nothing. For example, you can integrate just the hiring flow now and layer in more as your roadmap allows.
Owning the UI doesn't mean inheriting the liability. Oyster remains the Employer of Record behind every hire, no matter how much or how little of the interface you build.
What can you build?
So what does building on Oyster’s APIs look like in practice? Here’s one international hire, start to finish, embedded inside an HRIS with Oyster’s APIs.
Hiring. Your customer decides to hire a software engineer in Portugal. They enter the role, salary, and start date on your hiring screen, and your platform sends it to Oyster. Oyster generates a compliant local contract, and webhooks update the hire’s status in your platform through signature and onboarding.
Day-to-day management. Once the engineer starts, they request time off and submit expenses in the same HRIS as the rest of their team. Each request syncs to Oyster, and approvals flow back.
Payroll. At month end, your customer reviews payroll changes in your platform and submits them to Oyster. Invoice and payment data come back in for easy reconciliation.
Offboarding and more work the same way. Your customer never leaves your product, and you capture value they’d otherwise take to an external vendor.
Why build on Oyster's APIs?
- You're backed by specialists, even after launch. Payroll nuances, extended leave, a complicated termination, a surprise compliance question: these moments need people who know what they're doing. Oyster provides you and your customers dedicated specialists across the employment lifecycle, from onboarding through offboarding.
- That expertise is deep because EOR is all we do. Oyster isn't a feature bolted onto a bigger platform. Our specialists bring real depth on local employment law in every market we support, helping you get ahead of compliance risk in the most heavily regulated countries before small issues become expensive ones.
- A developer experience built for partners. We provide comprehensive documentation for developers, a sandbox environment that lets you build and test with dummy data, webhooks for real-time sync, and dedicated technical support during the build itself.
Partners already building on the API are seeing this firsthand:
“With the Oyster API, we enable our customers to onboard their global teams in a few clicks and get a single view of all their people right within Zelt. This saves them tons of time and headaches and reduces manual data entry.”
Polina Vorms | Head of Product, Zelt
How can you get started?
The first step is signing a partnership under the commercial model that fits your business. If you're still weighing Oyster against other EOR providers, our guide on evaluating a global employment partner walks through what to look for beyond the API documentation itself.
From there, you get sandbox access and our API docs along with a dedicated Partner Manager and specialized developer support through the build and after you go live.
Where should you start?
Building on our APIs is the most flexible path, but it's not the only one, and it doesn't have to be your starting point.
- Co-branded Quick Links let you offer global hiring under your own brand in an afternoon.
- Embeddable Modules drop fully functional components into your UI in days, for a native feel without a custom build.
Wherever you start, you don't have to commit to just one path. Mix API endpoints with Modules or Quick Links already live, start with the workflow that matters most, and build out further as your customers, your evidence, and your roadmap allow.
Want to see what you could build with Oyster's APIs? Let's chat!
