Deel vs Remote for PR Agencies: A Collective Agreement Worksheet

Not every country ties employment terms to a sector-wide collective agreement, but a meaningful number of European markets do, and Italy's CCNL system is one of the more consequential examples for a services business. Ask directly, for each country you're hiring in, whether a collective agreement applies to the role and, if so, which one, since PR and communications work can sometimes map to more than one sector agreement depending on how the role is classified. Get this answer from the platform in writing before assuming a generic employment contract covers it.

Collective agreements typically define job grades or levels, each with its own pay floor, leave entitlement, and notice period, and an account director should be graded differently than an account coordinator even within the same collective agreement. A platform that defaults every hire to the lowest applicable grade to minimize statutory cost is setting the agency up for a dispute later, when an employee or a labor inspector points out the role was actually senior enough to warrant a higher grade. Ask the platform to walk through its grading methodology for the specific role before you sign off.

Notice periods, severance calculations, and even the grounds on which an employer can end the relationship are frequently set by the collective agreement rather than by the individual employment contract, and these terms can run considerably longer or more restrictive than what a US-based agency would expect from an at-will employment mindset. Confirm the actual termination terms for the specific grade and tenure before you make a staffing decision you might need to unwind later, since ending an underperforming hire abroad can take considerably more time and cost than agencies typically budget for.

Once the collective agreement and grading questions are settled, the practical difference between Deel and Remote comes down to onboarding speed and entity presence in the specific country. For a fast-moving new-business win that needs an account lead staffed within weeks, Deel's faster contracting is the more practical default, provided the grading and collective agreement questions have already been answered correctly rather than glossed over in the rush.

A standing regional team that will carry multiple client accounts over years benefits from Remote's entity-owned structure, both because it supports a more durable employment relationship and because an agency managing a larger local team benefits from having its own entity's standing in the country rather than relying entirely on a third party's infrastructure. A single-client engagement with a defined end date leans toward the faster, lighter-weight platform instead.

Cost per hire for a role like this runs close to $1,200 on average for a nonexecutive position¹, a number worth comparing against the cost of correcting a grading error after the fact. Walk through the five questions above for every new overseas hire, not just the first one in a given country, since collective agreement classification is role-specific and a coordinator hired six months after a director doesn't automatically inherit the same grading logic.

Turn this worksheet into a standing checklist rather than a one-time exercise: which countries carry a mandatory collective agreement, which agreement applies to PR and communications roles specifically in each one, and who at your agency signs off on the grading before an offer goes out. New-business wins tend to compress hiring timelines, which is exactly when a rushed grading decision is most likely to happen, so having the checklist ready before the next win lands protects against exactly that pressure. Revisit the runbook whenever the agency opens staffing in a new country, since the collective agreement landscape doesn't generalize cleanly from one market to the next.

Record these items for each country in your hiring runbook:

• Whether a mandatory collective agreement applies, and which one covers PR and communications roles specifically.
• The job grade assigned to each role, with a named person at your agency signing off on it.
• The notice, severance and termination terms the agreement sets, which can be longer than what your template contract says.
• The pay floors and leave entitlements tied to that grade, which bind you for the whole employment.
• Whether the seat belongs to a standing team or a single-client engagement, since that affects which platform fits.