How Mauve’s Employer of Record in Germany helped Cognisess hire in-country

The challenge

Cognisess, a tech-driven talent acquisition company, specialising in talent assessments and analytics for engaging and managing workforces, wished to retain a valued senior team member who was relocating to Germany for personal reasons. As the move was not part of a planned international expansion strategy, it required the business to quickly find a compliant way to continue employment overseas.

The challenge was to support the individual’s relocation without distracting the leadership team from core commercial priorities or taking on the cost, risk, and time involved in setting up a legal entity in Germany.

The client

Cognisess, part of the DeepLearn Human Science Group, founded by Chris Butt, is a pioneer in talent assessments and analytics for hiring, managing, and reskilling workforces.

The software company uniquely integrates psychology, neuroscience, and AI with workforce data to help HR understand, predict, and unlock individual and team potential as part of their human capital strategy, driving performance, productivity, and business outputs.

Problems faced

Cognisess had limited internal expertise in German employment law, payroll, and compliance. Researching local regulations would have required significant time from senior team members, diverting focus away from product development and client delivery.

Establishing a legal entity for a single employee was neither cost-effective nor proportionate to the immediate need. At the same time, compliance was essential, as Cognisess was keen to ensure full adherence to local employment laws and minimise regulatory or reputational risk while supporting the employee’s relocation smoothly.

Partnering for success: finding a solution

Cognisess partnered with Mauve Group after comparing several providers and recognising Mauve’s strong value proposition and practical approach.

Mauve’s Employer of Record solution enabled Cognisess to employ their team member compliantly in Germany without establishing a local entity, while transferring all employment administration and regulatory responsibilities to a trusted specialist partner.

Key takeaways

• Enabled lawful employment of a senior team member in Germany without entity setup.
• Significant time saved by removing the need to research and manage local regulations.
• Reduced compliance risk and administrative burden.
• Increased confidence to consider similar international employment models in future.

Recommendation from Cognisess

I met Ann (Ellis, Mauve CEO and Co-founder) at a Wales Week event. We got talking, and so when we needed to retain our team member who was relocating to Germany, I thought of Mauve.

Mauve offered competitive pricing and, with them, we were able to expand smoothly into Germany without setting up a company there.

Mauve is a very solid team, very knowledgeable, patient, and full of goodwill. It’s one less thing for somebody in my team to be focusing on. It's important that we abide by the local rules and regulations, but we don't really want to be focusing on that when we want to be delivering quality services to our clients and our users. Partnering with Mauve gives us peace of mind.

Mauve’s 30 years of experience really makes a difference. Ann’s got incredible knowledge of the space and how things operate. She's got an insight, an intuition of where things are going, and I think that's really important. It’s what you want for a business like us, that's in scale mode – we need to be able to rely on our partners.

Mauve's service has been great, and we would recommend and refer. I'm sure we already have actually, in a number of situations.

- Chris Butt, Founder and CEO, Cognisess and DeepLearn Human Science