How AIRS Medical hired across Europe without new entities with Deel

AIRS Medical, headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, employs around 60 people across legal entities in Germany, Japan, and the United States—with team members also based across Europe. Ezra Lim, global HR manager at AIRS Medical, oversees HR for the company's teams in Japan and across Europe. In Europe, where AIRS Medical has no legal entities, he's responsible for staying on top of labor law, tax, and benefits requirements without a local HR presence.

“If you have an international workforce scattered across so many different countries, it’s really difficult for one global HR manager to keep track of the labor laws, taxes, and benefits in more than five or six countries.” —Ezra Lim, Global HR Manager, AIRS Medical

AIRS Medical uses Deel’s EOR to employ team members in countries where it has no legal entities, and Deel’s Contractor solution to manage an independent contractor relationship in Poland. Rather than weighing entity setup costs and timelines country by country, Lim manages the entire process—contracts, compliance checks, and country-specific pay requirements like 13th-month salary—from a single platform.

“Whenever I reach out with any regulatory questions, I get an email back within 30 minutes.” —Ezra Lim, Global HR Manager, AIRS Medical

Beyond fast email responses, Lim credits the relationship with the Deel team for keeping day-to-day questions from piling up.

“We have monthly check-ins with the team, and since moving to Slack, it makes it much easier to communicate instead of sending emails to solve small issues.” —Ezra Lim, Global HR Manager, AIRS Medical

Equipping a distributed team without the logistics headache

AIRS Medical also relies on Deel IT to provision and retrieve equipment for its global team, choosing between buying or renting laptops and shipping them directly to new hires—along with other accessories. AIRS Medical had already been using Hofy for equipment provisioning before Deel acquired Hofy, and Lim found the transition to Deel IT seamless.

“Deel IT has been great in helping us choose between buying or renting a laptop, sending it directly to the employee’s house, and retrieving it once the job is done.” —Ezra Lim, Global HR Manager, AIRS Medical

Setting up a new hire used to take AIRS Medical more than a month. With Deel, Lim now creates a new hire's profile roughly two weeks before their start date—enough time for contract review, work permit and background checks, and equipment delivery, which typically arrives within a week using express shipping.

The platform's depth showed up most clearly when an employee returned from maternity leave and requested reduced hours. Local law didn't allow AIRS Medical to reduce the employee's annual salary directly, so Deel's support team recalculated the adjusted salary and processed the change on Lim's behalf.

“It took me less than a day—maybe half a day—to figure everything out and assure our employee that she wouldn’t be losing any of her benefits while on maternity leave.” —Ezra Lim, Global HR Manager, AIRS Medical

For AIRS Medical’s leadership, the value of Deel comes down to a straightforward trade-off: the cost of the platform against the cost, and risk, of trying to stay compliant country by country without it.

“That in itself justifies why we need Deel—plus being able to work with such a talented community scattered across Europe. Building a legal entity in every country we hire in just wouldn’t make sense.” —Ezra Lim, Global HR Manager, AIRS Medical

Two years into the partnership, Lim says the initial hesitation some employees felt about being employed under the EOR model has faded entirely, replaced by confidence in how compliance and support are handled behind the scenes.