Outsourced Teams in Bulgaria

In this model the people work full time for you — your projects, your standups, your priorities — but their employment contract is with Three Link Talent. We run the payroll, the mandatory contributions and the employment paperwork in Bulgaria. You pay one monthly fee per person and you manage the work.

This is staff leasing, also called staff augmentation or a dedicated team. It is not project outsourcing: we are not quoting you a fixed scope or a delivery date, and we do not take responsibility for what the team builds. You direct the work. We carry the employment.

Who this suits

• You want to hire in Bulgaria but have no legal entity here and do not want to register one yet.
• You are testing whether a function works from this market before committing to it.
• Headcount moves with demand — three people this quarter, six next, back to four after.
• You need someone working in six to eight weeks, not after a company registration, a bank account and a payroll provider.
• You want the option to move people onto your own payroll later, once an entity exists.

It suits Bulgarian companies too, usually for a different reason: a project needs four extra people for ten months and nobody wants to be making ten-month redundancies at the end of it.

It does not suit the core of your company. The people who hold the key decisions and the institutional memory should be on your own contracts. If you ask us to lease you exactly that person, we will say so.

How it differs from permanent placement

Commercially. Permanent recruitment is one fee, paid once, after which the cost is simply your salary line. Here there is no placement fee at all. You pay a monthly amount per person for as long as the person is with you, and the cost stops after the notice period when you stop. Over a long horizon the recurring model costs more than a one-off fee. Over one or two years, once you count entity setup, accounting, payroll and the cost of unwinding it all, it frequently costs less. We will run that comparison with you, including the point where it flips.

Legally. The person signs a Bulgarian employment contract with us. We are the party on that contract, we run the payroll and the mandatory social and health contributions, we administer statutory leave and sick leave, and we run the termination process if it comes to that. You have no employment relationship with the individual and no Bulgarian payroll obligations. What you have is a commercial services contract with us.

Confirm with your lawyer: the exact contracting structure, any registration requirements that apply to it, and how the arrangement is described in your client contract. This page describes the mechanics; the wording in the agreement should be checked by counsel before this goes live.

Who manages the person day to day

You do. Your manager assigns the work, sets priorities, holds the conversations about the work itself, reviews output and decides what the person does this week. Treating a leased team member as a supplier who receives tickets from a distance is the fastest way to make this fail.

What stays with us:

• The employment contract, the payroll, the contributions and the payslips.
• Statutory leave and sick leave administration — you approve when someone takes holiday, we handle the paperwork.
• A regular check-in with the person about how the arrangement is working, separate from your performance conversations.
• A replacement search on the same brief if someone leaves.
• Everything that has to be filed with a Bulgarian authority.

What you are and are not responsible for

Yours:

• Day-to-day direction, priorities and deadlines.
• Access to systems, tools and licences, and the equipment they work on unless we agree otherwise.
• Onboarding into your team the way you would onboard an employee — introductions, context, documentation.
• Feedback, and telling us early when it is not working. Early is fixable.
• Notice, in line with the contract, when you want to reduce the team.

Not yours: gross-to-net calculation, social and health contributions, employment contract drafting and registration, statutory leave accrual, sick pay administration, and the legal process around ending an employment relationship in Bulgaria. Those are the parts that push companies into registering a local entity, and they are the parts you are paying us to absorb.

How an engagement starts

Week one. We agree the profiles, the rate build-up and the contract. Weeks two to six. We recruit, using the same screening process as permanent placement, because the person has to be right regardless of whose payroll they sit on; you interview and you choose. Then. Contract signed with us, notice served at their current employer, start date set. The person is in your standup on day one and on our payroll from the same date.

The recruiting part is not faster because the model is different. What is faster is everything around it: no entity registration, no local accountant, no payroll software, no separate employment law advice for a first hire.

Where the people work

Most commonly from Sofia — from your office if you have one, from home, or in a hybrid pattern you set. We are an outsourcing partner in Sofia by default, but the Bulgarian market is comfortable with remote work and we recruit nationally when the role allows it. Working hours are set to overlap with your team; full overlap with Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordics and the UK is straightforward from this time zone.

How it is priced

One monthly fee per person. It is built from the gross salary, the mandatory employer contributions on top of it, and our margin for carrying the employment and running the administration. We show you that build-up rather than quoting one opaque day rate, because you should be able to see what share of the money reaches the person doing the work.

Confirm the actual figure: your margin or multiplier, the minimum engagement term, the notice period on each side, and whether the monthly fee includes equipment, software licences or a training budget.

Confirm the actual figure: your conversion terms — what a client pays to move someone onto their own payroll, and after how many months that fee reduces or disappears.

What we staff

The same two areas as our permanent work: technology — software engineering, QA, DevOps, data — and office functions such as finance, administration and multilingual customer support. Technology is where most staff augmentation in Bulgaria happens, but back-office and support teams built this way are common and usually easier to scale up and down.

If you are not sure which of the two models you need, describe the problem rather than the solution and we will tell you which one is cheaper in your case. Sometimes the answer is to hire the first two people permanently and lease the rest.