He keeps fifteen people working on global risk for a living, borrows his best B2B ideas from the consumer aisle, and runs the company that turned hiring someone in another country into a two-week onboarding.
The Brief
Most companies treat “let's open a role in Portugal” as a six-month legal expedition. Jim McCoy runs the company that treats it as a calendar invite. Atlas HXM, the firm he has led since December 2023, pioneered the direct Employer of Record model: it owns its own legal entities in country after country, so a client can put a fully compliant employee on the ground in roughly two weeks instead of standing up a subsidiary from scratch.
That is the thing to understand about McCoy before anything else. He did not arrive at Atlas to write a manifesto. He arrived to make the unglamorous machinery of international employment - payroll, benefits, work permits, the tax code of 160-plus jurisdictions - feel like a single, consistent product. The pitch is not the technology. The pitch is that the handoff between countries should not feel like a handoff at all.
His read on the competition is unsentimental. Many rivals, he says, are aggregators stitching together local partners, and the seams show as “clunky” handoffs. Atlas sells the opposite: one experience, one report, one throat to choke. In a market full of consolidation noise, he is betting clients quietly want the boring promise of consistency.
At a glance
Where he sits
Atlas HXM, headquartered in Chicago at 1 N Franklin St, is a Series B human-experience-management company in the global workforce space. McCoy succeeded founder Rick Hammell, who stayed on as chairman and majority shareholder. The handover was framed as growth, not rescue: bring in an enterprise operator to scale what a founder had built.
By the numbers
“What your clients experience becomes your brand.” Jim McCoy
What he's building
His clients keep asking the same thing: not just how to hire abroad, but where. McCoy wants HR leaders armed with talent-acquisition intelligence so a hiring map is a decision, not a hunch.
He keeps roughly fifteen people working solely on global risk management - stock options, data-privacy compliance, the moving target of local law. Compliance here is not a footnote. It is the offering.
Where competitors aggregate and hand off, Atlas owns its entities and unifies the reporting. The wager: in a consolidating market, consistency is the feature people actually pay for.
Footprint, then and now
Two chapters of the same idea: meet talent where it lives. The reach he built at ManpowerGroup was global. The reach he inherited at Atlas is wider still.
The route here
The thread
Read the timeline backward and a single obsession appears. At Manpower he learned that scaling across borders is really a compliance problem wearing a sales suit. At Atlas he gets to solve it at the source, by owning the entities rather than renting them.
He calls himself a borrower of ideas. He studies B2C consumer techniques and imports them into the buttoned-up B2B world, on the theory that you don't need to invent everything when someone has already solved it one aisle over.
And he over-shares on purpose. With teams and clients alike he errs toward telling them more than they asked for, and says he is continually amazed by the ingenuity that openness sets loose.
In his words
I am thrilled to join a team of HXM leaders and problem solvers that are pushing the boundaries and transforming what the global workforce looks like.
As the new CEO of Atlas, I aim to ensure Atlas remains a pioneer, pushes boundaries and fosters a positive work environment.
There is no reward without taking some risk.
Clients want more data, and more knowledge, to help us make informed decisions about where we hire people.
You don't need to invent everything.
What your clients experience becomes your brand.
The bigger why
Ask McCoy what he loves most about Atlas and the answer is not the platform. It is access. He talks about providing economic opportunity to people who otherwise might never have had it, and about virtual work models that let a paycheck reach a community a multinational would never have bothered to open an office in.
It is an unusually idealistic line for a man whose day job is tax compliance across 160 countries. But it is also the logic of the whole enterprise. If hiring across a border becomes as simple as hiring across a state line, the map of who gets a shot quietly redraws itself.
On the industry's consolidation chatter, he stays cool. Look for the players who've been around the longest, he says, the ones reliably in the top three. He thinks the scramble for scale is, for Atlas, an opening rather than a threat - and that the future, in his words, is something to be excited about.
Culture, his version
He wants teams that celebrate wins out loud and learn fast from the losses. The risk is the point; the safety is what makes the risk survivable.
Share more than feels comfortable. Then watch what the people around you do with the information.
The mechanics
There are two ways to put an employee on the ground in a country where you have no legal presence. You can rent a local partner who technically employs them on your behalf, or you can work with a provider that owns its own legal entity there. Atlas built its business on the second path, and McCoy has made it the center of his sales story.
The difference sounds like plumbing until something breaks. When a provider leans on a patchwork of local partners, every country is a separate contract, a separate point of contact, a separate way of doing payroll. McCoy's word for the result is “clunky.” A late payment in one market, an inconsistent benefits package in another, a report that doesn't line up with the report from the country next door. The seams are invisible right up until they aren't.
Owning the entity changes the unit of accountability. Instead of managing partners, Atlas manages itself, and a client gets one experience and one set of numbers across the whole footprint. That is why McCoy keeps returning to consistency as the product. In a category where everyone promises global reach, he is selling the unglamorous guarantee that the hundredth hire feels exactly like the first.
It is also why he treats compliance as something to invest in rather than outsource. The fifteen-person global risk practice is not a cost center in his telling. It is the reason a client can sign in confidence that a stock-option grant in one jurisdiction and a data-privacy rule in another are both being handled by people whose only job is to handle them.
The handover
Atlas was built by Rick Hammell, who founded the company and, when he stepped back from the CEO role, stayed on as chairman and majority shareholder. That detail matters. McCoy did not inherit a turnaround; he inherited a going concern from a founder who still holds the largest stake and a board seat.
Hammell's stated reason for the hire was specific: McCoy's international client-servicing background and his strength in building scalable, efficient solutions for enterprises while still prioritizing the local user experience. Read that as a job description. Atlas had the model and the momentum. What it wanted next was someone who had already run global accounts at the scale Atlas was growing into.
McCoy framed his own arrival in the language of continuity, not reinvention: keep Atlas a pioneer, keep pushing boundaries, keep the work environment positive. For a company in its Series B growth stretch, that is the trickier assignment - scale the machine without breaking the thing that made it worth scaling.
Margins & marginalia