Hiring remotely across Spain: what to settle before you sign

Your office is in Barcelona, you have been searching for weeks, and suddenly the strongest candidate in the process turns out to live in Vigo. She wants the job, you want her on the team, and nobody has yet stopped to think about her collective agreement, her public holidays or how the laptop is going to reach her. We see this a lot, especially in tech and digital roles, where opening the search to the whole of Spain completely changes how many people you can reach.

It is worth doing. But some things are far easier to sort out before signing than three months later. What follows is what we usually go through with companies in that position. It is general guidance, not legal advice: Spanish employment law has its nuances and it changes, so always have the actual contract reviewed by your employment adviser or a labour lawyer.

Start by naming your model

“Remote” means very different things depending on who you ask. For some companies it means never setting foot in the office except for the Christmas dinner. For others it means one week on site every quarter (in which case someone has to decide who pays for the train and the hotel). Then there is hybrid with fixed office days, which rarely works with someone who lives 800 kilometres away, however keen everyone is at the start.

Write it into the job ad exactly as it is. You avoid misunderstandings at the final interview, and it forces you to ask an awkward but useful question: does this role really work remotely? Some jobs run on informal coordination and “got a minute?” chats, and once you take them out of the office they need a lot more structure than you might expect.

The paperwork you cannot skip

In Spain, Law 10/2021 on remote work applies when a significant share of working time is regularly done remotely. In that case remote work has to be voluntary for both sides and set out in a specific written agreement. That agreement has minimum content and, among other things, it must cover:

• an inventory of the equipment and tools the company provides;
• how the costs of working from home are compensated;
• working hours and availability rules;
• the place of work the employee chooses;
• how long the arrangement lasts and how it can be reversed.

Before you design your expenses policy, check your collective agreement (convenio colectivo), because it sometimes already settles part of this.

Next comes the question that puzzles the companies we work with more than any other: which collective agreement applies? It depends on the company’s activity and sometimes on territorial scope, since agreements can be national, regional or provincial. If the person works from another province, get legal advice to confirm which work centre they are attached to. Public holidays raise a similar issue. Regional and local holidays differ from place to place, and sooner or later someone will ask whether they get the day off for your city’s local festival. Pick a rule, write it down and apply it the same way to everyone.

Working remotely does not switch off the usual obligations either. Recording working time is still mandatory, so you need a tool the team will actually use from home. You need a digital disconnection policy, which is a legal requirement but also does a lot to prevent burnout. And the home workstation has to be covered by your health and safety assessment, usually through a questionnaire with help from your prevention service, while respecting the employee’s privacy.

Two decisions best made with a cool head

The first is pay. Some companies adjust salaries to each city’s cost of living; others pay the same for the same role wherever people live. We are not going to tell you which is right. What we do recommend is that it is an explicit decision, based on objective criteria and applied consistently, rather than something negotiated case by case depending on who pushes hardest. With the EU Pay Transparency Directive on its way, being able to justify pay differences will matter even more.

The second is the temptation to go freelance. Engaging someone as self-employed when they work full time, on your hours, with your tools and financially dependent on your company, can end up being treated as a disguised employment relationship. If it looks like a job, treat it as a job. And if you are unsure, ask a labour lawyer before you sign, not after.

Where it usually goes wrong

Legally, remote employees generally have the same rights as office-based ones when it comes to training, promotion, pay and access to information. In practice, what we see go wrong is something else. The person who is not physically there slowly fades from view. They hear about decisions late, contribute less in meetings and, when review time comes, nobody quite remembers what they did.

The fix is a handful of simple habits. Run meetings with the people dialling in in mind, even when most of the room is together. Put decisions in writing instead of leaving them in a corridor conversation. Assess performance on outcomes, against criteria the whole team knows.

Day one starts a week earlier

If accompanying remote hires has taught us one thing, it is how much the first week counts. If the laptop arrives late, the logins do not work and nobody has planned an agenda, the new person spends their first days alone in front of a screen wondering whether they have made a mistake.

So before they start, make sure the laptop has been shipped and set up (and listed in the agreement’s inventory), access is in place with secure authentication, and there is a clear device policy. If they will handle customer data, add some basic data protection and security training. Then give them a go-to person, book conversations with the teams they will work with and set goals for the first 30, 60 and 90 days. If you can manage it, meeting in person during the first few weeks builds a connection that is hard to create over video calls alone.

Before the contract goes out

When a company asks us for a last check, we go through a few questions together:

1. Does the job ad say clearly which remote model it is?
2. Are the remote work agreement and the expenses policy ready?
3. Do we know which collective agreement, work centre and holiday calendar apply?
4. Have we sorted out time recording, disconnection and health and safety?
5. Will the equipment and access be working on day one?

If any answer is “not yet”, better to find out now than once the person has joined. And if you are about to run your first remote search and would like someone alongside you who has been through it many times, drop us a line and we can look at it together.