London 51°N · Cape Town 33°S · one working day
South Africa’s best marketing and tech talent, for 40% less than the true cost of a UK hire.
We find you senior professionals in South Africa and place them in your team full time. They work your hours, on your projects, under your direction. We take care of the contract, the payroll, the admin and the HR. You pay one monthly fee, and if it ever stops working out, we replace them for free. Forever.
- candidates placed
- 500+
- UK clients
- 200+
- brief to contract, typically
- 21 days
- replacement terms
- Forever
Trusted by the fastest growing agencies
Companies that have hired through Kadraa include ADR Products, AIP, ALT Agency, Accelerate Agency, Addition Finance, Adhesive Media, Affluent Agency, Agilio Software, Allocator, Anyvan, Aqueous Digital, Assertive, Bahe Design, Bastion and Flowe, BeQuick Media, Bear Jam, Beetu.Be, Bigfoot Digital, Bite IT Marketing, Blink, Bolt, Bootcamp, Brace Creative Agency, BrainKind, Brave Bison, Breathe, Cabot Insights, Cantena Media, Caura, Checkboard, Clair De Lune, Click Expose, Clickoo, Cloud Construct, CommVersion, Heur Positive, Creative Media NI, Diginius, Digital Optimisation, Digital Ethos, Digital Marketing Specialist, Direct Response, Distribute Digital, Dominate Dental, EVOLVE, EasyChew Normal Charcoal, Equimedia, Equinet Media, Eyeful, Fantastic Services, Fibre Marketing, Fill My Funnel, Fliff, Forj Media, Get Leads, GlasGrowth, Good e Learning, Gorilla Marketing, HSNF, Herdl, Herrington Carmichael, Hilti, Hopscotch, Hugo Carter, Immersive Me, IncreaseFlow, Interactive Concepts, Itineris, JBI Digital, Jakala, Kaweb, Kingpin, Komodo, Kwery, LDB, LP Marketing, Leslie, Maley Digital, Mativus, MiniSocial, MobyMax, MoneyBoat, MoreDemand, Muve, MyCashline, OFFERNET, Noise Agency, Notox, NuOptima, Nuvictus, Opticomm Media, Optimisably, Without Cut off, Pearl Lemon, Phizz, Pinnacle, ProGlobe, Prospect Path, Dog, Push Group, Reason, Receptional, Reflect Digital, SP with plum, Sarah Clay, Savree, Sharp Ahead, Singulier, Smart Websites Plain WEB, Smithfield Agency, Social Media Time, Somebody Digital, Sozo, SpotDev, Squibble, Story Shop, Strike Digital, Sweet Digital, Switch Jam, TalentSpa, TechInformed, Texture, The Media, Thundr Digital, Titan Network, Tobin Capital, Traction, Treefrog Design, Tuck, Twenty Degrees, Unusual Group, Uprated, Vendo Digital, VisualSoft, Vivactive, We Are Sunday, WedGen Media, WhizzDigital, Woya, Yellowball, adhesive media, broker diary, capitalixe, coregeo, creative media home page, Hoxo, digital litmus, diploma, durabilt outdoors bg, learna, Switched amplify long, mvf, original, rafflehouse, redrhino, robot zebra, tradectory.
The problem, itemised
A “£40,000 hire” does not cost £40,000.
Before overheads, software or a recruiter’s placement fee, UK employment adds its own stack on top of every salary. Most budgets forget it exists. It exists.
The important part
And no, cheaper does not mean worse.
Let’s be blunt, because it’s the first thing sensible people worry about. Most cheap offshore hiring gets you exactly what you paid for. This is not that. A South African marketer or developer is the same standard of person you’d hire here. They just live somewhere life costs less, so their salary goes further. You pay less. They earn well. Nobody got a worse person.
The model
Built to favour the UK employer. That’s the point.
There are three ways to bring someone from another country into your team. Two of them hand you a pile of obligations along with the person. Here they are in plain English.
Use a recruitment agency
They find someone, you pay a large one-off fee, and then you're on your own. You can't employ someone in South Africa from the UK, so you'd contract with them directly: drawing up the agreement, sending money abroad every month, and handling anything that goes wrong, on your own. If it falls apart after the guarantee runs out, a new hire means a new fee.
You carry everything.
Use an Employer of Record
A platform in the other country legally employs the person, then rents that employment to you. You pay their salary plus a platform fee, sign up to someone else's employment machinery, and still run the relationship. It exists for big companies opening in new countries. It is heavy going for hiring one marketer.
You carry most of it.
We take care of all of it
We find the person, and they sign with us, not with you. They join your team full time and work under your direction like any colleague. We run the recruitment, the contract, the payroll and the HR, and if it ever stops working out we replace them for free. You pay one monthly fee. That's the whole arrangement.
You get the person. We carry the rest.
For the record: we spent years as a recruitment agency. That is what the reviews on this site come from, and the search muscle hasn’t gone anywhere. We built this model because we watched what the old way costs the people who pay for it.
Calculator & pricing
Run your numbers.
- Salary
- £40,000
- Employer’s National Insurance15% over £5,000
- £5,250
- Pension auto-enrolment3% employer minimum
- £1,013
- Paid monthly
- £2,313/mo
- Recruitment fee
- £0
- Employer’s NI, pension, admin
- £0
Figures are indicative, not a quote: each consultant sets their own asking price, and the exact monthly fee is agreed with you before you commit to anything. UK side uses 2025/26 employer’s NI and pension minimums, before recruitment fees, software, equipment and the other costs a UK employee carries.
What you get
One monthly fee. Everything below is inside it.
No setup fee, no placement fee, no platform fee, no charges for moving money to South Africa. The fee you agree is the number you pay, and this is what it covers.
Prefer the standard recruitment model?
We can still help you with that. We find the person, they contract with you directly, and you pay a 20% fee, payable when the hire starts, with 3-month replacement terms.
The process
Brief to signed contract, typically in 21 days.
Your time cost through the whole thing: one call and the interviews. Everything else runs on our side of the meridian.
Discovery call
30 minutesYou tell us about the role and what it would pay in the UK. We tell you honestly whether the model fits, and give you an indicative monthly fee on the call.
Search and shortlist
your time cost: interviews onlyWe source, vet and shortlist against your brief, and adjust as your picture of the role sharpens. You meet only candidates worth your time.
Contract signed
typically day 21You choose. Your consultant signs with Kadraa, never with you, and a start date is agreed. No placement fee changes hands, because there isn't one.
Deployed into your team
from day oneThey work your hours, in your tools, under your direction. We run payroll, foreign transactions, admin and HR behind the scenes. You pay one monthly fee.
The guarantee
Recruiters guarantee a replacement for 3 to 12 months. Ours never expires.
If it stops working out, at any point and for any reason, give one month's notice and we start looking for a replacement the same day. No time limit. No replacement fee.
Compliance
The questions your finance director will ask. Answered before they’re asked.
No employment relationship
Your consultant contracts with Kadraa, not with you. You direct their day-to-day work, and the contractual relationship and its obligations sit with us.
Under the Kadraa model, we contract directly with your consultant in South Africa. You get a full-time, dedicated professional embedded in your team, working your hours, in your tools, on your priorities. The contract that governs their engagement is between them and Kadraa. You do not become their employer, in the UK or in South Africa, and you do not need to set up a South African entity or engage an Employer of Record.
No employer's National Insurance
Your consultant is not on your UK payroll, so employer's NI does not arise on your monthly fee.
For a UK employee, employer's National Insurance adds 15% of everything above £5,000 to your wage bill. On a £40,000 salary that is £5,250 a year before anything else. Because your Kadraa consultant is not your employee and is not paid through your payroll, there is no employer's NI on the arrangement. You pay one monthly fee to Kadraa, and that is the whole cost.
No pension auto-enrolment
Auto-enrolment duties attach to your UK workers. Your Kadraa consultant is not one, so no employer pension contributions arise.
UK employers must auto-enrol qualifying staff and contribute a minimum of 3% on qualifying earnings (£6,240 to £50,270 in 2025/26). These duties apply to workers working in the UK under a UK employment relationship. Your Kadraa consultant works in South Africa under contract with Kadraa, so the duty does not attach to you.
No UK employment-law exposure
UK employment rights like unfair dismissal, redundancy and tribunal claims belong to employment relationships. You do not have one with your consultant.
The rights that make ending a UK employment slow and hazardous (unfair dismissal, statutory redundancy, tribunal claims) arise from an employment relationship. Your consultant's contractual relationship is with Kadraa. If the engagement needs to end, you give one month's notice to us and we handle the rest, including the human side. That is our job, not yours.
IR35: outside its target
The off-payroll rules exist to catch disguised UK employment through intermediaries. This is a South African professional, contracted and paid in South Africa, with no UK tax presence.
IR35 and the off-payroll working rules address UK workers supplying services through their own intermediaries to avoid employment taxes. A South African resident, living and working in South Africa, contracted by Kadraa and with no UK tax presence, is a different arrangement. As with anything touching tax, satisfy yourself with your own adviser. We will happily walk them through the structure.
Your IP, assigned
Everything your consultant creates for you is assigned to you through the contractual chain.
The contract between Kadraa and your consultant assigns the intellectual property they create in the course of the engagement, and our agreement with you passes it through. Work product, code, creative, accounts, documents: all yours.
GDPR-compatible
South Africa's POPIA is a comprehensive data-protection regime, and UK GDPR transfer mechanisms are put in place in the engagement terms.
Your consultant will usually need access to some of your systems and data. South Africa has its own comprehensive data-protection law (POPIA), and the engagement is papered with the standard UK GDPR international-transfer safeguards so your compliance position is documented, not assumed. Your DPO or adviser can review the terms.
This page describes how the Kadraa model is structured. It is general information, not tax or legal advice. For advice on your specific position, speak to your own adviser. We're glad to walk them through the details.
Want your accountant, lawyer or DPO to look under the bonnet? Bring them on the call. We would genuinely rather talk to the careful ones.
Google reviews
Five-star reviews from people you can look up.
Real names, real companies, quoted in full. Six at a time, and they keep coming.
“We've just made our first hire using Kadraa and we've been really impressed. We had a really challenging brief as the blend of skills we needed was unusual. We were also learning more about what we needed based on the candidate CVs and interviews we conducted. Michael did a great job of adjusting to our evolving brief and customised the process to streamline things at our end to minimise the impact on our time. And we got there in the end. I'd definitely recommend Kadraa and we'll be using them again in the future I'm sure.”
“Our experience with Kadraa has been great, from the first meeting to hiring staff they have been helpful, hard working and great at sourcing high quality talent. I could not recommend them any more. Top work guys!”
“Kadraa have been a great agency to work with. Michael in particular is very attentive and has produced some great quality candidates.”
“Excellent recruitment team who will work on the requirements specified. Easy to contact and very professional in communications and approach. Highly recommended to fill any vacancies with quality candidates at reasonable price.”
“We started working with Mike from Kadraa a few weeks back to source a high calibre candidate for our digital marketing team. He immediately *got* it - the profile of candidates we are looking for, our culture and requirements. He is a very attentive recruiter and a great pleasure to work with.”
“The service I've received from Mike has been excellent and the quality of the candidates has been exceptional. Can't recommend Kadraa highly enough!”
On camera
Founders saying it to your face.
Worked with Kadraa for over four years and used Kadraa to scale Digital Ethos to its sale to the multinational agency Cadastra.
One of Kadraa's longest-standing clients, over 20 remote staff hired. How Kadraa helped them scale and embrace remote work to drive growth.
Three high-performing team members hired within his first few months with Kadraa, with more to come.
How Kadraa supports Push Group's people strategy by sourcing exceptional remote talent from South Africa.
The objection stack
Asked, answered, at length.
Short FAQ answers are for sites with something to gloss over. These are written for the careful reader, who is usually the person who signs.
How is this different from using a recruitment agency?
Is Kadraa an Employer of Record (EOR)?
Do I pay employer's National Insurance or pension contributions?
What happens if the person isn't right, or it stops working later?
How quickly can someone start?
What exactly does the monthly fee include?
What about the time difference?
How strong is the talent, really?
Do I need a South African entity, a visa, or any local setup?
Who is this for, and who is it not for?
The next 30 minutes
Bring a role. Leave with its price.
Tell us what the role would pay in the UK and we’ll give you an indicative monthly fee on the call. Typical time from brief to signed contract is 21 days. And if the model doesn’t fit what you need, we’ll say so on the call.
- 30 minutes, with a founder
- An indicative monthly figure for your role, on the call
- No obligation, no follow-up sequence