EXCLUSIVE: EOR B Corp Oyster appoints a new VP of People and CRO

Employer of record (EOR) B Corp-certified company Oyster has announced two new strategic appointments – a new VP of People and a new Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

With a decade of experience in the HR space, most recently at Clickhouse and Elastic, Marina Farthouat joins Oyster as VP of People, while Geraldine MacCarthy joins from Personio where she served as CRO for four years.

Geraldine MacCarthy, CRO, Oyster.

For an exclusive news story, UNLEASH sat down with the new Oyster executives to find out why they are joining the EOR company, and what their plans are for the future of the HR tech company.

MacCarthy shares that it’s “no coincidence” that she and Farthouat joined in the same week.

“In a traditional business, the CRO sits over here, and the VP of People sits over there, but actually, Marina and I are going to be working hand in glove, both internally and externally”, she notes.

When it comes to excitement about joining Oyster, both executives agree that ethics and compliance were top of mind.

Farthouat stated that as a practitioner, she has spent a lot of time purchasing HR tech solutions – “I have been concerned about the level of ethics and compliance in the industry.

“You can’t afford to have to use a provider that’s questionable when it comes to integrity at all”.

She tells UNLEASH: “I’ve been very impressed by Oyster, because I have seen them be so focused on that piece. I know it is not glamorous, but actually for a practitioner, that’s what you expect to be table stakes”, and often it’s not.

This plays into why she can’t wait to be customer 0 for Oyster. A challenge she faced in previous roles was that she couldn’t feed that customer insight into products.

The ethical future of EOR at Oyster

UNLEASH was keen to find out what Farthouat and MacCarthy have planned in their new roles at Oyster, both in the short and long term.

“We remain focused in EOR. We don’t want to dilute our focus by trying to do too many things at once,” notes MacCarthy.

We are somewhat of a challenger in the market, and we see our way of doing it as very different with high compliance and high ethics.”

MacCarthy continues: “In terms of me coming in, my role is to pull together the go to market teams and to make sure that we have a clear, cohesive strategy across each of our core markets that we serve.”

She plans to pull on her experience of working in the HR tech space for the last four years – “I have deep empathy for the pains and the challenges that HR professionals can face at varying different cycles. I’m really excited to bring that into the team”.

Marina Farthouat, VP of People, Oyster.

For Farthouat, she is focused on getting to know the People team at Oyster, as well as looking externally at how she can support customers with their HR challenges by open sourcing best practices to the market.

She tells UNLEASH: “It’s very strange that in our industry, when you’re dealing with people’s lives and livelihoods, and that it’s not more consistent.

“You can work for one company that treats people badly [but within the law], and then you go to another company, and it is amazing.”

So, she is committed to “bringing more consistency” and ensuring that the wider HR community is really focusing on the “the right things for companies and the right things for people”.

At the end of the day, “often business success and people thriving that doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive”, in fact, “it’s the opposite”. “I am very excited that we can show that by being at Oyster”, concludes Farthouat.