The Atlas HXMHiring Destination Index (AHDI)

The weights are, in the listed order: 20%, 30%, 10%, 40%. The two shared pillars (the first ones) carry more weight here than in the other two indexes, because employing people directly exposes a company to the operating environment far more than engaging a contractor does. The last two pillars are specific to AHDI.

Labor Market Regulations covers statutory flexibility together with the dismissal friction actually observed — weeks of notice and severance in practice, not only as written — with a ceiling applied where rule of law is weak. Workforce Cost enters differently from the other three pillars. Low employment costs only improve a country's score once the operating environment clears a minimum standard. Without that condition, a country could score well purely for being inexpensive, which is not a recommendation anyone should act on. The gate keeps affordability as something that rewards an environment already worth operating in, rather than something that compensates for one that is not.

The AHDI deliberately rewards flexibility together with a stable and predictable environment, so stable countries with lightly regulated labor markets score well. A high AHDI does not mean "the best place to hire", it means "this is a place where it is more straightforward to employ people directly and manage them on the long term."

The scores are absolute, not a relative ranking. Each one is measured against fixed reference points that stay the same from one edition to the next, so a country's score does not move because another country was added or taken out of the set. And a country only appears once there is real data behind every pillar.

The index is built on a blended data model. We use established public sources — including the World Bank, the OECD, the International Labour Organization, the European Commission, the IMF, and multiple national governments' offices — to establish the baseline for every country, while Atlas HXM layers in proprietary data from its own contractor engagement work, including real classification outcomes, onboarding patterns, and misclassification risk flags drawn from cases Atlas HXM has actually run.

Read the results as bands, not as a ranking. The scores are precise enough to separate a strong country from a weak one, but they are not precise enough to say that 12th place beats 17th. In practice, differences of less than a point should be considered a tie. A high score also means one specific thing and nothing more — a high contractor score says the legal risk is low, not that contractors are the right model for your business.