How Tracksuit's Head of People Found a Strategic Partner for Global Mobility

Before, I was stressed juggling visas across vendors. With Concord on the trickier cases, I finally have a partner I can think with.

Christine Van Hoffen

Head of People @ Tracksuit

Overview

Christine Van Hoffen's old visa workflow was a patchwork. At least six law firms across multiple regions, a backup firm in case the primary stalled, and a two-week turnaround on a simple question that couldn't wait two weeks. Each new case meant reworking evidence another firm had already gathered. Each renewal through a new firm meant starting over.

As Tracksuit's Head of People, Christine is responsible for the thing every fast-growing startup needs and rarely gets right: making the company a place people want to stay. Tracksuit is a New Zealand-founded brand tracking platform with more than 1,000 customers, a recent Series B, and US revenue growing 240% year-on-year. As the team scales across four countries, the mobility programme sits at the intersection of growth, retention, and talent density.

Christine wasn't looking to hand the whole programme to a single firm. She was looking for a partner she could think with on the calls that actually mattered.

Challenge

Six firms, no shared playbook

With at least six law firms across regions, each renewal meant translating evidence from one firm's format into another's. A simple status question could sit unanswered for two weeks. There was no single source of truth for visa history, and no consistent way to assess risk when circumstances at Tracksuit changed.

Startup speed, law firm pace

Tracksuit's culture is always-on. Decisions move in days, not months, and hires expect the same clarity from their employer on something as personal as a visa. Traditional law firms ran on the opposite cadence: long email threads, scheduled calls, conservative defaults. When a candidate needed an answer inside 48 hours, that mismatch cost real momentum.

Under-prepared for the interview

More than once, Tracksuit's people arrived at consular interviews without the prep they needed. Company changes that should have been flagged ahead of submission, like role shifts or restructures, went unmentioned. When things went wrong, they went wrong at the worst possible moment, with a candidate on the other side of a visa officer's desk.

No one to think with on the hard calls

The hardest cases weren't always the most complex on paper. They were the ones with judgment in them: an unconventional role, a tight timeline, a recent restructure. Christine needed a partner who'd weigh the situation with her instead of defaulting to no. Most of her firms didn't operate that way.

The Turning Point: A Partner Who Thinks With You

Christine doesn't remember the exact moment she added Concord to the mix. It was the accumulation: another two-week reply, another renewal that felt like a cold start, another candidate nervously checking in. She didn't need to fire every firm. She needed someone she could route the harder cases to. The ones with judgment in them.

What made Concord different wasn't a better price or a bigger brand. It was the way the team worked. Concord speaks Slack. It reviews evidence in Google Docs. It tracks matters in Notion. For Christine, that meant decisions on those cases stopped living in a separate world of PDFs and formal email threads, and started running inside Tracksuit's own tools. Concord moved at Tracksuit's pace, not the other way around.

The creative edge mattered even more. Where the old default on anything unusual was no, Concord kept thinking. Unconventional roles, recent company changes, tight timelines: the response was usually some version of "let's find a way," and the way usually existed. That changed Christine's relationship to the work. She stopped dreading the conversation and started using it.

When a case is genuinely tricky, Concord is who I call. They think with me instead of defaulting to no.

Christine Van Hoffen

The Outcome

Tracksuit now runs 19 visas across four countries, with more in the pipeline. Concord doesn't handle all of them, Concord owns the cases where pace, judgment, and creative thinking matter most: the unconventional hires, the tight timelines, the calls that would have been a "no" elsewhere. The mobility programme has become part of how the company grows, not a tax on it.

The practical side has shifted too. On the cases Concord runs, context is shared, not rebuilt every time. Questions get answered inside the day. Interview prep and risk-flagging are built into the process, so the surprises that used to surface at the worst moment now surface early, when they can still be solved.

What Christine has bought back is her week. The hours that used to go into chasing law firms now go into the parts of her job only she can do: the policies, the employee experience work, the cutting-edge practices Tracksuit is becoming known for. "We just feel like we're really taken care of," she says.