Dive Brief:
- “Seismic shifts” are taking place in the global labor market, including remote workers migrating back toward urban areas, according to Deel’s annual State of Global Hiring report, released Mar. 11.
- U.S. workers are now as close to major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and San Francisco, as they were in 2021 prior to the pandemic-era exodus, an analysis of more than 1 million workers at more than 37,000 companies globally found. The same is true of London and Paris, the HR and payroll platform reported.
- In another shift, cross-border hiring by nearly 100 top-funded startups “overwhelmingly” is centered on high-income countries, “shattering the myth that international hiring is primarily about cost-cutting,” the analysis showed.
Dive Insight:
“Hiring internationally isn't driven by shrinking budgets, but an intense competition for the best talent. That talent still lives in major metro areas, closer to big cities than they have in recent years,” Lauren Thomas, Deel economist, stated in a press release.
For example, Deel’s analysis found that general AI trainer jobs are the fastest growing cross-border roles on its platform, with a 283% increase in 2025. More than half of AI trainers are based in the U.S., followed by India (7.2%), the Philippines (4.6%), Canada (2.1%) and Kenya (1.7%), the analysis showed.
Notably, seven of the top 10 cross-border roles globally are in sales, marketing or customer-facing functions, signifying that “local market knowledge remains nearly impossible to automate,” Deel said.
As workers migrate back to metro areas, they also appear more willing to accept mandatory return-to-office policies, according to a January report from MyPerfectResume.
A mere 7% of 1,000 U.S. workers surveyed at the end of last year said they would quit their jobs over being required to return to the office, a significant decrease from the 51% who said at the beginning of 2025 that they would resign if forced to go back to the office, the survey found.
However, as companies find their teams spread across different locations, evolving workplace arrangements require flexibility, a September 2025 Gallup report indicated. The report found that hybrid models work best when teams decide the rules, such as scheduling, because people are more productive and less anxious when teams establish shared norms.
