As flexible working becomes the norm for more and more businesses, companies are increasingly looking beyond what their local talent pools can offer.
According to a report by global work payments and employment platform Native Teams and recruitment firm Robert Walters, five markets generate almost half (49.8%) of all global cross-border hiring: the US, UK, Germany, Spain and India.
Cross-border hiring between European countries generates 40.9% of all global hiring activity, the report says. This type of hiring is not randomly distributed but concentrated around a small group of economies and markets.
AI is only accelerating this shift. With AI job roles evolving fast, employers are looking abroad to fill their talent gaps.
Within the next three years, around half of all jobs will be fundamentally reshaped by AI, requiring new skills and expectations, according to Boston Consulting Group.
Meanwhile, the UK government’s AI Skills for Life and Work data suggests occupations directly involving AI are also projected to grow by 12.4% over the next decade.
To understand this changing landscape, Sifted sat down with Jack Thorogood, founder and CEO of Native Teams, to unpack how hiring trends have shifted from local to global talent pools and what companies should consider when hiring across borders.
The shift from local to global
Global hiring has quickly become the new normal for many companies and flexible working is no longer considered a perk but a standard employee expectation.
According to Thorogood, location is rapidly becoming secondary to skills and suitability for a role. “What has changed is people don't think about global hiring anymore,” he says. “It just happens.”
Companies in Europe are not necessarily hiring everywhere, but building repeatable routes into a handful of specific markets.
According to Native Teams and Robert Walters, the UK originates the highest number of hiring transactions in Europe with the UK-Spain and UK-Germany being the two most active hiring corridors.
Europe is also one of the leading origin and destination regions for cross-border workforce activity. Most cross-border hiring happens from high-cost countries to lower-cost talent markets.
Countries such as Spain and parts of Eastern Europe attract hiring because they can offer 40–68% cost savings for similar roles, without compromising on skills.
The Covid-19 pandemic only served to accelerate this shift.
People have to look internationally. There's somewhat of a scarcity of talent here in the UK, specifically for industries such as AI.
“Covid definitely changed people's perception. It made people realise they don't need everybody in the office to work productively," says Thorogood.
As demand for skills in emerging technologies and AI grows, focusing purely on local talent is no longer enough for expanding companies, he adds.
“People have to look internationally. There's somewhat of a scarcity of talent here in the UK, specifically for industries such as AI, but also even in the US compared to the demand that there is," he adds.
The AI sector can differ vastly from other professions due to the fact that many formal educational pipelines in the field are still developing and many specialists are self-taught, early adopters or career switchers.
Because of this, talent tends to be more geographically distributed. Companies looking for this type of talent now need to be looking for aptitude and people who are genuinely interested in AI, rather than looking in a specific location.
Data by Native Teams and Robert Walters also shows that 40% of cross-border roles are senior or leadership positions, suggesting global hiring is increasingly driven by access to expertise rather than cost alone.
Global hiring is becoming more and more structured, concentrated and engineered, especially for businesses focused on scaling fast.
Compliance and operational challenges
Finding global talent is not the only hurdle for expanding companies. They also need to make sure they’re staying compliant with local employment laws.
In most cases, companies hiring abroad will need a legal presence or entity in that country such as an Employer of Record — a third-party organisation that hires employees on behalf of another company in another country.
"It's impossible to employ somebody formally abroad if you don't have your own entity in a certain country,” Thorogood adds. “It's one thing finding a freelancer, but a lot of people want to have a formalised employment contract so they can have that certainty."
Employers must ensure their contracts comply with local regulations, taxes and social contributions are managed correctly and employees’ legal rights are protected.
Companies that start to hire globally rarely stop at hiring in just one additional country.
Rather than understanding every country's individual employment framework, employers can utilise third parties such as Native Teams to ensure greater control over compliance, reduce costs and “build the infrastructure behind borderless work," Thorogood adds.
These organisations can handle local employment requirements, process payroll and tax obligations and ensure legal compliance across jurisdictions.
One of the bigger challenges of hiring abroad is paying employees. Fintech infrastructure should also be utilised by employers to do this.
These platforms can process payroll across multiple countries, convert currencies and reduce the cost and complexities of international transfers.
“Companies that start to hire globally rarely stop at hiring in just one additional country,” Thorogood adds. “They tend to recruit from multiple markets and teams become geographically diverse very quickly.”
Future of global hiring
Job candidates now hold flexibility in the same regard as salary, benefits and career development opportunities, says Thorogood. Cross-border hiring is going to become less random and unevenly distributed and more of a structured growth strategy.
“Not every employee will want to take an employer up on flexible remote working but to have it as an option is something people like to have,” he adds.
The option for remote work is increasingly changing where people choose to live and work. Traditionally talent clusters emerged around major cities and workers tended to move to where their employers were based.
There's going to be an evolution of the internal structures of companies.
Remote work now allows employees to detach where they live from where they work and choose locations based on lifestyle rather than employment opportunities.
Talent hubs are still rapidly emerging but for different reasons. Hubs traditionally formed due to universities, company headquarters or concentrated employment opportunities.
Today’s talent hubs are increasingly emerging around quality of life, affordability and lifestyle advantages.
‘AI is bringing huge change’
Thorogood predicts the next phase of work won’t just involve more global hiring but significant organisational restructuring.
“AI is bringing huge change to companies. There's going to be more reconfiguration of workforces over the period ahead than we ever have seen before,” he says.
Between 2023-2025, 1.3m AI roles were added to LinkedIn with 774k of these being data annotators and 177k AI engineers. In tech and AI roles, the UK also generates 20.4% of all global hiring, ahead of the US at 15.3%.
As existing roles adapt and new AI specialist roles emerge, companies are having to reassess their needs and reallocate resources.
New positions are rapidly being created and “the trends we're going to see over the next three to five years is going to be mass global hiring and global firing," Thorogood adds.
“That doesn't necessarily mean everybody's going to get sacked, but there's going to be an evolution of the internal structures of companies. New roles need to be filled and the quicker the pace of change, the faster the global distribution of teams will occur."
To get the full insights into global hiring, read the report here.
