The post-pandemic shift away from cities has reversed since 2022, with return-to-office mandates playing a role, according to a new report on global hiring trends.
Analyzing more than one million worker contracts across 37,000 companies worldwide, HR and recruitment platform Deel found that people were moving closer to their main offices, even if they still work from home.
The study found the average distance between employees and major cities rose in 2022 but has declined each year since. The trend is particularly pronounced in the US, where workers are now located as close to major cities as they were in 2021. Similar patterns appear in the UK and France.
"The reversal suggests that even fully remote workers value proximity to urban centers. Return-to-office mandates may play a role – workers who expect occasional in-person requirements are less likely to relocate far from cities. Cultural and lifestyle factors likely matter too: after a few years of remote living, some workers appear to be choosing urban or suburban proximity over rural isolation," the report states.
Lauren Thomas, economist at Deel, said international hiring isn't driven by shrinking budgets but by intense competition for the best talent. "That talent still lives in major metro areas, closer to big cities than they have in recent years, and they're a hot commodity for companies around the world. Post-pandemic, there is a slow crawl towards the urban centers that were always where top talent gravitated towards."
Among nearly 100 startups, the study found that cross-border hiring overwhelmingly targets high-income countries, which runs counter to the idea that international hiring is primarily about cost-cutting. Software developers make up 28 percent of cross-border hires among top startups, followed by tech sales (6.2 percent), business developers (4 percent), and AI engineers (2 percent).
Elsewhere in the report, "AI trainers" have emerged as a distinct profession, with the role growing by 283 percent in cross-border hiring in 2025.
The push-pull between remote and office work became a live-wire topic following the pandemic. For example, in 2023 Dropbox closed one-quarter of its office space at corporate HQ in San Francisco. The company operates Dropbox Studios that allow for occasional in-person work. Some staff see it as a perk of the job, and a boost to work-life balance.
However, Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri pushed to get staff back into the office, saying that spending five days a week working from home was perhaps "too much family time." The company later spent $172.5 million on a new building on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay as other companies treated flexible and remote work as a permanent shift resulting from the pandemic. ®
Source: The register