How to hire globally
The ultimate global hiring playbook. Hiring, relocation, employment built for a distributed world of 2026 and beyond.
Working as a team in a single location is an archaic wet dream.
In our highly fragmented world of IT pros - candidates are scattered all across the world.
It’s still possible to get all your employees working together in the same hub; it just became unacceptably expensive for most companies.
You know the obvious currents behind this. Covid fractured on-site work on a global scale. The Ukrainian war led to a massive exodus of post-Soviet IT brains and their spread all across the world (~several million people according to certain stats), alongside sprawling AI startups that now make remote work a hiring advantage and the new norm.
Our working life is already remote. Even if a single person is remote, your whole meeting becomes one. To be honest, over the last four years I haven’t had a single meeting where everyone was physically present in one room.
The push for RTO is just a BigTech hype that multiple companies decided to follow suit. There’s neither conclusive evidence that it works, nor do companies really enforce it after the first PR wave two years ago (based on my insights in EU Big Tech).
Moreover, RTO backfired because it reduced the value prop for the candidates (the mobility aspect, but more on that later). Maybe if you’re Amazon you can make such trade-offs, smoothing out this downside with higher comp and a reputable brand name.
Personally, I think RTOs signal something about the leadership’s mental model - which was likely forged in a different era (’90s, ‘00s, ‘10s). They are nostalgic about the old ways and try to rationalize the need for RTO. I’ve seen the numbers; there’s no proof it works. It’s dead and we all have to let go.
Modern-day hiring requires you to adopt a different playbook.
The one that works best for a distributed world.
Yes, you can hire and enable your team to work globally and still get great efficiency at a way lower cost.
Here’s how I’ve been doing it for the past two years.
