A shift toward flexible employment models is underway as contractor and consulting roles see significant growth across industries.<\/p>\n
The pandemic-induced shift to\u00a0remote work<\/a>\u00a0made it clear that a distributed workforce could be effective and viable. In the years since then,\u00a0cross-border hiring<\/a>\u00a0has continued to flourish due to persistent talent shortages, particularly in the tech sector.\u00a0Korn Ferry<\/a>\u00a0estimated in 2018 that unfilled roles will result in $8.5 trillion in lost revenue by 2030, while\u00a0Gartner<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0McKinsey<\/a>\u00a0report that the talent crunch is limiting growth in high-tech fields like AI, quantum technologies, cloud computing, and more.<\/p>\n To meet these challenges, companies are increasingly\u00a0open to hiring remote talent<\/a>. Research from Gartner shows that\u00a0cross-border hiring for tech roles doubled<\/a>\u00a0from 2020 to 2023, and as of 2022,\u00a058% of organizations<\/a>\u00a0employed tech talent working remotely from other countries.<\/p>\n So, what\u2019s the state of global hiring today? Where are companies hiring talent? What roles are they hiring for? What does compensation look like across roles and regions? To find out,\u00a0Oyster<\/a>, a global employment platform, analyzed the data from its platform, with particular attention to new hires made in the last calendar year. They also surveyed more than 500 HR professionals in North America and Europe to learn about their reasons for hiring internationally.<\/p>\n The full findings are available in Oyster\u2019s\u00a02025 Global Hiring Trends and Impact Report<\/a>: top hiring destinations, in-demand job families and roles, shifting employment models, compensation insights, and more.<\/p>\n Here are five key global employment insights distilled from the platform data and survey results.<\/p>\n Europe is the top region for global remote hiring<\/p>\n Where in the world were companies hiring the most? It turns out Europe is the top choice for global employers. Oyster found that 43% of new hires made through its platform in 2024 were located in Europe, with Asia (inclusive of the Middle East) and North America following at 24% and 20%, respectively.<\/p>\n Drilling down to the country level, the most popular\u00a0talent markets<\/a>\u00a0were the Philippines (9%), the United States (8%), India (7%), Canada (6%), and the United Kingdom (6%). Taken together, these five countries accounted for over a third of new hires on the platform in 2024.<\/p>\n Technology, sales, and marketing are most in demand<\/p>\n Certain types of roles are more suitable for remote work than others, so they\u2019re easier to fill through cross-border hiring. According to the\u00a0World Economic Forum<\/a>, the number of global digital jobs will increase by 25% to over 90 million by 2030. And in Oyster\u2019s recent survey, 57% of HR professionals indicated that their organization intends to\u00a0hire talent in another country<\/a>\u00a0within the next year, with access to a larger talent pool being their top reason for looking beyond borders.<\/p>\n So, what kinds of roles are companies filling with remote, global talent? To answer this question, Oyster looked at all active team members on the platform to see what areas are most supported by international talent. The top three job families for remote talent are:<\/p>\n
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\n<\/ul>\n Why are these the top job categories for recruiting globally? IT roles are naturally remote-friendly, with high global demand and portable skills that let talent \u2018plug in\u2019 from anywhere. Sales and marketing hires often align with global expansion\u2014bringing in local experts who understand regional nuances. Admin and support roles have long been outsourced to extend coverage across time zones, ensuring round-the-clock support via roles like assistants, customer service, and operational support.<\/p>\n The top roles hired on the platform are closely aligned with the above job families. The most frequently hired role is software engineer, accounting for 18% of new hires in 2024. Other popular roles include marketing coordinator, customer service representative, data analyst, and account manager.<\/p>\n Technology, sales, and marketing are most in demand<\/p>\n Traditionally, being employed meant having a full-time job working 9 to 5. But as with remote and\u00a0hybrid work<\/a>, traditional work norms have been disrupted by the gig economy\u2014the rise in\u00a0freelancing<\/a>, contracting,\u00a0fractional work<\/a>, consulting, and more. According to\u00a0McKinsey<\/a>, these \u201cdo-it-yourselfers\u201d value autonomy, flexibility, and meaningful work.<\/p>\n How does this show up in global hiring? Looking at full-time versus contractor roles, there was a 46% increase in new contractor engagements from 2023 to 2024 on the Oyster platform, whereas the number of new full-time hires decreased slightly by 2%. This suggests that contractors are increasingly in demand as companies look for flexible and scalable solutions for their workforce needs.<\/p>\n A related microtrend is a sharp rise in consulting hires, which grew 10 times from 2023 to 2024. Taken together, the increase in contract and consulting work indicates an increasing reliance on fractional, part-time, project-based, or general consulting services. For employers, this could be a strategy to fill short-term talent needs quickly and remain agile, or to mitigate tighter talent budgets.<\/p>\n Median global compensation rises by 4% year over year<\/p>\n We\u2019ve looked at where companies are hiring global talent, but what does compensation look like across borders?<\/p>\n How companies reward people varies across regions and roles, and a robust\u00a0global compensation strategy<\/a>\u00a0needs to consider local compliance requirements, market data, employee expectations, and more.<\/p>\n While salary data always needs to be contextualized, Oyster looked at the compensation data on the platform to uncover the median salary overall as well as for the most frequently hired roles. For the purposes of this report, the salary data has been standardized by converting to U.S. dollars.<\/p>\n In 2024, the median salary for new hires was $74,700, which represents a 4% increase from 2023. For the most in-demand roles, the median salaries were:<\/p>\n
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\n<\/ul>\n Keep in mind that\u00a0total compensation<\/a>\u00a0goes beyond salaries. In addition to\u00a0competitive benefits<\/a>,\u00a0research from McKinsey<\/a>\u00a0shows that employees seek workplaces that offer flexibility, meaningful work, and support for\u00a0health and well-being<\/a>.<\/p>\n Confidence hiring in emerging markets grows<\/p>\n In 2024, the gross payment volume to\u00a0emerging economies<\/a>\u00a0via Oyster was over $137 million, a 29% increase over 2023. As this metric increases year over year, it helps uplift global knowledge workers along with their families and communities.<\/p>\n In 2024, 47% of new hires on the platform were located in emerging economies, which is 3 percentage points higher than 2023. Companies are also becoming more confident in hiring talent in these regions and building geographically diverse teams. While just 37% of companies\u2019 first international hires on Oyster are based in emerging markets, that number rises to 48% for subsequent hires\u2014an 11-point increase. In other words, once employers begin hiring in emerging markets, they\u2019re more likely to continue seeking talent in these markets, gaining confidence and moving past any initial uncertainty.<\/p>\n This story<\/a>\u00a0was produced by\u00a0Oyster<\/a>\u00a0and reviewed and distributed by\u00a0Stacker<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A shift toward flexible employment models is underway as contractor and consulting roles see significant growth across industries.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230959,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3092],"tags":[51,897,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-230958","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-jobs","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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