To work remotely or not is no longer the issue. Experts say it’s the limitless hiring for tech roles that’s stealing the conversation.
“Remote is like the gateway drug to borderless,” said Jeremy Johnson, CEO of AI-enabled tech talent marketplace Andela, whose clients include Goldman Sachs, Github and Coursera. “Once you realize that you don’t all have to be in the same office five days a week in order to build a compelling culture and feel connected to the mission and solve complex problems, then you start to think there are amazing people in the whole world. world.”
With technology leaders simultaneously focusing on value-driven innovation and efficiency, technology employment that eclipses national or even global time zone determination is a growing phenomenon. Borderless tech employment has doubled in the past three years, according to Gartner’s CEO Survey 2023. By 2022, the workforce of tech talent in cities like Beijing and Delhi will surpass that of US powerhouses like San Francisco and New York. York, reports the CBRE Global Tech Talent Guidebook 2024. The report cites growing tech talent markets as Bucharest, Romania; Cape Town, South Africa; Cebu City, Philippines; Nairobi, Kenya and more.
Global employment is an example of a luxury that is moving down the value chain, Johnson said. Just as services like Uber increased access to what is essentially an on-demand private driver, talent markets and a digitized workforce are making global hiring more than just a costly C-suite search.
Global payment processing platform Payoneer has its hands in the world of borderless employment from an internal perspective (with around 2,200 employees in 50 countries and more than 25 offices worldwide), but it also benefits from and leads the borderless trend with its customers.
“The rhetoric about globalized opportunity is powerful, but it doesn’t make a difference to the business you’re doing if you don’t actually have the services and tools to do it,” said Payoneer CEO John Caplan.
Pockets of talent around the world
Adam Jackson, CEO of decentralized tech talent platform Braintrust, does things without boundaries. “We don’t have a physical office,” he said. “Everyone works remotely. Every engineer except the one who works at Braintrust is outside the U.S.” Braintrust clients, from NASA to Nestlé, are also building borderless teams, Jackson says.
“It was the case maybe 20 years ago when I moved to San Francisco that the best technology, the best developers, the best product managers and designers all lived here in Silicon Valley,” Jackson added. “That’s not true anymore. There’s still a lot here, but there are pockets all over the world.”
Some leaders, like Johnson, believe that time zone coordination is still important to provide certain employees the opportunity to work synchronously. Jackson, however, takes the view that global innovation with an asynchronous workforce is a chance to create a company “where the sun never sets.”
While there are questions about work-life balance, Jackson says it doesn’t exist in startup culture anyway, but asynchronous work can increase clarity in documentation and minimize the endless routine of meetings, leaving more time for creative thinking and deep work.
Johnson says local labor laws, compliance and payroll are all factors at play in global operations, which is why many organizations have opened centers in specific countries. But even these obstacles are not insurmountable.
AI and the future of work geographies
One thing these experts agree on is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to borderless employment. “Each company has to find its own custom solution,” Caplan said. “You have to design your office footprint, your philosophy of the future of work for the business you’re building.”
Thinking about artificial intelligence innovation and, on the other side of the same coin, AI regulation, Johnson says the European Union’s standard-setting regulatory framework will make it difficult for tech operations to flourish. As more regulatory and judicial laws are put in place around the globe around AI and data, cross-border employment trends will change as part of the puzzle.
“I think Europe is going to have a really tough time over the next few years,” he said. “They’re driving a lot of data innovation outside the continent, and I think that’s an opportunity for Africa and Latin America and other parts of the world.”
Regardless of where organizations hire, Jackson emphasizes the importance of managing risk and hiring good people. “Quality still matters,” he said. “The old saying is when you’re building software, do you want to be fast, good quality, or cheap? Pick two. Now, I reject that. You can have all three, but quality still matters, no matter where you are.”
Caplan relishes the more altruistic potential of borderless employment, namely its ability to “uplift communities around the globe.” That may be true, but at the very least, its talent expansion and cost-effectiveness benefits are enough for leaders in all kinds of industries to get it. With applications for standard work-sponsored visas in the US increasing 263% in 2023 compared to a year earlier, according to the latest Deel Technical Migration Report, and US cities accounting for the top five average monthly apartment rental costs, borderless employment can ease the burden. for job seekers and employment providers in one
“If you can make your biggest expense, which is talent, 10% more efficient, you have a dramatic advantage,” Johnson said. Unlimited employment looks set to continue to seep into the growth ledger at all levels.