U.S. workers are still landing remote jobs using a clever trick

Fully remote job listings are declining in the U.S., but there’s a way around it: Get hired by a foreign company.

According to Deel’s State of Global Hiring Report, the number of Americans hired by internationally-based companies spiked 62% in 2023.

Deel is an HR platform that specializes in helping companies hire international workers. The data is based on 300,000 contracts between Deel clients and their workers—85% of whom are hired remotely.

“Despite growing return-to-office measures, distributed hiring continues to climb, expanding beyond technical roles to those like sales and content,” the report said.

The U.S. has the second-highest number of workers on Deel, behind only the Philippines. Americans typically get hired for roles in marketing, quality assurance, engineering, and accounting. San Francisco was ranked in the top five cities for global workers.

Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz said the jump in Americans working for overseas companies appears “correlated with the elimination of remote roles” in the U.S. He said more Americans are quitting their jobs after employers told them to return to the office.

“A couple of our competitors did that, and we hired their best people. So I welcome them to keep doing it,” he said.

While many economists believe remote or hybrid jobs will prevail in the long run, work arrangements vary greatly by employer. Recent data on U.S. hiring trends suggest more employers are doing away with remote work.

The great return-to-office adjustment

With Covid in the rearview mirror, several major U.S. employers have asked their workers to come back to the office at least a few days a week. BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Amazon, and Zoom are just some of the big names to have done so.

According to Resume Builder, 90% of companies plan to implement return-to-office policies by the end of this year.

“The message I hear from executives is, ‘We never intended for the world to change this dramatically and the office to just go away,’” Dan Kaplan, an executive at management consultant Korn Ferry, told CNBC.

“Then, there’s the popular argument that people are less connected to their company and to their peers without the office, which is bad news for employee engagement and retention,” he added.

According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the share of job postings for remote or hybrid positions peaked at 10.3% in February 2022 but has since declined to 8.3%.

“There has been a significant decrease in remote job openings over the last six months of more than 20%,” said Evan Sohn, CEO of workforce insights platform Aura.

“This trend signals that employers are altering their post-Covid strategy, gradually shifting back to the traditional onsite work model,” he said.

As companies scramble around where to put their workers, business leaders say the real disruption won't be from remote work. It'll come from AI. For better or worse.

The 3 ½ day work week?

A 2023 report by Goldman Sachs suggested that AI could disrupt up to 300 million jobs. Occupations with the most exposure could see between 25% and 50% of their workload replaced.

According to the bank’s analysts, “18% of work globally could be automated by AI on an employment-weighted basis.”

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon thinks the AI disruption could be a net positive for workers, who will most likely work fewer hours in the future.

Once AI is fully implemented, workers will “probably be working 3 ½ days a week,” he told Bloomberg.

The one drawback will be the types of workers affected by AI. Whereas automation impacted manufacturing workers, AI “is expected to impact high-paying, white-collar jobs largely insulated from previous technological shocks,” according to the Dallas Fed.

Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, pose “higher displacement potential,” the researchers said.