Young smiling businesswoman having a video call while working from her home office.
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To work remotely or not is no longer a question. Experts say it’s borderless recruiting for tech positions that is grabbing headlines.
“Distance is like the gateway to borderless,” said Jeremy Johnson, CEO of Andela, an AI-powered tech talent marketplace whose clients include Goldman Sachs, Github and Coursera. “Once you realize that you don’t have to all be in the same office five days a week to build a compelling culture and feel connected to the mission and solve complex problems, then you start to think that “There are great people all over the world.”
As technology leaders simultaneously focus on innovation and value-driven efficiency, technology recruiting that eclipses the demarcation of national, or even global, time zones is a growing phenomenon. Borderless technology hiring has doubled over the past three years, according to Gartner’s 2023 CEO Survey. By 2022, the tech talent workforce in cities like Beijing and Delhi far exceeded that of U.S. powerhouses like San Francisco and New York, reports the CBRE Global Tech Talent Guidebook 2024. The report cites markets of burgeoning tech talent like Bucharest, Romania; Cape Town, South Africa; Cebu City, Philippines; Nairobi, Kenya and more.
Hiring globally is an example of luxury moving down the value chain, Johnson said. Just as services such as Uber have increased access to what is essentially an on-demand private driver, talent marketplaces and a digitized workforce are making global recruitment more than just an expensive search for C -following.
Global payment processing platform Payoneer is in the borderless recruiting world internally (with approximately 2,200 employees in 50 countries and over 25 offices worldwide), but it is also benefiting from and driving the borderless trend with its customers.
“The rhetoric about globalized opportunity is powerful, but it doesn’t make a difference to the business you run unless you actually have the utilities and tools to do it,” said John Caplan, CEO of Payoneer.
Pockets of talent around the world
Adam Jackson, CEO of Braintrust, a decentralized tech talent platform, is making a difference when it comes to borderless development. “We don’t have a physical office,” he said. “Everybody works remotely. All but one of the engineers who work on Braintrust are out of the United States.” Braintrust’s clients, from NASA to Nestlé, are also creating borderless teams, Jackson said.
“Maybe 20 years ago, when I moved to San Francisco, the best tech guys, the best developers, the best product managers and designers all lived here in Silicon Valley,” Jackson added. “That’s just not true anymore. There are still plenty of them here, but there are pockets of them all over the world.”
Some executives, like Johnson, believe that time zone coordination remains important to allow certain employees to work synchronously. Jackson, meanwhile, believes that global innovation with an asynchronous workforce is a chance to create a business “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 of documentation and minimize the endless cycle of meetings, leaving more time for creative thinking and deep work.
According to Mr. Johnson, local labor laws, compliance and payroll management are all factors that come into 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 hiring. “Each company needs to find its own tailored solution,” Caplan said. “You need to design your office footprint, your future of work philosophy around the business you’re building.”
Reflecting on artificial intelligence innovation and, on the other side of the coin, AI regulation, Johnson believes that the European Union’s regulatory framework, which sets standards, will make it difficult for businesses to prosper. technological activities. As more regulations and case law are put in place around the world around AI and data, cross-border employment trends will evolve like pieces of a puzzle.
“I think Europe is going to go through a very difficult period in the next few years,” he said. “They’re pushing a lot of data innovation out of the continent, and I think that’s an opportunity for Africa, Latin America and other parts of the world.”
No matter where companies recruit, Jackson emphasizes the importance of managing risk and hiring the right people. “Quality remains important,” he said. “The old adage says that when you build software, do you want it to be fast, good quality, or cheap? Choose two options. I reject this hypothesis. You can have all three, but quality always matters no matter where you are. »
Caplan raves about the more altruistic potential of borderless employment, namely its ability to “uplift communities around the world.” That may be true, but at the very least, its benefits in terms of expanded talent reach and cost-effectiveness are enough for leaders across all types of industries to embrace it. With applications for standard U.S. work visas up 263% in 2023 compared to the previous year, according to Deel’s latest Tech Migration Report , and U.S. cities accounting for the top five average monthly apartment rental costs, borderless hiring could ease the burden on both job seekers and job providers on the one hand, and
“If you could improve the efficiency of your biggest expense, talent, by 10 percent, you would have a huge advantage,” Johnson said. It appears that borderless recruiting will continue to seep into the growth plan at all levels.
News Source : www.cnbc.com
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