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Remote jobs aren’t going away – they’re just shifting from expensive coastal cities like New York and San Francisco.
Faced with labor shortages and rising wages, companies are hiring more remote jobs abroad and in smaller US cities.
During the pandemic, with jobs no longer tied to offices, millions of Americans flocked to cities like Phoenix, Asheville and Boise in search of greener pastures and more affordable housing.
But remote work has also opened up new opportunities for employers. Businesses quickly found that their employees could be productive remotely, often for a third of the cost, by expanding their location requirements.
Remote recruiting is expanding beyond its traditional strongholds like India and creating new “zoomtowns” overseas and in parts of the US Midwest.
It’s more cost-effective for companies to move some positions overseas, as wages in the US are often “double or triple what workers in countries like Mexico, India and the Philippines” and these workers can do just as well as a fully remote workers in the US,” says Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who has studied work-from-home for decades.
Latin American countries in particular have benefited from this trend as they share a time zone with the USA. For example, the number of North American companies with remote workers in Central America and the Caribbean grew 300% between 2020 and 2023. according to a new study by Lightcast.
Q2, an Austin-based financial firm, outsourced more than 90 engineering, marketing, product design and other jobs to Mexico and India last year.
Executives pondered the new recruiting strategy in late 2020, says Kim Rutledge, Q2’s executive vice president of people, as competition for talent was fierce and the company struggled to fill open positions.
While executives have been “skeptical and a little resistant” to hiring remote workers across time zones, Rutledge says they have been “overwhelmed” and “really excited” by the talent they have found in cities like Monterrey in northern Mexico and Bengaluru south india.
In the second quarter, 2,200 people were employed, around 20% of them abroad. However, Rutledge expects that proportion to “grow significantly” in the coming months as the company plans to hire more staffing and administrative roles overseas.
The potential to cut costs and attract new talent has also prompted companies to recruit more remote candidates in smaller, cheaper cities in the US Midwest. “For example, if your budget for hiring a remote software developer in California is $100,000, those same skills could be available in parts of the central US for 60% of the cost,” says George Denlinger, president of Technology Talent Solutions at Robert Half.
Illinois, Ohio, and Nebraska have become hotspots for remote work opportunities, according to Rutledge and Denlinger, primarily because they are densely populated, have lower costs of living, and are home to several top-notch colleges and universities.
According to Layla O’Kane, a senior economist and director of research at Lightcast, there has been a “significant increase” in the number of remote marketing, engineering and manufacturing job postings open to international candidates and applicants across the United States.
Bloom also expects more service support jobs, including software developers, human resources coordinators, and payroll administrators, to be offshored over the next decade.
Whether and how a job will be affected by this trend depends on the level of personal interaction the job requires as well as how senior it is, Denlinger says.
“If you, as a manager or supervisor, are expected to lead a team, mentor young people and set the culture, the likelihood of it being a remote job that can be done in a different time zone is far less likely” , he adds.
Q2 takes these two factors into account when deciding which jobs should be done remotely and where. “For a project manager who’s in a more straightforward role, it doesn’t matter where he sits,” explains Rutledge. “But I do care about the location of my senior HR business partner who is expected to check in regularly with our executives because the majority of our executives are still in Austin.”
If you’re hoping for a remote job, you can improve your chances of getting hired by targeting companies headquartered in expensive regions and improving your soft skills.
“It depends on your salary expectations and your cost of living, but if you’re based in Oklahoma, for example, and you’re applying for a remote job at a company in New York City, you might have more flexible pay options,” says Denlinger. “You can definitely emphasize that in your application or your interview, because that will be attractive for some employers.”
However, hiring experts say the key factor that drives an employer to choose one remote applicant over another is often a person’s soft skills.
“The best way to differentiate yourself is by showing genuine enthusiasm for the company’s initiatives and a willingness to learn and adapt,” says Rutledge.
Communication, problem-solving and collaboration are other soft skills companies are increasingly emphasizing when hiring remotely, adds Denlinger. “Hiring managers may start their search by emphasizing the importance of finding someone with strong technical expertise,” he says, “but nine times out of ten, when I ask them why they hired someone, they answer me always that they have chosen the best candidate.” Soft Skills.”
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