The global job market looks contradictory right now. Layoffs are mounting in some sectors while major employers are hiring aggressively, just not where they used to. Google is building a 20,000-employee campus in Bangalore, effectively doubling its India headcount.
Thales, the French aerospace and defense firm, plans to add more than 9,000 employees globally, with significant engineering investment concentrated in India. According to a 2026 analysis of over 4,800 relocation-friendly tech roles, Andrew Stetsenko, founder of Relocate.me, found that most such postings now come from companies with 50 to 5,000 employees, rather than enterprise giants.
This is not offshoring in the traditional sense, as it appears these companies are not necessarily chasing cheaper labor. They are building integrated global talent pipelines in markets where the workers they need already (or want to) live.
The visa math changed
For companies that relied on sponsoring international talent to work in the United States, the calculus has shifted sharply. Recent Department of Homeland Security reforms have made the H-1B visa process significantly more expensive and unpredictable. Wage-based lottery systems and application fees that can reach $100,000 per filing have turned international talent sponsorship into a financial risk that many organizations are no longer willing to absorb. It is now often faster and cheaper to hire in the market where the talent already exists.
AI investment is also accelerating wandering recruiting. As companies restructure around machine learning and data capabilities, demand for back-end engineers, data scientists and DevOps professionals is outpacing domestic supply. According to that analysis of relocation-friendly job openings, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom have emerged as primary relocation hubs, with Berlin and Barcelona leading specifically for AI and engineering roles.
The domestic picture is more complicated than it looks
While companies are expanding their international hiring footprints, they are simultaneously pulling back on moving talent across borders. According to the 2025 Atlas Corporate Relocation Survey, international relocations dropped 9% in 2024 (the most recent reporting, for 2025, hasn’t yet been released) while domestic relocations increased just 3%. Companies are spending more money to relocate the same or fewer people, and most relocated only 50 to 99 employees in 2024. This is down significantly from the larger-scale moves of 2023.
The Atlas survey also found that 29% of companies cited lack of qualified local talent as an external factor affecting relocation volume, which ticked up slightly from 27% in 2023. That number has been climbing steadily, and it points to something HR leaders already feel; in many places, domestic hiring pools are not keeping pace with what companies need.
Return to office adds a new layer of tension
The Atlas data reveals a tension that HR leaders are navigating in real time. Even as companies expand global talent pipelines, they are pulling workers back to physical offices at home. Sixty percent of companies surveyed had a full on-site, return-to-work plan in their 2024-25 workplace policy, a 7-point increase from 2023. McKinsey Quarterly research cited in the Atlas report found the number of in-person workers roughly doubled from 34% to 68% between 2023 and 2024.
For HR leaders, where-we-work changes create a strategic question that few organizations have answered cleanly. If proximity matters enough to mandate in-office attendance for existing employees, what does that mean for a distributed global workforce being hired specifically to stay put?
Read more: Return-to-office and the impact on the leadership pipeline
Most companies lack the architecture for global hiring
Another factor makes the global hiring surge more complicated than it appears. Most of the companies driving it do not yet have the internal systems to support it. LinkedIn’s 2026 Talent Report found that 86% of companies lack adequate “talent velocity,” the organizational ability “to see its skills, build or acquire what’s needed and mobilize talent in real time.” LinkedIn found that only 14% of companies have the systems to do this well, and those organizations report significantly higher confidence in their ability to attract and retain critical talent.
Companies without strong internal mobility and skills infrastructure are more likely to look externally, and internationally, when needs shift. Building abroad is, in many cases, making up for the inability to redeploy talent at home. The global hire becomes a substitute for the internal promotion, the cross-functional move or the reskilling program that never happened.
Skills-based workforce planning is also significantly more advanced in the markets U.S. companies are expanding into. The LinkedIn data shows Asia-Pacific leading at 41% adoption of skills-based planning frameworks, with Europe and the Middle East at 32%. North America sits at just 22%. The regions attracting the most aggressive investment are already operating with more agile talent frameworks than the companies moving into them.
One more note of nuance: The Atlas survey found that 30% of companies are now considering relocating their own offices to cities with stronger workforce availability. This could be a signal that even the location of work is being renegotiated. But location alone does not solve a planning problem.
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