Global Talent — How Borders Are Dissolving

For most of the 20th century, the talent available to any given company was largely defined by geography. You hired from the city you were in, or you persuaded someone to relocate, or you went without. The talent market was local, the information about talent was local, and the ability to manage talent was local.

This is changing, and it is changing faster than most organisations have updated their mental models to account for.

What has actually changed

The productisation of remote infrastructure. Managing a distributed workforce has become dramatically less operationally complex than it was ten years ago. Employment-of-record services allow companies to hire employees in almost any country without establishing a local entity. Payroll infrastructure spans jurisdictions. Collaboration tools have matured. The operational barriers to hiring globally have been reduced from significant to manageable for most roles.

The demonstrated viability of remote knowledge work. Before 2020, most organisations had limited experience managing knowledge workers who were not in the same physical space. The pandemic ran a forced experiment at scale. The conclusion — that individual knowledge work can be done at high quality from anywhere with reliable internet — has made the option of global hiring feel less risky than it did when it was theoretical.

The cost of access to information about global talent has collapsed. LinkedIn operates globally. GitHub is globally visible. Professional portfolios, public writing, open source contributions, conference talks — the signals that allow a hiring team to form an initial view of a candidate's capability are available globally. The information asymmetry that once made hiring globally impractical — you couldn't find out who was good in a city you didn't have a presence in — has dramatically reduced.

Where the advantage is accumulating

The companies winning the global talent competition are those that have updated their sourcing model in three specific ways.

They source from markets that are underpriced relative to quality. India, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Southeast Asia have engineering talent that is excellent and, at the moment, priced below what the global market would pay if it had full information. This pricing gap exists because the sourcing infrastructure to access this talent was previously expensive to build. For companies that have built it, the advantage is real.

They have moved from location-based to skills-based job requirements. The job posting that requires the candidate to be in a specific city for a role that can be done entirely remotely is leaving talent on the table. Companies that have removed or significantly reduced geographic requirements from their job descriptions have access to deeper candidate pools.

They have invested in remote onboarding and culture. Hiring globally is the easy part. Building a coherent team that functions well, maintains shared culture, and produces the collaboration that complex work requires is the harder part. The companies that have invested in remote onboarding processes, in distributed team rituals, and in explicit culture maintenance in a distributed environment have an advantage over those that hire globally but manage as if everyone is still in the same office.

What hasn't changed

Geography still matters for certain types of roles. Customer-facing roles often require physical proximity to customers. Roles that involve physical infrastructure require presence at that infrastructure. Roles that benefit significantly from the informal learning that comes from working alongside excellent practitioners are still better filled with people who can be in the same place.

Geography also still matters for senior leadership roles in many organisations. The VP or C-suite executive who is completely disconnected from the headquarters — who never builds relationships in person, who participates only in scheduled calls — is often at a disadvantage to the colleague who is physically present for the informal conversations where strategy is shaped and decisions are made.

The dissolution of borders is real. It is not complete, and it is not equally distributed across role types.

The India dimension

From the perspective of India specifically, the dissolution of geographic barriers to global talent markets is one of the most significant economic developments of the last decade. Indian engineers and professionals who would previously have needed to emigrate to access the best opportunities can now access those opportunities remotely.

This is changing the economics of the Indian technology industry — the best Indian engineers no longer face a binary choice between staying and accepting lower compensation or leaving and losing their connection to home. It is also changing the ambitions of Indian companies, which are hiring talent for global markets without the infrastructure costs that global expansion previously required.

The floor on the wages of skilled Indian workers is rising as the best global opportunities become accessible without emigration. The ceiling on what Indian companies can build is rising as they access global talent. Both changes are still in early stages. The direction is clear.