Let’s talk about the elephant (that is still) in the room: remote vs return-to-office.
The debate is never ending, but the current hiring landscape is shifting the narrative.
There are plenty of reasons for companies to want to enforce return to office policies – from pressure at the local government level to making real connections through facetime. There are empty offices with expensive leases. The energy, office buzz, and brainstorming breakthroughs don’t resonate the same way over a video call.
It’s challenging to get a job seeker excited over a video call when they’ve searched unsuccessfully for 6+ months. That in-person spark is lost. Within our own recruiting team, it’s hard not to absorb that lack of excitement when we don’t have a team physically surrounding us with ideas, feedback, or the momentum to move forward.
For many companies, these reasons alone are enough to bring people back on-site. And realistically, returning to the office can be the right choice for your organization. It might align with your hiring cycle, business model, or company performance. It could be the catalyst for better working relationships and generating ideas.
Yet, the current hiring landscape adds a complicated layer to the sweeping desire for employees to come together in a physical space.
Hiring decisions slowed to a crawl in the 2nd quarter of 2025. Companies are actively interviewing but unwilling to pull the trigger. The urgency just isn’t there. There are dozens and dozens of junior and mid-level applicants for every job posting. It feels easy to bring these jobs back into the office. This has triggered a laissez-faire interviewing attitude. In many cases, this lack of structured timeline indicates that these positions won’t materialize into new hires. Instead, the work will be absorbed into another employee’s workload.
Yet, when companies are competing for highly skilled senior talent, the top priority after compensation is consistently the desire for remote flexibility. Right now, companies might have the hiring upper hand for many jobs, but experienced technical talent with proven skills in data science, infrastructure, project management, LLM, machine learning, and other AI-based technologies are few and far between.
Not every AI Engineer is destined for a FAANG job. Most companies can’t even compete for that miniscule stratosphere of talent once total compensation is on the table. Speed is your advantage for the limited pool of skilled and available engineers. Companies must be confident and clear about what they can offer – not only in compensation, but also in the form of benefits and remote flexibility.
We advise our clients to decide how critical it is for these positions or teams to be back on-site. No matter the decision, it will impact who is willing to entertain your job offer. At the end of the day, projects need to be started, and new AI strategies need to be implemented. This can’t be done without the right employees.
If your priority is building an in-person culture, own it. If you believe that physical proximity is the only way to spark a revolution, accept the decision and be aware of the impact that it will have on the talent available to you.
It is imperative to understand, in detail, how remote turned return-to-office policies influence every facet of the business. Review the hiring impact, the ripple effect on the team, and how goals will be altered if your seasoned remote talent walks out the door. Everyone knows that they are replaceable at work, but re-hiring, onboarding, and training the wrong person can be more costly than getting that in-office spark back.
