Not long ago, employing someone in another country meant setting up a legal entity, hiring in-country legal experts, and writing checks that would make most startup CFOs break out in hives. The enterprise players had this market to themselves.
That era is over. Small and mid-sized businesses are now building distributed teams across continents. The barriers to entry have come down. But the complexity? That hasn’t budged. Talent shortages are biting harder, regulatory environments are shifting faster, and workers everywhere are expecting more from the companies that employ them.
This article breaks down seven global hiring trends shaping the SMB landscape right now. We want to help SMB leaders understand which trends actually matter to them today, and how those workforce trends should factor into decisions around hiring, budgeting, and workforce planning.
To ground all of this in real data, we’ll draw from The State of International Hiring, a survey report we recently published based on insights from 300 HR and People leaders across the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and Brazil.
Trend 1: Global Hiring Is About Growth and Resilience
For years, the primary motivation behind international hiring was straightforward: find talent you can’t source locally. That rationale still holds, but a second driver has moved up the priority list. More founders and HR leaders are also treating global hiring as a form of risk management.
Businesses have weathered multiple obstacles in recent years, including:
- Economic volatility
- Sudden regulatory pivots
- Currency swings
Companies that concentrated all their hiring in a single market learned painful lessons when that market got expensive or unstable.
Distributing teams across regions creates a buffer. If one geography becomes difficult, the rest of the organization keeps running.
Global hiring has become one way businesses can stay flexible, keep costs from getting out of hand, and avoid making commitments they can’t easily undo.
The pressure behind this work trend is real and measurable. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 39% of workers’ core skills will shift by 2030, which means the scramble for adaptable talent is only accelerating.
And in our own State of International Hiring survey, every single respondent reported feeling the squeeze of talent shortages. Not most. All of them. Seventy-four percent called it “very” or “extremely” challenging. For growing SMBs, spreading hiring across multiple markets has become a defensive strategy as much as an offensive one.
Trend 2: Cost Optimization Has Shifted From Salaries to Structure
The cost conversation around global hiring has grown up. Five years ago, the question was simple: “Where can we hire cheaper talent?” Today, savvy SMB leaders are asking a different question entirely: “How can we hire without locking ourselves into high fixed costs?”
There's a good reason for that shift. Setting up a legal entity in a new country can easily run into tens of thousands of dollars and stretch across months of legal and administrative work. For an SMB trying to employ a single engineer in Germany or a product manager in Brazil, the cost of the infrastructure often dwarfs the cost of the hire itself.
So companies are restructuring. They’re blending full-time employees with international contractors in more deliberate ways, picking hiring models that keep their options open. The conversation is no longer about cutting corners on compensation. Instead, the best SMBs are redirecting what they would have spent on entity overhead toward competitive pay and benefits. The savings come from the structure, not the people.
Trend 3: The Line Between Contractor and Employee Is Under More Scrutiny
Regulators have noticed how many companies are leaning on contractor arrangements, and they’re responding with sharper teeth. The EU’s Platform Work Directive, headed for implementation by 2026, will introduce more unified classification standards across Europe.
The U.K.’s IR35 rules continue to catch businesses off guard. In 2024, the U.S., the Department of Labor overhauled its approach to the economic reality test that determines contractor status.
SMBs should pay particular attention here. Smaller teams move fast, often without formal processes or dedicated legal counsel. But that speed can become a liability. A contractor who works fixed hours, uses company-issued tools, and reports exclusively to one manager looks a lot like an employee to a labor inspector, no matter what your contract may say.
The penalties for getting classification wrong include fines, back taxes, and legal claims that can devastate a small business.
None of this means SMBs should stop engaging contractors. Independent workers remain a vital, flexible part of the global workforce. Rather, classification decisions need to be deliberate, documented, and grounded in the specific labor laws of each country where you operate.
For many companies, partnering with an Employer of Record (EOR) to manage contractor compliance across borders is the simplest way to get this right without building an in-house legal team.
Trend 4: Speed to Hire Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage for SMBs
The talent war isn’t just between tech giants anymore. Startups in Berlin, scale-ups in São Paulo, and mid-sized firms in Toronto are all competing for the same pool of AI specialists, security engineers, and data scientists. Our survey confirms the intensity: 73% of respondents named AI roles as the hardest to fill in the next 12 months. Cybersecurity followed at 71%, with data and analytics at 63%.
But here’s an angle that doesn’t get enough attention. Bigger companies are often slower to close. Their hiring processes involve more stakeholders, longer approval chains, and heavier compliance reviews.
Our survey found that 51% of companies fill international roles faster than they fill positions at headquarters. And once those international hires are onboarded, 57% of respondents said they ramp up at the same pace as local hires, while 43% said they come up to speed even quicker. Not a single respondent said international employees took longer.
This opportunity gap represents a competitive edge for SMBs. If you can extend a compliant offer in weeks while a Fortune 500 competitor is still scheduling panel interviews, you get the hire.
The trick is to eliminate the bottleneck caused by entity setup and country-by-country compliance research. Working with an EOR handles both, so your team can focus on evaluating talent rather than deciphering foreign labor codes.
Trend 5: Talent Expectations Are Global and Personal
Workers in different countries also have different laws and expectations regarding benefits. They can tell when an employer hasn’t done their homework on the types of benefits that align with cultural norms.
- An employee in the Philippines is entitled to 13th-month pay.
- In France, workers anticipate generous statutory leave well beyond what a U.S.-based company might consider standard.
- India’s provident fund system is a fundamental part of how employees plan for retirement.
If your company fails to align with local benefit norms, you’ll struggle to attract qualified candidates, let alone keep them.
SMBs don’t need to match enterprise-level benefit packages to compete. But they do need to understand what’s legally required and culturally expected in each market.
Our survey backs this up: 33% of companies reported that their international hires actually had better retention rates than local employees. The companies seeing those results are the ones investing time upfront to learn what workers in a given country actually value, then building offers that reflect it.
Trend 6: SMBs Are Selectively Hiring in Fewer Countries
Spreading a handful of hires across five different countries might sound impressively global, but in practice, it’s a compliance headache. Every additional market means a new set of labor laws, tax requirements, and benefit standards to learn, monitor, and maintain.
Our survey found that companies spend an average of 8.3 hours per month per international hire just managing compliance tasks. Scale that across several countries and, if you’re operating with a lean HR team, it quickly becomes unsustainable.
Smarter SMBs are taking a different approach. They’re choosing two to four strategic markets and building a deeper local presence there, rather than spreading themselves too thin across the map. This concentrated strategy improves onboarding consistency, simplifies management, and produces better compliance outcomes.
Our data gives a clear picture of where the hiring is happening. The top countries for full-time international hires right now are:
- United States: 55%
- India: 51%
- United Kingdom: 45%
- Brazil: 28%
- Australia: 27%
Looking ahead, a striking 88% of respondents plan to hire workers in India over the next year, underscoring its depth as a scalable talent market.
Trend 7: Compliance Is Top of Mind for SMBs
Rewind a few years, and compliance barely registered when SMBs were shopping for hiring solutions. Price mattered. Speed mattered. Compliance was an afterthought, something you’d figure out if you ran into a problem.
That calculus has flipped. High-profile enforcement actions and well-publicized misclassification cases have put compliance front and center.
Our survey data clearly tells the story: more than 90% of companies now rely on an external expert in some capacity when managing employment law and compliance internationally. Only 7% try to handle it entirely in-house. Among smaller tech companies (100 to 199 employees), 74% point to a lack of internal knowledge or resources as their main barrier to entering emerging markets.
The appetite has shifted from reactive to proactive. SMBs want partners and platforms that bake compliance into the hiring workflow from the beginning, so problems are prevented rather than patched up after the fact.
What These Trends Mean for SMB Hiring Strategy
The old approach, hire locally until you can afford to expand, is being replaced by something more deliberate: a workforce strategy that weighs flexibility, compliance readiness, and long-term positioning from the outset.
Country selection deserves more attention than it typically gets. Rather than chasing the lowest salary benchmarks, SMBs should evaluate markets based on talent density, time zone overlap, regulatory complexity, and strategic fit. When our survey asked companies where they’d hire if cost and compliance weren’t barriers:
- 58% chose Latin America
- 40% picked Eastern Europe
- 38% selected Southeast Asia
That tells you where the pent-up demand is.
The companies that get global hiring right treat it as a core capability. They invest in understanding the markets they’re entering. They pick the right partners. And they make compliance part of the plan, not an obstacle to work around.
How SMBs Can Turn These Trends Into an Advantage
Large enterprises have budgets on their side. They have dedicated legal departments and regional HR teams. But what they often lack is speed.
SMBs can make hiring decisions in days that would take a larger organization weeks to route through approvals. That agility is a genuine competitive advantage when you’re trying to land a senior data engineer who has four other offers on the table.
You don’t need to get everything perfect on the first try. You simply need to make informed decisions, backed by the right tools and partners.
That means understanding the compliance landscape before you post a job listing, choosing the right blend of employees and contractors for each market, and working with people who can handle the operational complexity so your team stays focused on building the product, closing the deal, or shipping the feature.
Global Hiring Is a Strategic Lever, Not a Shortcut
Global hiring has moved past the experimental phase for SMBs; it’s foundational. The global workforce trends outlined in this article reflect a larger transformation in how growing companies approach talent, risk, and growth. The winners won’t be the companies that treat international hiring as a quick fix for a tight local labor market. They’ll be the ones who hire globally with greater intentionality.
Global hiring is more than a workaround to talent shortages. It’s a long-term approach that, when done correctly, supports sustainable growth.
Grow Your Global Team With RemoFirst
RemoFirst is an Employer of Record (EOR) that enables SMBs to hire talent in 185+ countries without the time, cost, or risk of setting up local entities. We handle global payroll, benefits, compliance, and local labor law requirements, so you can focus on building the team you need.
Our pricing starts at USD 199 per person per month for employees and USD 25 per person per month for contractors, making compliant global hiring within reach even for lean, early-stage teams.
Book a demo to see how RemoFirst can help you employ the best talent in 185+ countries.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Are the Biggest Global Hiring Trends Affecting SMBs Right Now?
Several forces are converging at once. Talent shortages in technical fields like AI and cybersecurity are intensifying. Regulators are tightening worker classification rules across the EU, the U.K., and the U.S. Companies are moving away from salary-based cost optimization toward reducing structural overhead. And international talent increasingly expects localized benefits and culturally appropriate employment terms.
How Can SMBs Compete With Larger Companies for International Talent?
Speed is the biggest differentiator. Our survey found that 51% of companies fill international roles faster than positions based at headquarters. An SMB that partners with an EOR can extend a compliant offer in weeks, while a larger competitor may still be working through internal approvals and entity setup. In a tight talent market, that timeline difference often decides who gets the hire.
What Are the Risks of Hiring International Contractors Without Proper Compliance?
If a contractor’s working arrangement resembles employment (fixed hours, exclusive engagement, company-controlled processes), regulators may reclassify them as an employee. The consequences include fines, back taxes, benefit obligations, and potential legal claims. SMBs face heightened risk because they often lack the in-house legal expertise to evaluate classification rules in every country where they operate.
How Many Countries Should an SMB Hire In?
There’s no single right answer, but the trends favor focus over breadth. Every country you add brings new compliance requirements and administrative overhead. Many successful SMBs concentrate on two to four markets where talent availability, time zone alignment, and regulatory conditions work in their favor, then expand from there as internal capacity grows.
What Is an Employer of Record and How Does It Help SMBs Hire Globally?
An Employer of Record (EOR) legally employs workers on behalf of another company in countries where that company doesn’t have its own entity. The EOR handles payroll, tax compliance, benefits, and local labor law requirements. The client company manages the employee’s day-to-day responsibilities. For SMBs, this eliminates the need to register a legal entity in every market where they want to employ someone, saving time and money while reducing compliance risk.
