By: Nick Martin
Australia's jobs market is softening, with unemployment rising to a post-COVID high of 4.6%, while job vacancies remain well above pre-pandemic levels. While the assumption is that a larger pool of available workers should make hiring easier, this does not hold true for many specialist roles.
Headline unemployment tells us how many people are looking for work. It does not tell us whether they possess the capabilities a business needs. A labour market can have more people available for work while simultaneously facing acute shortages in software engineering, AI and other technical specialisations.
Remote’s research of 250 Australian HR and business leaders found that 88% say finding people with the right capabilities, at the right level, at the right time has become harder over the past year. Nearly eight in ten (79%) say they have missed a key business goal because they could not find the talent they needed.
Hiring strategy should not be limited by geography
When the capabilities a business needs are scarce, geography can become an arbitrary constraint.
Restricting a search to one city, state or country reduces the available talent pool before the hiring process has properly begun. Capability and location are not synonymous, and Australian businesses have started to recognise this.
Remote’s hiring data from 2025 to 2026 shows hiring by Australian companies has increased in markets including the Philippines (+108% year-on-year growth), India (+89% year-on-year growth) and the US (+55% year-on-year growth). This growth is particularly concentrated in highly specialised technical roles, with demand for senior software engineers up 140.9%, game developers up 100%, software engineers up 85.5%, and QA specialists up 41.7%.
This is not to say every role should be hired internationally. It means geography should be treated as a consideration in workforce planning, particularly when a critical capability is in short supply locally.
The more pertinent question for HR and business leaders today is not “Where can we hire from?” but “Where does the capability we need exist?”
Don’t overlook the talent you already have
Looking overseas should not come at the expense of developing the workforce already in place. While international hiring can plug an immediate skills gap, it is not a substitute for building a sustainable domestic talent pipeline. Before looking offshore, leaders should understand why a role cannot be filled locally.
Has the realistic domestic talent pool been exhausted? Could the requirement be met through training, internal mobility or upskilling? And does the business need the capability immediately, or can it afford to build it over time?
The strongest workforce strategies are not built in reaction to a shortage. They establish a balance between the skills a business needs today and the workforce it wants to build for the long term.
That means global hiring exists as an additional strategic lever for businesses to utilise when their skills requirements outpace what the domestic market can supply.
Finding the person is only half the hiring problem
Identifying the right candidate for the job is only one part of the challenge. Global employment remains one of the hardest operational challenges a growing company faces, particularly when it comes to doing so compliantly.
A probation period in Australia doesn’t map cleanly onto one in Germany. Notice periods, statutory leave, worker classification rules and severance obligations can all vary significantly from country to country. A role that looks identical on paper may be subject to very different compensation expectations, tax obligations and benefits requirements depending on where the employee is based.
With each new market comes another layer of operational complexity and risk. That’s why the decision to hire internationally cannot stop at whether the right candidate exists. Businesses also need to consider the infrastructure required to employ that person properly and the operational risk they are prepared to take on by entering a new market.
Global hiring needs infrastructure, not workarounds
Businesses that hire effectively across borders tend to have one thing in common: the infrastructure in place to support a global workforce.
For a growing business, international employment shouldn’t be treated as a series of isolated exceptions every time a hard-to-fill role emerges. It requires the right foundations to support a distributed workforce consistently and compliantly as it grows.
For companies hiring in a market where they don’t have an established entity, an Employer of Record (EOR) can provide a practical way to employ people compliantly, without establishing a local employment operation from scratch.
However, operational infrastructure is only part of the equation. Leaders still need to determine which capabilities warrant international hiring, which markets offer the strongest fit, and how those hires fit into the organisation’s broader workforce strategy.
The objective isn’t to make every role global; it’s to ensure geography doesn’t become a constraint when the talent a business needs could be elsewhere.
Talent is everywhere. Opportunity should be too.
About the author: Nick Martin is the APAC GTM Lead at Remote. With more than 15 years of experience spanning multiple industries, he is an accomplished commercial sales leader with expertise in building and sustaining long-term client relationships. Nick focuses on understanding business challenges and developing solutions that address evolving organisational needs while creating lasting value for customers.