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- Remote work demand is flourishing, amid sluggish hiring and a growing work-location divide.
- Companies like Atlassian and Dropbox leverage remote work for talent retention and recruitment.
- Some companies are redefining the concept of in-person work with regular gatherings and ‘workcations.’
If you want a remote job, you’d better get in line.
As more big-name companies boost the number of days they require workers to be in the office, firms sticking with remote work arrangements are seeing outsize demand.
The numbers highlight candidate interest: In the US in September, about 8% of paid job postings on LinkedIn offered remote work, but drew 35% of applications, a spokesperson told Business Insider.
At the payments company Primer, a recent posting for a remote role drew 1,200 job applicants in two weeks. Deel, an HR and payroll platform with a global workforce, said it hired more than 2,000 employees in 2024 — out of 1.5 million applicants.
“A lot of the companies going back to the office are leaking talent to us, whether or not they want to admit it,” Alex Bouaziz, Deel’s cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider.
A growing divide
The influx of job seekers at remote companies comes amid sluggish hiring in industries such as tech — and a widening divide over where people work.
Among US workers whose jobs can be done remotely, the share of people either fully remote or fully in-office ticked up two percentage points over the past two quarters, Gallup data show.
For some companies, remote work has shifted from pandemic necessity to recruiting advantage, executives said — one built on flexibility, autonomy, and trust.
“It’s not about where we work, but how,” Melanie Rosenwasser, chief people officer at Dropbox, told Business Insider in an email. She said the cloud storage company has redesigned its business model to fit a workforce where “flexibility and agency are the new currencies of work.”Meanwhile, companies driving more time in the office — including Amazon, AT&T, Google, JPMorgan, Starbucks, and Walmart — have said that in-office time fosters collaboration, innovation, and the training of junior staff.
A ‘competitive advantage’
For a remote company like Dropbox, the payoff shows up in hiring and retention, Rosenwasser said. The average number of applicants per job is nearly sevenfold higher in 2025 than it was prior to 2021, when the company adopted its “virtual-first” model, she said.
More than eight in 10 applicants accepted the company’s employment offers, while attrition is the lowest in the company’s history, Rosenwasser said.
Matt Martin, cofounder and CEO of Clockwise, which uses AI to optimize workers’ calendars, said the main reason the company operates remotely is because doing so drives recruitment and retention.
Yet, he said, both in-person and remote work have trade-offs.
“I wouldn’t begrudge anybody for being back in office because there are huge advantages to that,” Martin told Business Insider. Yet, ultimately, he said, an RTO policy is “just another filter that you’re putting on your access to talent.”
Caitriona Staunton, Primer’s VP of people, told Business Insider that the company’s remote structure helps it “tap into talent pools” outside the reach of traditional offices or hybrid setups. That includes courting candidates who live in rural areas, as well as those who are caregivers or neurodiverse. She said it’s “massively a competitive advantage.”
At software maker Atlassian, which has 13,000 employees in more than a dozen countries, nine in 10 workers report that flexibility is both an important reason they stay and a means of doing their best work, Avani Prabhakar, the company’s chief people officer, told Business Insider.
Since Atlassian adopted a work-from-anywhere policy in 2020, it has seen a doubling in the number of applicants per job opening, Prabhakar said.
Redefining ‘in-person’ work
Many remote companies still find ways to bring workers together periodically.
Toptal, a freelance platform with roughly 700 employees worldwide, hosts in-person team gatherings three days a quarter. CEO Taso Du Val told Business Insider that a structure where teams are remote 80% of the time and together 20%, works best for hybrid work.
That doesn’t mean he expects all employees to show face in the office once every week, however. He said that in-person time should be saved for high-energy team meetings and strategy planning — but that workers generally aren’t “brainstorming ideas all day long.”
Other companies have also made in-person gatherings a cultural cornerstone. Software company Zapier brings workers together for a week each year alongside customers to focus on projects, Brandon Sammut, the company’s chief people officer, told Business Insider.
By working with customers and solving problems with teammates, he said, “you naturally build connection and belonging.”
Some of Zapier’s 800 workers, spread across 42 countries, come together periodically in groups to focus on a particular topic or challenge.
Primer provides team budgets for “workcations” — twice a year, company-funded team trips to any location employees choose. Caitriona Staunton, the company’s VP of people, told Business Insider that she’ll soon be heading to Malta with her team. The goal is to have three to four days to “go deep” on strategy planning, she said.
While global airfare and four nights in a hotel might sound expensive, the experiences can cost less than maintaining office space — and shake up routine corporate life.
Toptal’s Du Val said that, in 2019, he considered renting a roughly $150 million New York penthouse at about $200,000 a month to make the point that even a luxe dwelling might amount to one-tenth the cost of maintaining a workspace.
Having an office, in his mind, would be “the most ridiculous idea ever.”
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