For most of modern work history, onsite work was the expectation. Hiring managers recruited from the area, employees came into the office, and organizations built their teams within relatively fixed geographic boundaries.
Then, the pandemic erased that playbook seemingly overnight and forced companies across industries to adopt remote work—and candidates to a new set of expectations about how and where they work.
Now, with return-to-office (RTO) mandates at companies like Amazon and Ford, it’s easy to conclude that the workforce has reset to historical norms and that hiring can go back to the way it was.
It can’t. Neither employees nor employers have landed in one place. Some want total flexibility. Others crave the connection only an office can bring. At the same time, many organizations are wrestling with what work model actually supports their culture, collaboration, and overall growth strategy, especially as technologies like AI radically change their go-to-market strategies.
Clearly, there’s no consensus on either side, and that tension is playing out directly in the hiring process, which is why the companies that win moving forward will be those that don’t confine themselves to a single hiring model but instead embrace a mix.
What’s Actually Happening With Where People Work?
The RTO conversation right now is often framed as if the workforce is moving back in a single direction (or to a single location). But the reality—and the data—is much more mixed than that.
While many organizations are certainly increasing onsite expectations and putting new mandates in place to bring employees back to the office, employees and candidates themselves haven’t universally shifted in the same way.
In fact, Gallup found that among employees with remote-capable jobs, 60% prefer hybrid work and roughly a third prefer fully remote. Meanwhile, fewer than 10% said they desire fully on-site work.
And Stanford research confirms this isn’t a passing trend. While working completely from home has naturally declined after the initial surge in early 2020, it eventually stabilized rather than continuing to fall as the world recovered from the pandemic. In other words, that level of flexibility may be less prevalent, but it hasn’t disappeared from the labor market completely.
That matters for hiring managers because it shows flexible work is not just a temporary preference that employees will eventually move past. Even as more companies bring employees back onsite, many candidates still expect some level of flexibility when evaluating new opportunities.
At the same time, the office hasn’t lost its value, particularly among organizations that value in-person work and believe it better supports collaboration, mentorship, productivity, and culture, all of which McKinsey cites as primary reasons leaders want employees back onsite.
This is making the hiring market so difficult to navigate. Yes, flexible work remains important to many candidates, but in-person work remains important to many companies. For hiring managers, that often means figuring out how to compete for talent while still building the kind of team structure their business needs to thrive in 2026 and beyond.
How Wellington Steele Helps Companies Adapt Their Hiring Strategy
Today’s hiring market requires more than simply deciding whether a role should be onsite, hybrid, or remote. That’s a fundamental consideration, but hiring managers—and the teams around them—need to understand how each option affects the candidate pool, the speed of each search, and the likelihood of finding the right fit.
That’s where Wellington Steele helps.
We work with organizations across industries, including technology, IT, Cybersecurity, and more, to build recruiting strategies around how their business actually operates. Some companies need strong local recruiting support for fully onsite roles. Others need candidates who are comfortable with hybrid schedules. In some cases, companies need to expand beyond their immediate market to reach specialized talent that may not be available locally, especially for emerging skill sets where gaps may exist.
Our goal is to help hiring managers understand how these workplace expectations affect the search process before it begins. And instead of forcing every search into the same hiring model, we work closely with hiring managers to understand:
- How the team operates historically and in the future
- What workplace structure makes sense for the role
- Where hiring bottlenecks and challenges exist
- Whether geographic limitations are impacting access to talent
- What candidates in the market currently expect
From there, we tailor the search accordingly. For some organizations, that means building stronger local pipelines for on-site positions. For others, it means identifying candidates open to hybrid work. And when the role requires highly specialized skills, it may mean expanding the search to remote candidates who can bring the right expertise. At the end of the day, our goal isn’t to push every company toward remote work. Rather, it’s to help hiring managers make smarter, more flexible recruiting decisions based on what the role requires and what the talent market can support.