Today’s talent landscape: how companies are changing their location strategies

Businesses are rethinking where they locate amid labour scarcity, moving work where talent is available and spreading operations across multiple cities.

The past decade has brought some of the most profound changes to working practices since the Industrial Revolution. Labour scarcity, slowing global migration and macroeconomic volatility have made finding and retaining talent more complex. At the same time, maturing digital technology has enabled companies to spread functions across different cities.

Traditionally, businesses clustered in a select few leading global cities, drawn by deep talent pools, access to capital and proximity to clients. Today, a new corporate geography is emerging. These major global cities remain important but are now part of wider office networks that support growth, provide access to talent and improve cost efficiency.

This has flipped the traditional relationship between workers and jobs: increasingly, companies are not asking talent to relocate but are moving to where they can find skills matched to their strategy. In boardrooms across the globe, corporate expansion plans are driven by the question: where can we find – and keep – the right people?

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