Solving the global HR puzzle
Global HR once meant finding the best talent anywhere, regardless of location. Today, nationalism, demographic shifts, hybrid work and AI-driven change are forcing companies to adapt, turning workforce planning into a careful mix of local compliance and global vision.
that lead programmer in Shanghai you wanted to move to Cupertino? H-1Bs are looking dicey now. Maybe we should try Bangalore. Or what about Singapore? No, we’ve used up our quota for the year. How about Dubai? Global companies once had the luxury of seeing most of the world as a potential source of labor and talent. Today, it isn’t that simple. That big picture is looking more like a thousand puzzle pieces that need to be fitted into place one by one.
Where multinational companies once imagined themselves as what General Electric CEO Jack Welch dubbed a “boundaryless organization,” able to source skills and expertise wherever it was cheapest or best, extreme weather, war and the threat of war, assaults on long-standing free trade agreements and the rise of anti-immigrant populism have all forced the adoption of new labor strategies that treat the world less as a single market and more as a collection of separate regions.
Further complicating the picture, work itself is changing. Artificial intelligence can now take on a wide range of tasks that could formerly only be done by people, leaving human resource executives with even more factors to consider. “It’s a really, really dynamic time for HR leaders right now,” says David Collings, professor of sustainable business at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin.
The percentage of today’s workforce that will need to be reskilled by 2030, of which just half will be upskilled within their current role.
Source: World Economic Forum
About 25 years ago, most global companies began focusing on building a global talent pool, according to Elaine Farndale, professor of human resource management and director of the School of Labor and Employment Relations at Pennsylvania State University. The idea was to “hire the best person – it doesn’t matter where they are.” The global talent program worked well, but not all countries were convinced. “About a decade ago, that started to be undermined with this general movement that we’re seeing across a lot of Western countries to more nationalism, more protectionism – a focus on the local and not the global,” she explains.
Today, some markets that were once major draws for foreign talent, such as the US, are now much less friendly to foreigners – with President Trump’s executive order in September 2025 to increase visa fees for H-1B applicants a case in point. Local labor chauvinism, however, is not confined to big countries: Singapore now has a quota system that limits the number of foreign workers in every sector, and Saudi Arabia now requires companies to hire more local employees. Companies are also facing extreme demographic challenges: A recent World Economic Forum (WEF) survey of 1,000 global employers, for example, found that 40% say aging and declining working-age populations are driving transformation in their business, even as another 25% say their enterprises are being transformed by growing working-age populations.
Hybrid workplaces are another challenge for HR. Managers of hybrid teams face a dilemma, in Farndale’s view. “If you keep the people in the office happy, the people online feel less connected. But if you focus on keeping the people who are remote more connected, the people internally feel like they’re being abandoned … that’s a challenge I don’t think we’ve solved yet.” Other questions are also up in the air, according to Farndale: “How do you keep the culture? How do you keep communication? How do you ensure people are fully focused on what you want them to be focused on?”
Today’s digital nomads are making trouble for HR teams in legal terms as well. “The landscape of mobility has got hugely more complex,” says Collings. “This creates challenges for organizations in terms of managing all that complexity and knowing where everybody is and ensuring the compliance, tax issues, permanent establishments and all that kind of stuff are right.” Farndale agrees that employees’ legal situations are getting more complex. “The thing with visas is every single individual that you’re trying to work with has a personal situation, so you can’t just lump a load of people together … it’s a really complex individual equation every single time. How much vacation time do you get? Or sickness allowance? Do you need an allowance for using your internet from your home?” she says. These issues are so complex, in fact, that Farndale has started to see some chief HR officers take on a second title as vice president of legal affairs.
Companies have also found legal workarounds to complex cross-border hires. Employer of record (EOR) firms such as Deel or Rippling, for example, give companies a way to expand more quickly into new markets. These services act as third parties that enable companies to outsource the legal headaches of being an employer in an unfamiliar country along with the foreign worker’s payroll and other basic HR needs. Responding to these pressures while retaining the scale advantages of being a global organization is a challenge for many firms. For example, just as geopolitical pressures are leading some companies to reel in their supply chains, many firms’ HR teams are being redeployed from global centers of excellence to regional hubs.
“In cultures where there’s strong leadership from the top, AI is more accepted because it's another form of authority.”
The percentage of global employers that expect talent availability to decline between 2025 and 2030.
Source: World Economic Forum
The Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) believes a regional HR model makes it easier to tailor HR practices to local legal, cultural and market conditions, as well as speed up decision-making. “Centralized HR models can introduce bureaucratic layers that slow down decision-making and responses, which is problematic for companies needing to address urgent staffing needs, resolve employee relations issues quickly or adapt to dynamic market conditions,” AIHR analysts write.
Often, companies are locating these hubs in a country that have other advantages as well, such as Costa Rica or the Czech Republic. For US companies Costa Rica is a great location for an HR hub: It operates on Central Standard Time (the same time zone as the central US), ranks second in Latin America for English proficiency, has good tax incentives and can save a company 40-60% on its HR salaries.
Headhunting
Artist Florian van Roekel spent 15 months documenting the reality of daily life in Dutch offices. The resulting series of photographs, How Terry likes his Coffee, looks at how corporate environments shape the people within them, as well as how people shape the office itself.
“The landscape of mobility has got hugely more complex. This creates challenges for organizations.”
On top of more regional HR hubs and employer of record services, companies are also simply sending people abroad for shorter stints, according to Collings. Now, however, even short-term assignments are increasingly problematic. On September 4, 2025, for instance, 300 or so South Korean automotive technicians who were helping to complete an advanced electric car battery plant for Hyundai Motors and LG Energy Solution in Ellabell, Georgia, were arrested by agents from the US Department of Homeland Security on charges that they were working in the US illegally.
While US government officials contend that the business visas and other travel documents the Korean nationals held did not permit them to work, lawyers for some of the workers have disputed the charge, according to Reuters. In spite of their protestations, most of the arrested technicians returned home to South Korea. Hyundai CEO José Muñoz estimated the disruption would delay the opening of the $7.6 billion plant by at least two or three months.
Artificial intelligence is also expected to have a variety of implications for talent and labor strategy. Partly because of AI, the WEF estimates that 59 out of every 100 workers will need to be reskilled between now and 2030. Of these, WEF analysts estimate 29 will stay in their current jobs, 19 will have to learn new jobs in their organization, and 11 will require training that won’t be accessible to them in the near future.
Welcome big data specialists, fintech engineers, AI and machine learning specialists and software and application developers. So long to the clerical and secretarial workers, including cashiers, ticket clerks and administrative assistants. Many other jobs are likely to change. WEF respondents estimate that 39% of workers’ existing skills will be outmoded by 2030. Perhaps not coincidentally, 42% of employers expect talent availability to decline between 2025-2030. Skill gaps are the biggest challenge global employers face, say 63% of surveyed employers in the WEF study.
Fortunately, digital technology is also solving problems for HR teams, as Collings points out that most people expect HR budgets will stay tight. For example, cloud computing and AI are being used to overcome the growing number of barriers to moving employees across borders. A number of software vendors now say they can fill the cultural gaps exacerbated by geographic distance by offering instant translation services and accent reduction filters. Recruitment is also being automated. “AI is being used to scan interviews and get people through at least the first stages of the application process,” says Farndale. Training is being streamlined too, thanks to digitalization. “There is more customization of the training that you need before you go off on this assignment in a new country. You’ve got all these digital tools that save you having to worry about learning the language or worrying about how to act in this meeting. Just press a button. It’ll tell you,” she adds.
Not all workers are equally good partners with AI, however. “Some cultures are more accepting of technology than other cultures," Farndale says. “In cultures where there’s strong leadership direction from the top, AI is more accepted because it’s another form of authority.” Conversely, companies with flatter hierarchies are less inclined to accept the AI agent. “In other environments where the hierarchies are flatter, then you've got people who will question, what is AI doing? I don’t trust the black box,” she says.
Collings predicts that there will also be cultural issues to be worked out with HR’s new silicon co-workers, such as handling the kind of “moments that matter” with sensitivity. “For example, if I have a bereavement in my family and I have a question around bereavement leave, is that something I really want to talk to AI about, or could AI direct me to a person where I’m going to get empathy and the ability to work beyond the boundaries and rules if that’s the right thing to do?” he says. On the other hand, researchers in Indonesia have found that GenAI can be an effective way to train people to be more culturally sensitive, enhancing cross-cultural communication. Researchers concluded that AI-based instructional media “outperform conventional methods in improving cultural representation and reducing implicit biases.”
Another challenge Collings sees emerging in the longer run is what happens if the work currently done by entry-level employees is largely automated and people have less occasion to learn by osmosis from more senior people. “I think that’s something that we really haven’t got our arms around yet,” he says, adding that this may be particularly problematic in a hybrid workplace.
Ultimately, Collings argues, companies will have to be more conscious about creating structures that encourage experienced workers to spend time with younger workers. One case in point he notes: Mastercard’s guilds. The credit card giant has created a number of such groups within the organization in which people are clustered based on similar interests or similar roles “as a means of creating some sort of forum for them to come together to discuss some of these issues,” he says.
Today’s work patterns
work arrangements for managers and professionals at US Fortune 500 companies across fully flexible, structured hybrid and full time in office models.
Adapted from the Organization toolkit in Think:Act Magazine 47, part of a three-part series offering data insights on geopolitics, technology and organizations.
Takeaways
HR needs to find the time to think strategically, Collings concludes. “It tends to be so resource-constrained and so focused on the here and now and the pressure to keep the lights on and meet today’s needs that oftentimes it doesn’t have the space and the time to really look forward and plan strategically for where the workforce is going and the skills and capabilities and the locations of people in the future,” he says.
If automation creates an HR dividend, Collings predicts that it could be a moment of truth for HR leaders. “Speak to any HR leader. They say, generally, their teams are under-resourced. They don’t have the capacity to look forward and be strategic. Moving forward, AI is the perfect opportunity to create some of that capacity for their team,” he says. But CHROs are going to have to overcome a lot of longstanding prejudice, in his view. “Unfortunately, HR continues to be seen as a cost, and the strategic value which the function brings is not understood,” he says. “In those organizations, I think there’s a real risk that AI, and the efficiency that comes with it, will result in smaller teams, cost savings and the status quo being maintained.”
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