Noelle Pittock often spends workdays at a co-working space in downtown Toronto, since her company, Remote, has no physical headquarters.Jenna Marie Wakani/The Globe and Mail
Creative solutions can help solve Canada’s nagging talent problem according to professionals like Noelle Pittock, who is gainfully employed in Toronto by an American company with no physical headquarters.
For the sixth year in a row, more than 70 per cent of Canadian companies surveyed by ManpowerGroup reported difficulty finding the talent they need for 2026. Skilled workers for tech and digital roles are among the most difficult to find.
Ms. Pittock, senior director of payroll operations at Remote, believes Canadian companies should consider hiring remote workers to help solve the country’s talent shortage.
“Moving towards a global hiring approach unlocks a lot more opportunities,” says Ms. Pittock.
Founded in 2019, Remote is a U.S. HR tech company that acts as an Employer of Record to help businesses hire, manage and pay international workers. Not surprisingly, Remote itself is made up of 2,000 remote workers. Ms. Pittock, a Canadian, works from Toronto and leads a team of 150 people distributed around the world.
Ms. Pittock says that Canadian companies have used Remote to hire talent across 114 countries globally, with more Canada-based employees hired than those from any other single country. Companies in other countries have also used Remote to hire Canadians.
“Leaders struggle to find skilled candidates locally,” Ms. Pittock says. “And using a company like Remote to be able to facilitate global hiring compliantly is one kind of tool in the toolkit.”
Having employees work remotely isn’t a new concept, but hiring remote-first goes well beyond that. It’s a creative approach based on the idea that companies don’t need to favour candidates who live in the city or province where a company is headquartered, or even the same country. The whole world becomes the talent pool. But what kind of impact could that have on a company’s culture, productivity or advancement opportunities?
Redesigning workflows and teams
Sam Jenkins, managing partner at Punchcard Systems, understands the benefits of hiring remote workers. During the pandemic, Punchcard, a Canadian software development company founded in 2016, hired its first remote worker outside the geographic area of the then 15-person company in Edmonton.
Punchcard has since let go of their physical office space and gone fully remote as they’ve grown to a staff of 50 spread from British Columbia to Ontario.
“We were able to seek out new types of talent that we just didn’t have access to before,” Mr. Jenkins says.
Through this transformation, Punchcard redesigned how work happens in their organization, including how information flows, how decisions get made and how they build teams.
In particular, Punchcard examined its organizational approach to documentation and trust. They started leaning into documenting everything, from operating procedures to playbooks, then trusting staff to make decisions based on the documentation. The result is that fewer people are now involved in any given decision, but more people across the organization are making more decisions. This allows Punchcard to keep up momentum on projects, Mr. Jenkins says.
The company has no immediate plans to hire remote workers outside of Canada and sees remote work as a way to help keep Canadian talent in Canada.
“For a lot of Canadian communities, remote-first means talent gets to stay and contribute where they already live, rather than being pulled toward a handful of urban centres,” Mr. Jenkins says.
Advancement and retention risks
As some companies move toward remote-first hiring, many larger organizations are pushing return to office (RTO) mandates. David Zweig, professor of organizational behaviour and HR management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, believes this backlash against remote positions is due to leaders’ perceived loss of control.
Prof. Zweig says there has been no significant productivity loss data to support RTO mandates. The real issue is that many leaders have not been trained to lead remote teams.
“If you’re leading a remote team, you’ve got to use a different set of skills than you necessarily would if you’re managing an in-person team,” he says.
Though not a critic of remote work, Prof. Zweig cautions that it does come with a big trade-off for early-career employees and those new to a company. Performance appraisals are often influenced by proximity and recency, aside from productivity metrics, which means whether a boss sees an employee regularly in person could impact chances for advancement.
Jelena Zikic, professor in the School of Human Resource Management at York University, also cautions that remote positions have major downsides for social connections and knowledge transfer.
Bonding with others in person and learning often go hand-in-hand, she says. Spontaneous mentoring in the hallway or at the main entrance of a company building just doesn’t happen in remote positions where networking is pre-arranged with another calendar invite.
“My sense from interviewing people in these situations is that there’s definitely a negative impact on one’s career,” Prof. Zikic says.
Remote positions can also lead to weaker organizational culture and a weaker organizational identity, Prof. Zikic adds. All this, combined with the always-on expectations that are often part of remote positions, can have a negative impact on retention.
Ms. Pittock, of Remote, says she recognizes the importance of strong company culture. She points out that not every company, regardless of the strength of its culture or whether it supports remote work, is going to be a fit for every person. But remote work is a type of work that’s here to stay, she says, and it will allow companies to diversify their talent pools and find the best talent in the global marketplace.
“I think the idea of companies employing global talent is super exciting,” Ms. Pittock says, “because it unlocks a lot of flexibility and access to new and interesting markets.”