‘Work from Home’ is officially dead, says CEO of the world’s largest recruitment company; the only exceptions will be …

Amazon mandated its employees to return five days per week to office at the start of 2025. Over the next few months, many more technology companies including Dell, IBM, Meta, Salesforce, Snap, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Disney, AT&T and others too joined in with the same or similar mandate for employees. And the year ends with Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri telling employees to be back in the office five days a week. according to a companywide memo sent by Mosseri, starting February 2, US employees will need to return to the office full-time. As Sander van ’t Noordende, the global CEO of Randstad, which places around half a million workers in jobs every week and can be termed as the biggest recruiter across the world, said in an interview to Fortune, that the great return-to-office war is effectively over — and a new pecking order has emerged. While rank-and-file staff are called back to their desks, the CEO of the world’s biggest talent company says that only star performers will be able to hold on to fully remote roles. “You have to be very special to be able to demand a 100% remote job,” van ’t Noordende tells Fortune. “That’s increasingly the story. You have to have very special technology skills or some expertise.”“The whole phenomenon of freelance work has been coming up, of course, over the last decades… but that also requires also special skills — good commercial skills or networking skills, which not everybody has.” What van ’t Noordende reportedly claims to be seeing on the ground is something similar to what Korn Ferry predicted at the start of this year: As companies increasingly upped the dial on in-office working, the consulting firm forecasted a “new hybrid hierarchy” where flexibility becomes a perk reserved only for star performers. “2025’s Haves and Have-Nots will be divided not by economics, but by talent and how much the company wants them,” the report outlined.Essentially at the top, workers with scarce skills can still negotiate for fully remote or ultra-flexible setups. But at the bottom, workers with the least leverage—often in more junior or commoditized roles—are more likely to be expected to show face.

5 years after remote work boom, the return-to-office becomes reality in 2025

Covid-19 pandemic ushered in a new way of working remotely in 2020. However, almost all the companies that initially championed the model changed or are changing their tune in 2025. In recent months, employees across corporate world, from Inosys to TCS, Amazon to Dell have been told that their days of working remotely are over. Instead, select employees have been called back into offices five days a week, a reversal of conversations in 2020 that touted remote and hybrid options as the future of work.Some companies have been very strict. Amazon cloud boss Matt Garman reportedly told employees who don’t agree with the work from office rule that they can leave. Similarly, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and counterparts at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been strong advocates of working from the office, saying it fosters better learning, innovation and culture. More than half of JPMorgan’s employees already come into the office full-time, according to the memo from the bank’s operating committee. It has more than 316,000 staff worldwide.“Now is the right time to solidify our full-time in-office approach,” the executives wrote. “We think it is the best way to run the company.”