As Instagram employees join the millions of workers who were slapped with a return-to-office mandate in 2025, remote work is fast becoming a status symbol.
Sander van ’t Noordende, the global CEO of Randstad, which places around half a million workers in jobs every week, says the great return-to-office war is effectively over—and a new pecking order has emerged.
While rank-and-file staff are dragged back to their desks, the CEO of the world’s biggest talent company says only star performers will be able to cling 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.”
