Remote working rewired ERP recruitment, and the interesting part isn't the 2020 story everyone's told — it's where the dust actually settled, because it settled differently on each side of the Atlantic.
Where things landed
In the US, remote won. A large share of ERP roles — implementation, development, administration — are now hired fully remote as standard, which turned the talent pool national. A NetSuite administrator in Boise competes for the same roles as one in Boston. For employers hiring niche skills, that's been the single biggest practical improvement of the decade; we cover it in our US market guide.
The UK settled on hybrid instead. One to three days on site is the standard pattern across the UK partner channel now, and fully remote UK ERP roles remain the exception. What changed permanently is the radius: a Manchester consultant can serve a London partner without relocating, which quietly widened every UK shortlist we run.
Fully office-based roles, meanwhile, have become genuinely hard to fill. When one lands on our desk, we tell the client plainly: the requirement will cost them most of the candidate pool, so it had better be worth it to them.
The bit nobody says out loud
Remote didn't loosen ERP hiring — it moved the competition. When employers could only hire within commuting distance, geography protected them. Now the strongest candidates field approaches from everywhere, and retention has become the harder half of the game. The pattern we see: businesses that treat location flexibility as a perk to be negotiated lose people to businesses that treat it as the default.
For candidates, the calculus is mostly upside, with one caution we repeat a lot: early-career consultants develop faster with real site time. Shadowing a senior through a messy go-live teaches things a Teams call can't. The strongest juniors we place deliberately choose hybrid roles for exactly that reason.
Practical takeaways
Employers: state the arrangement in the advert — remote, hybrid-2-days, whatever it truly is. Vague "flexible working" copy reads as "we haven't decided", and candidates skip it. And if you're hiring for scarce skills, every day of mandatory office attendance shrinks your market; check what that scarcity costs in our salary guides.
Candidates: remote-friendly markets price nationally. If you've been benchmarking yourself against local adverts, you're probably low — the salary checker takes thirty seconds.
We place ERP people into remote, hybrid and on-site roles across both markets, so we've no ideology about it — only data on what each choice does to a search. Ask us about yours.