Remote working rewired the way ERP teams hire. Ask anyone who was hiring in March 2020 and they’ll tell you the same thing: almost overnight, interviews moved onto video, onboarding moved onto laptops, and a lot of “we’d never do that” rules quietly disappeared. That story has been told to death, though, and it isn’t the useful part. What matters is where the dust actually settled in ERP recruitment, because it didn’t settle in the same place on both sides of the Atlantic. Six years on, the US and the UK have each landed on their own pattern, and those patterns shape who gets hired, how fast, and what it costs. Here’s what we see from the desk, week in and week out.
Where things landed
In the US, remote won. A big share of ERP roles, whether implementation, development or administration, are now hired fully remote as standard. That turned the talent pool national. A NetSuite administrator in Boise is going for the same jobs as one in Boston. If you’re hiring for niche skills, it’s been the single most useful change of the decade. We go into it in our US market guide.
The UK went hybrid instead. One to three days on site is the usual pattern across the UK partner channel, and fully remote UK ERP roles are still the exception. What did change for good is the radius. A consultant in Manchester can now work for a London partner without moving, and that has quietly widened every UK shortlist we run.
Fully office-based roles, on the other hand, have got properly hard to fill. When one lands with us, we’re upfront with the client: that requirement will cost you most of the candidate pool, so make sure it’s worth it.
How the two markets compare in practice
It helps to see the difference day to day, because the two markets behave so differently.
In the US, a vacancy can be advertised nationally on day one. A hiring manager in Texas might interview people across four time zones before lunch. The trade-off is competition. Everybody else is doing the same, so strong candidates move quickly and expect a fair rate for the work, wherever they live.
In the UK, the conversation usually starts with the commute. How many days, which office, how flexible is it really? A candidate within reach of the office will often be preferred, but the definition of “within reach” has stretched. A three-hour trip once a week was unthinkable before 2020. Plenty of consultants do it now and think nothing of it.
Neither approach is wrong. They’ve grown out of different working cultures, and employers hiring across both markets need to stop treating them as one.
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 get approached from everywhere, and holding on to people has become the harder half of the job. The pattern we see is that businesses who treat location flexibility as a perk to be negotiated lose people to businesses who make it the default.
For candidates, it’s 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 choose hybrid roles on purpose for exactly that reason.
What this means for retention
Hiring remote is easy to get excited about. Keeping people is where the effort goes.
When your team is spread out, the small things that used to happen naturally need planning. Questions get asked in the corridor less. Juniors lose the habit of leaning over to check something. A problem on a project can sit unnoticed for days because nobody saw the worried look on a colleague’s face.
The employers who do this well tend to do a few unglamorous things. They keep regular one-to-ones in the diary. They make sure juniors have a named person to ask. And they bring teams together in person at the moments that matter, such as project kick-offs and go-lives, rather than on a fixed schedule that suits the calendar more than the work.
None of this costs much. But it’s what stops a good consultant from answering the next recruiter message.
Practical takeaways
Employers: say what the arrangement is in the advert. Remote, hybrid with two days on site, whatever it truly is. Vague “flexible working” wording 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. You can see 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. All we have is data on what each choice does to a search. Ask us about yours.