Return to Office Mandate Is Costing Your Company the Best Applicants

While return to office mandates spread across corporate America, a smaller group of employers is running the opposite play and posting the hiring numbers to prove it’s working, according to a recent Business Insider roundup of companies embracing remote work.

Among its findings, the report shows Dropbox’s applicants per job have risen nearly sevenfold since it adopted a “virtual first” model in 2021, with attrition now at the lowest point in company history. Atlassian has seen applications per opening double since adopting a work-from-anywhere policy in 2020, and Spotify cut annual attrition roughly in half after adopting a similar policy.

“A lot of the companies going back to the office are leaking talent to us, whether or not they want to admit it.”

Alex Bouaziz, co-founder and CEO of Deel

Deel hired more than 2,000 people in 2024 out of 1.5 million applicants, and its CEO credits rigid RTO policies elsewhere for the size of that applicant pool.

RWN’s Take

This isn’t a story about companies disliking offices. It’s a story about flexibility becoming a recruiting weapon, and the RTO camp not fully pricing that in yet.

Flexibility Is Now a Measurable Hiring Advantage

Dropbox’s nearly sevenfold jump in applicants and Atlassian’s doubled application rate aren’t soft sentiment; they’re pipeline numbers. When a remote-first policy multiplies your applicant pool, that’s a recruiting cost advantage over competitors requiring five days in the office.

Retention Is Where the Bet Really Pays Off

Spotify’s attrition rate is now half what it was before its policy shift, while Dropbox’s is at the lowest point in its history. Firms treating flexibility as leverage to keep people are seeing it show up directly in retention, not just applications.

The Talent Migration Is Already Happening

Deel’s CEO isn’t speculating—he’s watching it happen: professionals leaving RTO-heavy employers for companies that stayed flexible. That’s a live talent flow, not a hypothetical risk for the companies enforcing strict mandates.

Structure, Not Just Policy, Is Doing the Work

Coinbase, Zapier, and Toptal all pair remote-first defaults with deliberate in-person time, quarterly off-sites, and periodic gatherings. The companies making this work aren’t skipping the office entirely; they’re being intentional about when proximity actually earns its place.

The companies winning the talent war aren’t just remote; they’re intentional about it. Roam gives distributed teams a virtual office where the spontaneous hallway moments, the quick “got a sec?” conversations, and the sense of being in the same room actually happen, no matter where everyone’s logging in from. If flexibility is your hiring advantage, Roam is how you make sure it doesn’t cost you connection.