It took a few years for the winds to shift, but employers began in earnest in 2024 to reverse course on their openness to flexible work. Return-to-office plans proliferated last year, with 58% of surveyed U.S. workers working fully on-site compared to 53% in 2023, according to McKinsey & Co.

Now that trend is spilling over into employers’ recruiting efforts: the latest edition of HR Dive’s annual Identity of HR survey, which polled 578 HR professionals, found that fewer than half, 48%, said remote or hybrid work arrangements were part of their organizations’ talent acquisition strategies last year, compared to 56% in 2023’s survey.

HR Dive’s findings match up with broader industry sentiment, said Jamie Kohn, senior director, research at consulting firm Gartner. Despite strong demand for flexibility from candidates, HR teams are largely restricted from meeting that demand because of a shift by leadership toward RTO, she added.Fewer employers used flexible work, pay increases to attract talent in 2024

% of Identity of HR respondents who said each offering was part of their talent acquisition strategies in 2023 and 2024. Respondents were allowed to select multiple options.

“They kind of feel like their hands are tied by leadership decisions,” Kohn said. “It’s still a critical factor from the candidate side, but we’re definitely seeing that factor less in offers, and it’s still not being used as much as a carrot to attract talent.”

It’s a striking — if not foreseeable — trend after some studies in the years immediately following 2020 suggested that employers would settle on at least some degree of work location flexibility as a long-term strategy. But as far back as 2021, Kohn said she recalled having conversations with finance professionals who planned to push RTO when the then-candidate-friendly talent market cooled.

In 2025, the share of HR clients asking Kohn to help them make the business case for remote work has dropped considerably; “They’re not really asking for that anymore,” she said.

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