Analysis · November 1, 2026 · data as of November 1, 2026

Most remote creative listings name one country

Of 3,057 remote listings that state a scope, 85 (2.8%) are explicitly worldwide, and the country pattern follows which job boards Hired Creative reads.

Hired Creative's export holds 20,980 listings. Of the remote listings that state a scope, 3,057 in total, 85 (2.8%) are explicitly worldwide. 1,714 name the United States, alone or with other countries; counting the 85 worldwide listings as well, 58.8% name the US or are worldwide. These are shares of the boards Hired Creative collected, not of the remote job market.

The original question was whether better internet access or stronger English proficiency goes with a country being named more often in remote listings. The data cannot answer it, and the reasons are part of the finding.

Key points

• Of 3,057 remote creative listings that state where they are open, 85 (2.8%) say worldwide, in the job boards Hired Creative collected.
• Counting worldwide listings too, 58.8% of those 3,057 listings name the US or are worldwide (1,714 name the US). This follows which boards were read.
• Only 13 countries reach 30 listings, and only 4 do when the largest board is removed. The country list reflects board coverage.
• No relationship with internet use or English proficiency is detectable in this data, which is too thin and too source-driven to test it.

What the data covers

Remote status can only be read from some boards. The export has 9,825 rows from LinkedIn feeds. Their location text carries a remote or worldwide marker in 5 rows, so they cannot be used for this question. The other 11,155 rows include 3,905 with a remote marker. Together with the 5 LinkedIn rows, remote-flagged listings are 18.6% of the export.

Those 3,905 listings come mostly from a few boards. Three of them supply 78.8%: remoterocketship (2,124), ashby (488) and greenhouse (465). Any country pattern in remote listings is therefore largely a pattern in what those boards list.

Of the 3,905 remote-flagged listings, 3,057 state a scope that can be placed: 85 worldwide, 2,641 with an explicit country name and 331 placed only through a city or US state. A further 90 name only a region and 758 state no scope. The listings with no stated scope are not treated as country-bound.

What the scoped listings name

For each country c, a listing counts as naming c if it is worldwide or scoped to c. The share is that count over all 3,057 scoped remote listings. This describes the listings collected. The export has no eligibility field, so it does not measure whether a worker in c could be hired.

The worldwide listings set a floor of 2.8% for any country, however few listings name it. Above that floor, the shares fall quickly: after the US, no country reaches 9%. Thirteen countries have at least 30 country-scoped listings.

Why the country list is a board effect

Eight of the 13 countries get 83% or more of their scoped listings from one board, remoterocketship. France is the exception at 11%.

Without that board, 987 scoped listings remain and only 4 countries reach 30: the US, Canada, the UK and France. A country-level comparison needs more countries than that, so it cannot be run on the remaining data. A gap between countries here is first a difference in which boards list them.

The correlation test

Across the 13 countries with at least 30 scoped listings, openness has no detectable rank correlation with internet use (Spearman 0.17, permutation p 0.60, bootstrap 95% interval -0.52 to 0.74). Across the 10 of them with an EF English Proficiency Index score, the correlation with English proficiency is -0.31 (p 0.39, interval -0.87 to 0.53). The index does not cover the US, the UK or Canada, which hold most of the scoped listings, so that test drops them.

The intervals run from strongly negative to strongly positive. This is an uninformative result, not evidence of no relationship. Ten to thirteen countries, chosen by board coverage, cannot test the question.

A second check measured something different: the share of listings flagged remote among listings located in each country, on seven employer career-page boards. For 17 countries with at least 30 such listings it also shows no rank correlation with internet use (Spearman 0.12, permutation p 0.65, bootstrap 95% interval -0.49 to 0.66). These boards mostly carry employers with offices in those countries, so the check says little about workers elsewhere.

Method

Data: the Hired Creative listings export read on 2026-11-01, 20,980 listings, with the location text field as free text.

Remote flag: a listing from a non-LinkedIn source is flagged remote if its location text matches, case-insensitively, any of remote, worldwide, anywhere or global. LinkedIn feed rows are identified by a source name starting with "linkedin".

Scope: each flagged listing is placed as worldwide, an explicit country name (country names and aliases from the World Bank country list), a country reached through a city or a US state code after a city (using a short city list), a region only, or unstated. A hand-read check of 60 random country-scoped listings found 59 fully right and 1 partly right (a listing naming both the US and Canada was read as US only).

Openness: for country c, (listings scoped to c + worldwide listings) / (listings scoped to a country or worldwide). A listing naming several countries counts for each. Listings with a region only or no stated scope are outside the denominator.

Minimum sample: 30 country-scoped listings per country. Countries with fewer than 30 listings, and any whose separate reporting could identify a sensitive location, are pooled.

Outside data: internet use is the World Bank indicator IT.NET.USER.ZS (share of the population who used the internet in the last 3 months, from the ITU), latest value per country in 2015 to 2025, which is 2024 for most countries. The World Bank file was last updated 2026-10-08. English proficiency is the EF English Proficiency Index 2025, Appendix D, which covers 123 countries.

Tests: Spearman rank correlation across countries. The p value is two-sided from 5,000 random shuffles of one variable. The interval is a 95% percentile interval from 5,000 resamples of countries with replacement. A rank correlation was not computed where fewer than 5 countries qualified.

Limits

• The export has no eligibility field. Scope is inferred from location text. A board's "Country, remote" tag may mark where the employer or board places a role rather than a hiring restriction, and a remote label with a city (331 listings) probably shows the employer's base.
• LinkedIn feeds, the main source for several regions, carry no remote marker. The places where internet access and English proficiency vary most are where the remote data is thinnest. The 13 countries are mostly high-connectivity markets, so the range of internet access is narrow.
• Which countries reach 30 listings is decided by board coverage, not by labour markets. The null result describes this data. It does not show that connectivity or English proficiency do not matter, and nothing here supports a causal or predictive reading of either.
• The English index excludes the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and Singapore. Its test-taking sample is self-selected and, in the index's own words, not guaranteed to be representative. It rests on more than 2,200,000 test takers of the EF SET in 2024.
• A critic will say that US-only roles are the market and that the boards read over-sample US employers. The data cannot rule that out. The 2.8% worldwide share is a share of what Hired Creative collected, not of all remote creative jobs, and it says nothing about how often remote roles are open worldwide in the job market as a whole.
• Scope and remote status come from parsing free text. The hand-read sample is small, and the 758 listings with no stated scope are mostly a bare "Remote".
• Snapshot only. No trend is claimed.

Sources

• World Bank, Individuals using the Internet (% of population), IT.NET.USER.ZS
• World Bank data file used for IT.NET.USER.ZS, 2015 to 2025
• EF English Proficiency Index 2025
• Hired Creative listings export, 2026-11-01 (n=20,980).

Published by Hired Creative from its own listings and the sources above. Spotted an error? Tell us.