San Francisco, New York, London—tech talent has historically flocked to these hubs for a shot at working with industry-leading companies. Until recently, the best jobs have been limited to people in this handful of the world’s wealthiest cities. Oyster’s mission is to change that.
At Oyster, we want to create a more equal world by building a bridge between companies and the world’s top talent. That way, no matter where someones lives in the world, everyone has the chance to prosper.
In order to stay accountable to our mission, we put together our first annual impact report. This gives us insight into how we’re tracking against our goals, but also helps to ensure we’re creating a positive impact beyond just solving the global employment problem.
How is our work impacting Team Members and their communities?
Our north star is helping people access employment opportunities regardless of where they live, bringing a range of benefits to them and their communities. Our Team Member audience (people we engage through our platform) is made up two distinct profiles: traditionally credentialed talent and emerging talent.
Traditionally credentialed talent are Team Members who are not underserved by the global employment market, but are looking to relocate for lifestyle or personal/family reasons. For this group, the ability to work anywhere creates a positive lifestyle change, empowering individuals to spend less time commuting, more time with family, etc.
Our secondary audience is emerging-markets-based, geo-locked, and/or low income job seekers. These are people with low prospects of finding a “suitable” role locally who are also unable to relocate for work. This group is heavily underserved by the existing global employment market, and greatly benefits from having (remote) access to quality employment, income, benefits, and development opportunities which are otherwise unavailable.
To date, 25% of our current team members are in emerging markets and our projected total-dollar flow per annum to these markets by the end of 2022 is $50+ million. By 2024, we hope to increase this total-dollar flow to emerging markets to $1 billion annually.
What about the Oyster team?
As important as it is for us to empower our customers to create opportunities globally, we also want to make sure we’re walking the walk to match our talk. Given our mission to create a more equal world, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are incredibly important metrics for our Workplace team to track.
To date, the breakdown of Oyster’s workforce is as follows:
Inspiring change
We know that changing the global perspective on work doesn’t happen overnight, but the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have surely accelerated the process. We’ve seen a ton of change in the world of work in the last couple of years, so to better understand some of these trends, we conducted a cross-sector survey of global HR professionals in April 2022.
While many employers are bringing employees back into the office, our survey showed enthusiasm for continued remote working:
Although many employers have made strides to embrace remote work, we’ve found there’s still more work to be done when it comes to empowering companies to start hiring beyond their local talent pool:
Starting to think globally
While we’re are only a few years into our journey (and there’s no playbook for building an impact-driven business), we’re continuing to learn as we go.
Last year, we introduced Oyster’s “Mission Squad,” a cross-functional team that puts our mission at the core of our day-to-day decision making and operations. We also spent time with external advisors to revisit our original social impact thesis and consolidate our thinking on broader systems change.
We know the work doesn’t end there, which is why we’ve outlined even more goals that will help us stay accountable to our mission in the coming year, including applying for B corporation certification. It’s incredibly important to us that Oyster’s mission is ingrained in everything we do.
Read our 2022 impact report for more on how we’re working to enable companies everywhere to to hire, pay, and care for talent anywhere.
About Oyster
Oyster is a global employment platform designed to enable visionary HR leaders to find, hire, pay, manage, develop and take care of a thriving distributed workforce. Oyster lets growing companies give valued international team members the experience they deserve, without the usual headaches and expense.
Oyster enables hiring anywhere in the world with reliable, compliant payroll, and great local benefits and perks.