U.S. workers are getting scooped up by international companies hiring remote roles

It's getting harder to find a remote job in the U.S., but you might have better luck working from home for a company based abroad.

The number of American workers hired by international companies grew 62% last year, according to the State of Global Hiring Report from Deel, an HR platform that specializes in global hiring.

The report is based on 300,000 contracts between Deel customers and workers for both contractors and full-time employees, and roughly 85% of those contracts are for remote positions.

American workers are most likely to be hired by companies in the U.K., Canada, France, Singapore and Australia.

The spike in U.S. workers vying for remote jobs headquartered overseas "feels correlated with the elimination of remote roles" stateside, says Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz. He knows from experience people are quitting jobs with return-to-office requirements to be remote: "A couple of our competitors did that, and we hired their best people. So I welcome them to keep doing it."

Global employers want to tap into the U.S. talent market because it's so large and has produced some of the most influential companies in the world, Bouaziz says. International bosses want to "leverage more U.S. talent to bring some of that culture that leads to the biggest enterprises in the world to their home country."

Americans who work remotely for international employers tend to live in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Austin and Miami. These U.S. economic powerhouses are "a playground" to hire highly knowledgeable workers with "unique skills" in product, growth and sales, Bouaziz says. Some of the most common jobs are in research, sales, software engineering, content and product.

"A lot of those companies are thinking, 'How do we build the right