With Amazon announcing a RTO policy last week, the “office debate” is heating up again. For executive hiring, though, that debate seems settled. Despite opting for more in-state executive hires since the COVID peaks, PE-owned and VC-backed companies have maintained flexibility with talent and only hire executives based in the same state of the company’s HQ between 40% and 50% of the time—significantly below pre-COVID levels. Private and public companies are both closer to their pre-COVID numbers, but still only about 45-55% of hires. VC’s pre-COVID levels of nearly 70% in-state hires seems like a distant memory in particular, as the asset class has yet to see a quarter of at least 60% since then.