REMOTE WORK
When I started my career in recruiting, there were two indelible factors that really drove which positions a candidate might be interested in. One was money. The other was location. Most other factors were what I refer to as fluff - although they were important, candidates were more willing to compromise on these factors. In todays market, as more companies have moved to remote work, location doesn't have the same level of importance. But not all employers are excited or adept at hiring and managing a remote or hybrid workforce.
Can anyone confirm that the Big 4s' decisions not to require employees to come into the office, was based largely on fear of losing more people? If that's true - I understand their concern. I have witnessed, firsthand, the slow drain of employees these firms are experiencing. And, sadly, turnover begets turnover. Not only is the workload spread to fewer people, but there is a FOMO or copycat effect that happens.
Two and a half years ago I never asked a candidate how they felt about being in-office full time. That's not to say, people didn't want remote work or that it didn't come up in the conversation, but I just expected that everyone was prepared to go into the office all of the time. Unless they were one of the lucky few that had some type of unicorn job or crazy tech company employer. Now, it's only about 20-30% of the candidates I talk to that are OK with going into the office full time. Of the remaining 70-80%, about 2/3rds are OK with a hybrid situation and the other 1/3rd want fully remote. Of the 2/3rds of employees that are OK with hybrid, we are being very specific about which days and how many days they will work in office. An employer offering 3 days of remote work trumps someone offering only 2 days of remote work.
As with compensation, I try not to label what employees are looking for as good or bad. As an employer and a recruiter, I hear and understand most sides of the issue. The reality is, though, if an organization requires people to be in the office full time, their pool of possible employees, in an already tight market, is smaller. And, inversely, if you are open to hiring people that can work remotely, in theory you have the whole world of qualified candidates to choose from. Looking at this from a different perspective, if you're a job seeker looking only at positions that are fully remote, you are competing with a large pool of people and only seeing a small portion of available jobs. Conversely, if you are looking at all open positions, including fully in-office, you have a much larger selection of opportunities to consider.
While the location of where work is being done continues to evolve, in the short run the tight labor market favors employees. And at present, employees seem to prefer having the option to work remotely at least part of the time. I realize employers feel like this new way of doing things was kind of thrust upon them, but pretending it will go away or that they have such a great work environment that their employees don't really want to work from home, is wishful thinking at best. Like most healthy relationships, I think talking about it is probably the best thing to do. Change is hard and this change isn't something we saw coming. But, change has also been the doorway to lots of great opportunity. Instead of letting change be something that causes you to panic try to see it as your chance to be a leader.
