Did COVID fundamentally alter the job board market? – Job Board Doctor

: covid workersAs we move into Year 2 of the pan­dem­ic, some things have changed. There is not one, but mul­ti­ple vac­cines that have been shown to great­ly lim­it death or hos­pi­tal­iza­tion due to the virus. Mask-wear­ing, while still not uni­ver­sal, has become com­mon in much of the world, as has increased hand-wash­ing and social dis­tanc­ing. And – clos­er to home – the of employ­ers who have allowed their employ­ees to work remote­ly has grown sub­stan­tial­ly.

The big ques­tion as the world (slow­ly) opens back up: will remote work con­tin­ue to be an accept­ed and (in some cased) dom­i­nant option for work­ers?

Accord­ing to a recent sur­vey of knowl­edge and skilled office work­ers, about a third don’t want to go back to the office – ever. Inter­est­ing­ly enough, old­er work­ers are most emphat­ic on this. On the hand, only about 11% of younger work­ers want to con­tin­ue remote­ly.

Anoth­er view comes from this sur­vey: 30% of respon­dents said they would actu­al­ly quit rather than return to the office. That’s a rather strong state­ment.

about the oth­er of the fence? What do employ­ers have to say? An 2020 sur­vey of 12,000 employ­ees and their employ­ers world­wide indi­cat­ed that they had moved about 40% of their employ­ees to remote work. Although indi­vid­ual pro­duc­tiv­i­ty stayed the same or went up, many employ­ers found that col­lab­o­ra­tive projects suf­fered. Over the course of the year, how­ev­er, employ­ers invest­ed in tech that sup­port­ed remote work, and most expect­ed that about 40% of their employ­ees would fol­low a remote work mod­el in the future.

Sounds like a fun­da­men­tal shift, does­n’t it? So what does that mean for job boards?

  • An increase in remote work actu­al­ly plays to the strengths of the job board mod­el – job boards allow employ­ers to recruit from a wide geo­graph­ic area, not just a lim­it­ed area around the office.
  • Job boards can help employ­ers tag their job posts as ‘remote-friend­ly’ or ‘remote-only’ – thus tar­get­ing exact­ly the can­di­dates that want that work mod­el.
  • Job boards can help employ­ers sup­port their remote work­ers by part­ner­ing with remote work and tools, pro­vide them guid­ance on best prac­tices, and ensure that their hir­ing and onboard­ing process­es work for both in-per­son and remote work­ers.

On the employ­ee and can­di­date side of this mod­el, I expect that the cur­rent move­ment toward online com­mu­ni­ca­tion, com­mu­ni­ty, and col­lab­o­ra­tion will con­tin­ue – and that niche ‘hubs’ will increase.  Can­di­dates will be for more ways to inter­act with like-mind­ed in their pro­fes­sion – a gap that hubs can fill.

This is just the begin­ning of the changes that COVID will , I sus­pect. Will we soon have uni­ver­sal vac­cine cre­den­tial­ing? Office work­place rat­ings regard­ing their COVID ‘safe­ness’? Stay tuned…

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