And you thought driving across town was a long commute
Among the most astounding effects to emerge from the pandemic and the move to work from home as well as job seeking is the notion of geography. In the past it wasn’t unusual for job candidates to include “willing to relocate” on their resumes.
Thanks to the Covid and working from home movement, relocation is no longer an issue. Many candidates are now including “remote” as a work option as opposed to a specific location or a willing to relocate.
On the one hand, this is a good thing. Candidates are now free to pursue jobs that are hundreds, maybe even thousands of miles away. We know of a woman who accepted a job in Cincinnati although she lived (and continues to live) 250 miles away. She travels to Cincinnati 2-3 times per month and works from home the remainder of the time.
Of course there is a downside to that. While you may be able to apply for jobs hundreds of miles from your home, competing candidates are also able to seek jobs in your backyard as well. Depending on the job in question, whereas before you may have to compete with 15-20 viable candidates from your region, now your competing with hundreds of candidates who reside hundreds of miles away.
One company was offering a job that would service 19 of its offices in 19 different cities. This resulted in 19 times as many candidates. Anyone interested in that job would not have to be the best “widget director” in that limited geographic area, but the best “widget director” in the entire country… and maybe beyond.
Another company – which had 70 remote offices – calculated that by having its employees work from home, they could close the local offices and save as much as $100,000 each month in rent for each office. That’s a total of more than one million dollars over the course of a year.
It seems that the new job landscape could be covered with snow, or sand, or swamp, or… whatever – all at the same time.