There’s a Higher Bar for Working from Home

That’s the pattern that Letian Zhang, an associate professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, began to notice while studying how technological changes reshape work and management. Zhang collaborated with Kellogg PhD candidate Shinan Wang and professor Zhenyu Liao of Northeastern University to conduct 37 in-depth interviews of hiring managers and other individuals who had substantial experience with remote hiring. They found that the pattern seemed to apply to job postings for remote jobs even before Covid-19 turned remote work from a rare perk into a somewhat common way to work.   

“[There’s] a very strong and very consistent correlation between whether a job is remote and the skill requirement that was listed on the job posting,” says Zhang.  

To find out how that correlation played out on a larger scale, the researchers analyzed millions of job postings and confirmed Zhang’s early observation: remote job postings asked for more skills than did comparable postings for in-person or hybrid roles.  

As remote work becomes a lasting part of how organizations operate, Zhang says, this higher bar for skill and experience “could have a real impact, not just on how people do their work, but on whom organizations decide to hire.” 

Testing the pattern at scale 

The researchers focused their study on job postings in Europe, where Covid-era lockdown policies were drastically different across countries. For instance, Sweden’s restrictions were relatively loose, while France and the U.K. enforced stricter policies. This meant that the shift to remote work varied widely throughout the researchers’ dataset, not only based on how adaptable a job was to remote work but also on the country and year the job was posted. Accounting for these factors, along with differences across employers, allowed the team to more-precisely estimate the relationship between remote work and hiring requirements. 

In all, the researchers analyzed more than 50 million job postings in 28 European countries from 2018 to 2021. This included tracking 13,890 distinct skills identified in online job postings, ranging from broad competencies (like working in teams) to more-specialized expertise (like JavaScript coding).  

They found that remote job postings listed 25 percent more required skills than did non-remote job postings with the same occupation from the same employer in the same year.  They further broke down the skills into four separate categories—cognitive skills, social interaction with coworkers, social interaction with customers, and information- and communication-technology skills—and found that remote work was associated with higher skill expectations across all four categories. 

“Remote work in a job posting predicts [a requirement of] more skills,” Wang says. “Separately, remote work predicts more work experience and slightly higher education requirements.” 

Asking for more 

To check whether the pattern would hold up beyond the messiness of real-world hiring data, the researchers conducted a complementary study.  

This one was a controlled, preregistered experiment with 1,250 full-time employees with hiring experience from the same 28 European countries, recruited through the data-collection platform Prolific. Each manager read one of 18 different job descriptions and rated the level of skills, work experience, and education they would list as requirements for the job. The researchers randomly assigned the participants to review either a remote or in-person job posting.

The results of this experiment largely mirrored the initial observational findings. “Managers who reviewed remote work postings were significantly more likely to ask for more skills and more work experience,” Wang says, “but not as much in terms of educational credentials.” 

Ultimately, the experiment did show that remote work had roughly the same effect on job requirements even in a controlled setting. 

Why remote work raises the bar 

These findings point to three factors that the researchers believe are driving employers and managers to require more in their remote job postings, although the evidence for the shift toward more measurable qualifications is mixed. 

The first factor is larger applicant pools. Remote work inherently expands the number of people who can perform a job since they don’t have to commute to a fixed location. With significantly more applicants, employers might want to set higher criteria to filter out applications so that the hiring process stays manageable. 

The second reason for the higher bar is that it serves as a replacement for in-person impressions. Some employers may want to emphasize verifiable credentials more heavily for remote jobs since they will have fewer face-to-face interactions to assess someone’s ability and cultural fit. 

And finally, the more-demanding requirements could help offset the increased difficulty of training people remotely. Understanding that they may not be able to train and develop new workers in person, managers may prefer to hire people who have sufficient experience with certain tasks.  

“When [the position is] remote, it’s really hard to get people onboarded because there’s so much tacit knowledge in many jobs that is really hard to convey through a guidebook,” Zhang explains. “A lot of the learning on the job happens through hallway conversations and through shadowing your existing employees.” 

Rather than trying to replicate that type of informal mentorship over a video call, many employers seem to be leaning toward a simpler route: hiring people who need less training and mentorship to begin with. Consequently, they raise the bar for hiring, oftentimes in the realms of technical and cognitive skills.  

A narrowing door for early-career workers 

As more jobs go remote, Zhang argues that there may be consequences to these higher hiring standards.  

“This may hurt the entry-level workers who need training,” Zhang says. “Those are the workers who might be left out because organizations, after becoming remote, may have a stronger preference for more-experienced workers.”  

This could result in a negative feedback loop. As it becomes harder to train less-experienced workers remotely, companies increasingly hire people who have more skills. This leaves fewer entry-level openings for the next generation of workers to gain the skills and experiences that employers now expect them to have. As time goes on, that dynamic risks completely erasing “high-potential, inexperienced talent” that used to enter the workforce through junior roles.  

For Zhang, that highlights a question that businesses, universities, and policymakers have not fully answered.  

“If this is actually driving more organizations to expect more ready-to-use skills, then what should we do as business schools?” Zhang says. “What should we do to help better prepare students so that they can be more ready to get on board when they start these remote jobs?” 

The researchers note an important caveat: the effects they documented were strongest in fully remote jobs. The requirements for hybrid positions, on the other hand, looked much more like in-person jobs. So, these jobs may still offer access to the kind of early-career opportunities and training traditionally provided by the full in-office experience.  

Still, as remote work gradually takes up a larger portion of the labor market, Zhang argues that this upward shift in hiring requirements reflects something larger than a temporary pandemic-era adjustment; “it reflects a structural shift in how work is organized.”