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YOU VS. 4,000 OTHER APPLICANTS

Inside the frenzied scramble for remote jobs

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Angle down icon An icon in the shape of an angle pointing down. At this point
you're 60 times more likely to get into Harvard than to land a job that lets you
work from home. Chelsea Jia Feng/Insider

Aki Ito
Sep 26, 2023, 12:02 AM HST
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Last month, the data startup Cribl posted a job opening for a people-operations
analyst. There was nothing particularly eye-popping about the role. It offered a
salary of $55,000 to $70,000, required two to four years of relevant experience,
and included standard benefits like health insurance, dental, and a 401(k). But
the position came with an incredibly coveted — and increasingly rare — perk in
today's job market: It was 100% remote. 

Within the first week, 573 people applied. A week later, another 634
applications poured in. By the end of the process, more than 1,700 candidates
had lined up for the job. The hiring manager at Cribl eventually interviewed
three applicants before extending an offer to a lucky winner in Ohio. How lucky?
The chance of getting picked was 0.06% — 60 times worse than the odds of getting
into Harvard, about twice as unlikely as catching a foul ball at a baseball
game, and on par with having a birthday on February 29. 

Welcome to the impossible odds of today's job market for remote work. With
unemployment near a five-decade low, there are plenty of available positions for
those who are still willing to brave the morning commute. But it's a whole
different situation for job seekers who want to work from home full time. Ask
any of them and they'll tell you: It's brutal out there. 

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On LinkedIn, only 9% of job postings last month were fully remote, down from a
peak of 21% in March 2022. Yet the handful of remote listings attracted nearly
half of all applications on the site. On ZipRecruiter, the typical remote
opening now gets three times as many applicants as in-office roles. That's more
than twice as frenzied as the rush for remote jobs at the beginning of last
year.

"We're just seeing so much competition for remote roles," says Ashlee Anderson,
a career coach who specializes in helping people land work-from-home jobs. "So
many people want them. Everybody got a taste of it during the pandemic, and now
that it's being taken away they really want to hold onto it."

Why has it gotten so hard to land a remote job? Three factors are driving the
crunch. First, many large companies have ordered their remote employees to
return to their cubicles, prompting scores of office-averse professionals to
look for roles that will allow them to keep working from home. Second, those
same companies are now listing almost every new job opening as in-person or
hybrid, sparking a sharp drop in the number of remote roles. And third, there's
been a dramatic slowdown in tech, the industry that supercharged the boom in
remote work. The result: Too many WFH wannabes vying for too few remote spots. 

When jobs become scarce, things get ugly. People are so desperate to work from
home that some have taken pay cuts as steep as 20% to land a remote role. Others
have accepted offers that mark a significant step down in their careers.
Applicants are racing to enroll in certification programs, hoping to stand out
from the remote-hungry pack. But given how prolonged and demoralizing the search
can be, many have been forced to give up on the prospect of remote work,
resigning themselves once more to the imperatives of office life. 

Angel Medina hasn't given up yet, even though it's been four months since he got
laid off from his work-from-home job as a customer-service supervisor at
Verizon. So far, he's applied for nearly 40 remote openings on Indeed — some of
which had more than 1,000 applicants, and one that had more than 4,000. He's
never seen anything like it. "It's not the same as two to three years ago, when
you used to get to pick and choose your job," Medina says. "There's so many
competitors ahead of you. There's so many people applying for the same job."

> At the software maker Mural, the average job opening is getting 620 applicants
> – up by more than 200% from last year.

The few remaining employers that continue to offer remote jobs have been
overwhelmed by the surge of interest. The software maker Atlassian has seen a
93% jump in applications for the average job opening from last year. At Cribl
it's increased by 150%. And at Mural, another software maker, it's up by more
than 200% — averaging about 620 applicants per remote job. At Remote, an HR
platform that helps companies hire and pay remote workers around the world, two
recent openings — for a data analyst and a back-end engineer — each attracted
more than 4,000 candidates.

"We just get so many applications," says Barbara Matthews, the company's chief
people officer. "Sometimes we have to close them after four or five days."

While the tsunami of applications can be a challenge for small startups, it's
also creating a huge opportunity for them. As corporate giants like Google and
Amazon order everyone to return to the office, employers like Remote and Mural
can take their pick of the RTO refugees when they post a job opening. "It means
less competition for us, and greater access to talent," says Lisa Nielsen, the
senior vice president of people at Cribl. 

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With so few openings, candidates for remote jobs are being forced to hustle like
never before. They're setting up alerts on job sites so they can be among the
first to submit their applications. They're joining subreddits, Slack channels,
and Discord servers to trade tips and leads. They're directly messaging
recruiters and hiring managers on LinkedIn. And to stand out from the crowd,
they're getting creative. At Cribl, applicants have submitted poems about goats
and recorded videos of themselves with goats — a play on the fact that the
company's internal mascot is a goat.

One thing applicants should not do? Use ChatGPT. "I've seen a lot of folks use
AI to generate the intros on the top of their CVs," Matthews says. "If you're
sifting through CVs for two hours, you do notice a lot of these consistencies,
which is not a good thing."

The mad scramble for remote work isn't likely to subside anytime soon. Anderson,
the career coach who specializes in remote jobs, actually expects the
competition to intensify in the coming months, as big companies step up their
RTO campaign. This month, Meta began enforcing its three-days-a-week office
mandate, warning that repeat offenders would be fired. And Comcast is now
requiring employees to come in four days a week, up from three. 

"As more and more companies ask their workers to come back into the office,"
Anderson says, "2024 is when we're really going to see even more competition for
these remote roles." The dream of remote work, it appears, will soon be more
remote than ever.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aki Ito is a senior correspondent at Insider. 

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Through our Discourse journalism, Insider seeks to explore and illuminate the
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