As many companies increasingly encourage workers to return to the office, one portion of remote working is set to outlast its pandemic-era need.
“The in-person interview isn’t dead, but the remote interview is certainly here to stay,” Glassdoor Senior Economist Daniel Zhao told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “That is something we expect to see continue even after the pandemic and is something we have been seeing in Glassdoor data so far during the pandemic.”
Zhao explained that remote interviews are “much more covenant convenient and much cheaper” — both for jobseekers and employers.
“Now you don’t have to fly out a candidate to an onsite interview, and at the same time that candidate doesn’t have to take off time from work,” Zhao said.
So far in 2022, 20% of interview reviews on Glassdoor mentioned the word “remote” compared to just eight percent of reviews mentioning “in-person.” That marks a sharp reversal from the pre-pandemic interviews of 2019, in which 29% of interviews mentioned “in-person” versus just 10% mentioning “remote.”
A tight labor market is also providing an unexpected boost to remote interviews. The U.S. saw 390,000 new jobs added in May, with unemployment holding steady at 3.6%.
“When I go around the country, I talk to businesses,” Marty Walsh U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh told Yahoo Finance Live after the jobs report on Friday. “And… They’re looking to hire people, and they can’t find people out there. But their businesses are still continue to move forward. I just think we have to take this thing a step at a time here.”
To attract top talent in a tight labor market, businesses are trying to meet jobseekers where they are — even if that’s through a webcam.
‘Definitely made it easier for employees to interview for other jobs’
Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, told Yahoo Finance that first rounds of interviews are likely to continue to be conducted remotely, saving businesses time and money by allowing them to run multiple interviews. The second rounds would increasingly take place in-person and focus on ensuring a candidate is good fit.
Bloom added that switching jobs and even impulse job-hopping could become the new normal as companies embrace remote interviews and employees prefer the ease and discretion it provides.
“Work-from-home has definitely made it easier for employees to interview for other jobs,” says Bloom. “Indeed, it’s so much easier that we could be changing jobs within the same day.”
Consequentl, jobseekers are more likely to favor the remote interview because of how flexible and easy it makes the search for new employment — especially when hunting for jobs on the sly.
“They don’t need to pretend to have a dentist appointment in order to take an interview,” Zhao said. “So to some extent that might actually make the matching process a little bit faster which would be a nice change in the labor market.”
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