The Remote Hiring Revolution

How to use Emsi Burning Glass job posting data to track remote hiring trends and find remote talent.

 

What We Mean by Remote Hiring Revolution:

When a company hires an employee with the expectation that they will be allowed to spend all or most of their time working from home or outside the traditional office setting, that’s a “Remote Hire”.

The rapid rise in remote work represents a fundamental shift in how and where office work gets done in the US. It was a trend long before COVID came along, but the season of working from home during 2020 accelerated and amplified this trend.

Knowing the prevalence of remote hiring for specific roles can help you adapt your strategy for those roles and keep pace with the competition.

 

Emsi Burning Glass’s Methodology for Tracking Remote Hiring Trends:

Job Postings Methodology

• Emsi Burning Glass scans our hundreds of millions of online job postings across the US for the presence of language indicating that the advertised position can be filled by a remote worker. This involves analyzing the text of each posting’s title and body for remote language.
• Many words and phrases are used to indicate a remote position, including “remote”, “position can be located anywhere”, “work from home”, “telecommute”, and others. 
• Postings containing language indicative of a remote role are flagged as remote. 

 

[Note: Our definition is broad enough to include postings that require a person to live in a particular region, as long as coming to an office is not required.]

 

Other Methodology Notes:

To Analyze Remote Posting Trends we will use job postings data.

To Find Remote Talent we will use government occupational data (also known as Job Family Data) and profile data.

 Job Family Data:

• Job Family Data comes ultimately from Government reports organized by SOC codes (Standard Occupational Classification codes). SOCs provide context needed for labor market research, but are often broader groups of related job titles. 

Profile Data

• Profile data comes from online profile sources and helps measure the supply of talent in a region and shows what makes a job or an individual unique (based on their skills, job history, education history, etc.). 

 

Goal #1: Identify remote hiring trends

 

A. Find out if a role is “going remote”

Report: Job Postings Competition

Method: Toggle the remote filter option to compare posting trends specifically for remote positions against non-remote positions. 

Steps: 

• Enter an occupation, job title, skill, and/or region. Run the report.
• View and save the Unique Postings Trend
• Toggle the job location to “remote” in the left panel. 

• Compare the “non-remote” and “Remote” trend lines to each other. 

Example Results: 

You can see that remote job postings for this example are growing at a faster clip (steeper curve). The yellow shaded section is based on your report’s timeframe.

Note: You can also use either the Job Postings Competition or the Job Postings Table report to compare the percentage of remote vs non-remote job postings for two different timeframes. Ask your Account Manager if you’d like to see how to do this.

 

B. Identify top markets for remote hiring

Report: Map Job Postings

Method: Using the remote filter, you can identify where in the US companies are posting their remote positions. 

Steps: 

• Enter your search criteria: (for example, you could look at a specific competitor name or you could look for a specific job title or skill set that you’re looking to hire) 
• Include the “Unique Postings in Timeframe” data point, along with any others. 
• Run. 
• Toggle the job location to “remote” in the left panel. 
• If you’d like to view by city or county, you can select the box that says “State” and change it to “MSA” or “County”.

• Ensure that you select the “Unique Postings…” as the mapped column (click on the column header), and view your results.

Example Result:

You should see an interactive map of where your selected Remote job is being posted online the most. Below that will be an exportable table of postings by region. 

 

Goal #2: Find Remote Talent

 

Reports: Geography Explorer 

Method: Identify the best regions to post your own remote-friendly jobs based on supply, compensation, and competition using the supply data in Emsi Burning Glass. 

Steps: 

• Under the search parameters, enter your job title in “simple options” (or occupation + skill in “advanced options”)
• Run
• Quick Tips: Click on the heading of the column that you want to be mapped. Also, click the dropper in the top left corner of the column heading to apply a color scale to the column for easier analysis.

 

Download the PDF version of this training: The Remote Hiring Revolution