What these numbers look like in the real world

John Tenta, who currently lives in Chicago, has six years of B2B sales experience, and even with recommendations from friends working at companies he’s applied to, he’s been on the job hunt for entry- and mid-level SaaS sales roles since June. He and his wife are planning to move to New York, and he decided to look for a fully remote role after his previous job wanted him back in the office full time in the Windy City.

He told Morning Brew that he’s applied to more than 100 jobs.

“There has been no shortage of jobs for me to apply to. There have just been a lot more rejections,” said Tenta. “It feels much more competitive than it did when I was applying a couple of years ago.”

Dan Wade has been hunting since the end of June for remote senior roles in communications and marketing from his St. Paul, Minnesota, home. He noted that while most sites will filter remote and in-person jobs for you, the listings in those categories aren’t always clear.

“I have definitely clicked on jobs that were tagged in LinkedIn as remote. And then you scroll down to the requirements: ‘three days a week in our office in Detroit, Michigan.’ Boy, we have a really different definition of remote,” Wade said.

Even when a listing does describe a job as remote, sometimes it turns out the job…isn’t. Alli Kennon, who lives in Boise, Idaho, while her husband attends grad school, was recently searching for a remote role in influencer marketing or social media. She said she applied to 30–40 jobs that were marketed as either fully remote or hybrid in the Boise area. But after submitting applications for a number of roles, she got emails back asking her if she’d be willing to relocate to Austin or LA or wherever the heck they wanted her tweeting from.

“I’m not going to move to LA for a social media manager position where I’m making, like, 60k. That doesn’t make any sense,” Kennon told Morning Brew.

During one phone screening for a remote influencer marketing role, the recruiter (who was based in Denver) told Kennon that they actually wanted a candidate who was based in New York because the role would be working Berlin hours.

But there’s hope

Kennon found a dream remote role recently with flexible (non-Berlin) hours. “I’m excited to not have restrictions on actually working from home,” she said.

Plus, some companies have made WFH their whole brand. In the last two years, a number of companies like Dropbox, Lyft, and Airbnb said they were ditching forced “company culture” and commuting to let employees work wherever they want.

Other companies aren’t necessarily opposed to hiring remote (or at least hybrid) workers, but they’re still figuring out how to implement policy. Google faced pushback for its weird patchwork of WFH requirements, where some employees weren’t allowed to WFH while some were, including one senior exec who said he was moving to New Zealand. Finally, Google settled on a hybrid plan that lets employees work remotely two days a week and allows four weeks of “work from anywhere” time.

“I don’t think anybody knows what the rules for hiring fully remote teams are. …It feels like you’re a little bit adrift in this sea of semi-open jobs,” Wade said.

Right now, it all comes across like a bigger mess than trying to coordinate renting a big house with the group chat. But, eventually, companies are going to have to get it together.

Read the full report here