You vs. 4,000 other applicants: Inside the frenzied scramble for remote jobs

Inside the frenzied scramble for remote jobs

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.

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.

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.