“Remote jobs,” Google Trends, and Supply Intent🧑💻
Using Google Trends to Understand the Remote Worker Supply
“Remote jobs,” Google Trends, and Supply Intent🧑💻
Google searches for “remote jobs” are up 3x since the Spring of 2019.
My goal with this post is to help you recognize two things:
That Workers (AKA the supply side of the labor market) are looking for remote opportunities at a quickly accelerating pace. And…
If you want to “sell” a job to a candidate it is in your best interest to make it remote.
What Google Trends tells us about “Remote jobs”
Let’s look at how the search term “Remote jobs” did on Google Trends1 from March 2019 to December 2021.
Search is a good proxy for intent. So it’s fair to assume that three times as many people have been interested in working remotely since March 2019.
You don’t have to be a genius to know a lot more people are interested in remote jobs than just a couple of years ago. But just how interested are they?
Job Seekers’ Response to Remote Opportunities
Karen Kimbrough, the chief economist at Linkedin, has our answer. NPR’s Planet Money podcast interviewed Kimbrough about job seeker behavior on LinkedIn, where she had this to say.
People are nearly two and a half times more likely to look at a remote job when it's offered to them versus a job that's not remote and more than two and a half times more likely to apply for a remote job. So the job seekers like remote…
If what Kimbrough is saying is true, remote work is a talent pipeline gift for any organization that can adopt it. If you had a non-remote job that usually received 100 views and five applicants, that same job would have 250 views and 30+ applicants if it was remote. Garnering six times the number of applicants is a virtual guarantee that you will have better quality applicants.2
What about the Demand Side?
So how are companies (AKA the demand side of the labor market) responding to this fundamental shift?
Well, that post will have to wait until after the New Year. Until then, continue thinking about how you can be at the top of all those “remote jobs” searches.
In the meantime, have a great holiday season, and, as always, thank you for reading!
Google Trends is a service where you can put in any search term, and Google tells you how that term has performed over time. Said another way, it lets you know if more, less, or the same amount of people are searching for something over a given period. It doesn’t provide an exact volume of searches, but it does give you a clear picture of directional movement and relative popularity.
Being able to evaluate the talent of those applicants is another challenge entirely.