Since the start of the pandemic, advertisements for work-from-home job vacancies have risen by almost 500 per cent, reflecting a new way of working.
New research by Reed, a job and careers site, reveals an exponential rise in the number of jobs advertised with remote, hybrid or flexible working arrangements since the start of the pandemic.
The number of job opportunities advertising remote working arrangements doubled in 2020, reaching 2 per cent compared to just one per cent the year prior.
However, in 2021, this figure rose by over twice the amount, accounting for 5 per cent of all listed vacancies.
Overall, this represents a 452 per cent rise in these type of roles compared to pre-pandemic figures.
Similarly, vacancies which advertised dynamic working opportunities – including hybrid and flexible working – has also increased during the same period, reaching seven per cent by this year.
As such, candidate applications for these types of roles have also seen a large spike over the past few years, indicating a clear preference for more flexible ways of working.
With only one per cent of job-seekers choosing to apply for these vacancies in 2019, this has now risen nine-fold (9 per cent).
However, since January, the percentage of jobs advertising hybrid working has dropped from 9.2 per cent to just 5.6 per cent in July.
Whether this fall is due to lockdown restrictions easing is unclear but Reed has suggested employers may not be envisaging flexible working as a permanent fixture and may instead desire to return to old ways of working.
Commenting on the research, Chris Adcock, Managing Director at Reed Technology, says:
During the pandemic, we were forced into home working and everyone got a taste for it. And now we understand the benefits it has on our lives – with research from Reed finding that people are twice as likely to apply for a role on the site if they see it is remote.
We are now in a transitional period. Before, we were all forced into home working, but now we are slowly moving back to the office. At the moment companies are discovering what working arrangements suit their business. At the same time, workers are trying to find out how they fit into this new hybrid working setup and how they can balance work and life, having got used to working from home five days a week.
Various companies have been taking different approaches to the issue with LinkedIn recently permitting employees to work remotely permanently. Similarly, Ocado has allowed staff to work abroad for one month a year.
Conversely, many firms including Amazon, Google and Apple, which anticipated to see staff return to offices from this autumn, have been forced to delay this due to a rising number of COVID-19 cases.
Monica Sharma is an English Literature graduate from the University of Warwick. As Editor for HRreview, her particular interests in HR include issues concerning diversity, employment law and wellbeing in the workplace. Alongside this, she has written for student publications in both England and Canada. Monica has also presented her academic work concerning the relationship between legal systems, sexual harassment and racism at a university conference at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
