Remote / Virtual Office Positions
The two biggest hiring trends in our web/marketing analytics and online marketing universe are: 1. the clear shift away from full-time/perm hiring and toward contractors; and 2. the interest – on both the candidate side and the client-side – in virtual office workers.
I have used up enough blog space lately on #1, so I will focus on #2.
The main driver seems to be the fact that analytics & optimization talent is geographically sparse. And let’s be honest – the good people are VERY sparse. If a company is dead set on hiring an expert in a new and/or rare skillset, a proper search effort exhausts their local market within four to six weeks. Then what?? Hire a contractor? A consulting company? Keep reposting the job… call more recruiters… hope?
Remote experts start looking pretty good.
On the candidate side you have a growing group of people who live in low cost / high quality of life (unlike me) areas of the country. They have made remote web analytics consulting work for them. It fits their lifestyle – they work a lot of hours, but they work them when they want to… they make less than folks in San Fran or NY, but they live in palaces that cost $1400/month. Making 75% is still pretty darn good…
The other group of remote / virtual office candidates are those that live in small markets and have all but exhausted their employment possibilities if they want to stay in their field. These folks can either wait for their boss to expire or retire. If you have a family situation where you can not relocate and you have already worked at the two major companies in town, remote work starts looking pretty good.
So their is motivation on both sides. What is the problem?
The problem is that the reality has not caught up with the idea. Politics, logistics and/or fear blow up at least half of these opportunities.
Here is the typical scenerio:
The company starts the hiring process with enthusiasm and the highest hopes for their future employee. They often write detailed descriptions describing the ideal role that this ideal person will play. They address the needs of as many stakeholders as possible – kill as many birds as possible – with this individual. Especially these days!
They post the job, call IQ Workforce and spend the next 3-12 weeks meeting with the best people that are available in their local market. They learn some things from doing this: 1. Everybody is pretty much trying to solve the same problems that they are trying to solve and 2. it is going to be really hard to find ALL of the things that they are looking for.
Now what? They can change the requirements, but candidates without these skills/experience will not be able to do all of the things their stakeholders need done. They can raise the salary and bump up the title – try to buy their way out of the problem… but how many companies are buying their way out of problems these days?
Or… they think back to the expert that their recruiter told them about – the one that lives in Knoxville or Nashville or something like that… THAT guy has been successful in this exact type of role and he costs less than the non-qualified people that they just met. “We should talk to him.”
The hiring manager then builds some degree of concensus around himself that a virtual office worker is not an impossibility and that it is probably a good idea to at least explore the possibility… “if the person is perfect then maybe we can make it work…”
The person is perfect.
Now what? Who is signing off on this offer for the virtual office worker? How do we get him set up? How do we support him? How are the stakeholders going to feel about this? Who do we have to get it approved by? Let’s have the candidate speak with the SVP also – make sure we get his buy-in before we go out on a limb here…
The SVP says the candidate is perfect, but he is concerned about the whole virtual office thing. He thinks you should consider training and developing a more junior person that is local. “That person could someday be just as good if we can only get the right guy in THAT spot… let’s think about changing the specs…”
When faced with pulling the trigger on that perfect virtual office worker – even the one that costs less and is far better – companies will more often go with the local candidate. The idea has not survived the political reality. Nobody pushed for it – nobody wants to own the downside of that decision…
I can plainly see that some of our clients have developed real strategic advantage in the market – they have attracted the best talent in the country and saved a ton of money by using virtual office workers. It is hard to understand why it wouldn’t be more popular until you see 10 or 15 of these fall apart in the 11th hour. It looks like a no-brainer until you try to execute the idea within a corporation.
I was excited when I read the title of this post, but now I feel depressed. To be honest, I’m a very fortunate career changer who was that less experienced, local person in a limited local talent pool who was given the analytics job based on potential. Now that I’ve got the bug and am deeply in love with what I do, I’m very concerned about “what’s next?”. With nowhere to go internally or externally, my new career path depends on whether or not the virtual office is a real possibility in this field. I live in my version of paradise and I’m NOT moving. So now I have to figure out if it’s possible to live where I want AND do what I love. I know there are worse problems in the world, but this keeps me up nights. Is there a career path for reasonably talented analysts who don’t live within commuting distance of big cities? Per your article, it sounds like a long shot!
Thank you for the note Lori.
The reality is that virtual office positions are still your best bet if you want to stay in paradise. Just becuae they have not evolved to the degree that they could have/should have by now does not mean that they don’t exist.
My advice to you is to be proactive about “bringing work to you”. Post your profile on the contractor exchange on our site, post your resume confidentially on job boards and refresh it regularly, search indeed.com for key words “remote & web analytics”, update your profile on Linkedin… make it happen.
Since there are fewer of them available you are just going to have to work a bit harder to get the one that you want. Don’t get discouraged. Get mad. Get a plan together and execute. Get that job. It may not happen tomorrow, but if you continue to market yourself it WILL happen.
Maybe by the time your NEXT job search rolls around the rest of the world will catch on to the value of virtual office workers.
I know this posting is older but I ran across it doing some searches for remote web analytic jobs and feel the need to contribute.
I found a position yesterday that was perfect for both myself and the company; I have exactly what they are looking for and then some, and they have what I see as a gold mine just taking off and a lot of opportunity.
They must have thought so too because I got a phone interview within 6 hours of sending my resume. But no remote option; I am not relocating; interview over.
I do agree that not everyone is cut out to work remotely and be as successful and productive but there are ways employers can protect their decision/investment. I have been with my current company for 10 years and have worked remote for them for over a year now; so it does work and I do have the experience working remotely.
What gets me is this company (and others) is built to service a virtual world; clients, consumers; it is what they claim to be experts in. Yet they do not have an internal virtual policy in place?
A lot of companies are missing out on the “perfect person” because of this closed policy. It has improved over the last couple of years but still has a ways to go.
The biggest issue I think a lot of people have a hard time getting their head around, is how you manage remote workers. Quite honestly, I feel the best canidate for working remote will manage themselves.
ok there is my rant for my disappointment in losing out on a great opportunity.