Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Remote job ads ask for 25% more skills than the same employer's non-remote roles
Kellogg researchers found remote job ads list 25% more required skills than non-remote ads for the same occupation at the same employer in the same year. Because the extra demands fall on skills and experience more than on degrees, remote-first hiring raises the entry bar for early-career candidates.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- The team analysed more than 50 million job postings from 28 European countries between 2018 and 2021, tracking 13,890 distinct skills.
- Remote postings asked for more in each of four skill groups: cognitive, dealing with coworkers, dealing with customers, and information and communication technology.
- A preregistered experiment gave 1,250 people with hiring experience one of 18 job descriptions, randomly presented as either remote or in-person.
- In 37 interviews with people experienced in remote hiring, the researchers found the pattern already held before Covid-19 made remote work common.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision An identical job drew higher requirements once it was labelled remote, so the gap opens when the ad is drafted. A reviewer can hold a remote posting to the in-person version of the same role.
- cost If Zhang's onboarding explanation holds, a firm that wants remote juniors has to pay to pass on tacit knowledge at a distance. Asking for experience lets it skip that cost.
- precedent The higher bar appeared before the pandemic, so it looks tied to remote work itself. Firms adding remote roles can expect the same requirement creep to come with them.
The experiment isolates the hiring manager's judgment. Participants were randomly given a remote or in-person version of the same job description, so any difference in what they asked for came from the label [6]. Shinan Wang, a Kellogg PhD candidate, ran the research with associate professor Letian Zhang and Zhenyu Liao of Northeastern University [1]. "Managers who reviewed remote work postings were significantly more likely to ask for more skills and more work experience," Wang said, "but not as much in terms of educational credentials" [7].
The field data points the same way. The 25 percent gap compares postings for the same occupation from the same employer in the same year, so a different mix of occupations or employers does not explain it [2]. The researchers chose Europe because lockdown rules differed by country: relatively loose in Sweden, stricter in France and the UK [12]. The move to remote work therefore varied by country and year as well as by job, and the team accounted for those factors along with differences between employers [12]. In that data, Wang said, remote work "predicts more work experience and slightly higher education requirements" [5].
Zhang's explanation is onboarding. He said that when a position is remote, it is hard to get people onboarded, because many jobs carry a lot of tacit knowledge that is hard to convey through a guidebook [8]. A skeptic would say that justifies the higher bar. A firm that cannot teach a job at a distance should hire people who already know it. For a single senior role, I think that is a defensible call. Applied as a policy, the same logic shapes the firm's junior intake across every remote posting, and in the experiment managers raised requirements with nothing but the remote label to go on [6][7]. The ordering matters for recent graduates: education, the requirement that moved least, is the one a degree already meets [7].
The decision and its consequence arrive at different times. Choosing remote-first is a decision for this quarter, and it applies to every posting written after it. Any effect on who joins at entry level would surface over years, as those postings fill. That second part is an expectation. As described, the study measured requirements in job ads and in managers' ratings [3][6]. It does not report who applied or who was hired. Kellogg Insight's summary says the higher bar could limit opportunities for early-career workers [11]. Zhang called it a possibility, saying the higher bar "could have a real impact, not just on how people do their work, but on whom organizations decide to hire" [10].
What to watch
- Hiring-outcome data showing who is actually hired into remote roles by career stage, which the requirements study does not measure.
- Whether the 25 percent gap holds in postings after 2021 and in labour markets outside the 28 European countries studied.
- Evidence on whether structured remote onboarding narrows the gap between remote and in-person requirements for the same role.