How remote work lowered the talent pool for small businesses
The following is a Q & A with Bobby Peddi, is the Founder and CEO of TRUiC. He graduated with a Medical degree from Edinburgh University, but after training in surgery, Bobby ultimately decided to leave medicine to pursue an entrepreneurial path. Prior to founding TRUiC in 2008, Bobby launched his own business and noticed how scarce entrepreneurial materials were. Instead of lamenting about the lack of resources, he decided to create his own solution to give people from all walks of life access to these essential tools. Today, TRUiC is a $7 million company with over 40 employees that provides free, actionable tools to aspiring entrepreneurs during every step of the process.
According to the latest data, in the last year, the job market inside the United States has increased by over 6 million jobs. As the pandemic is coming to an end relatively soon, more and more companies have started looking to fill the empty positions that weren’t as necessary during the pandemic, and other positions they need to fill otherwise. However, despite this bounce back from the job shortage at the beginning of the pandemic, the current job market is still about 1 million employees short compared to what it was before the pandemic started.
Job Industry
The necessity and popularity of remote work ever since the pandemic started has managed to leave a big impact on both employees and companies. With the rise of remote work also came the advancement of communication tools and collaborative platforms that companies could start relying on to do the same work as they used to before the pandemic started, but without having to get everyone doing their jobs inside the same building. That meant companies got a chance to save on office management and renting office spaces in general. On the other hand, the employees got a chance to spend a lot more time inside their homes with their families, avoid long commutes to work, and became a lot more efficient during the workday because they could avoid any of the regular office distractions that happened at work. Another benefit of remote work for both employees and companies is the fact that now, employees get a chance to apply for job positions all over the world, and companies get the benefit of working with the most talented hires no matter where they might be located.
Challenges
However, this big change that was brought forward with the rise of remote work has negatively impacted a lot of small businesses. Many small businesses have stated that compared to even a year ago, it’s become a lot harder for them to find qualified people that they could hire. Furthermore, smaller businesses have also reported that even people that have been hired recently aren’t staying in those jobs positions for long periods of time. Given the fact that many employees prefer to work remotely, and no longer have to worry about working from their home on one continent for a company on a completely different continent, and despite the fact that there’s an increase in job openings, there is a shortage of employees, especially in regards to smaller businesses.
Small companies don’t have the benefits and opportunities that big corporations have, such as hiring remote workers from all over the world or being able to increase wages to attract more high-quality workers. Furthermore, most smaller businesses tend to be in the retail industry and that means they require employees to work on weekends or in different shifts. This automatically has made smaller businesses become less important when employees are looking to get hired and are applying to different job positions, because they get to have plenty of other perks and benefits by working remotely for bigger companies, instead of looking to work for smaller local businesses.
