How A Labor Economist Sees The Future of Work - Julia Pollak

In today’s episode, I chat with Julia Pollak, Chief Economist at ZipRecruiter, a leading online employment marketplace. Her team uses data from the ZipRecruiter marketplace to measure the health of the US labor market, identify hiring trends, and helping employers and job seekers prepare for the future of work. Their research is frequently cited in leading media outlets, like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

In the simplest of terms, in North America there are more people leaving the workforce than joining it. 

Every day. 

The World Economic Forum’s recent Future of Jobs 2023 report, predicts that between now and 2027, 44% of workers’ core skills will be disrupted. Technology is moving faster than companies can design and scale up their training efforts. 

How does an economist see that in the simplest of terms? What advice would she have for employers and job seekers alike? How does the labor market see remote and hybrid work today?

As we collectively navigate the future of work, Julia’s unique perspective provides needed clarity when considering evidence-based strategic decisions. What got us here, won’t get us there.

This was another memorable conversation and I hope you enjoy as much as I did recording it.

Julia Pollak

Julia Pollak is Chief Economist at ZipRecruiter, a leading online employment marketplace that uses AI-driven smart matching technology to connect millions of businesses and job seekers. She uses data from the ZipRecruiter marketplace to measure the health of the labor market, identify hiring trends, and help employers and job seekers prepare for the future of work. 


Her research is frequently cited in leading national outlets, like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

Prior to working at ZipRecruiter, Julia was an Assistant Policy Analyst at the RAND Corporation and an adjunct economics instructor at Pepperdine University.

Julia holds a B.A. in economics from Harvard and an M.Phil. in policy analysis from Pardee RAND Graduate School. She is a drilling reservist in the U.S. Navy.



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Matt Burns

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Transcript

Matt Burns: You.

Julia Pollak: We make a much smaller investment in, uh, the education of non college educated young people. And so we sort of channel a lot of young people who really shouldn't be going to college and won't benefit from going to college and won't complete their college educations into that path. Onto that path. When there are better paths, like vocational training, technical training, the kinds of things that are more widespread in Germany, say.

Matt Burns: Missing someone.

Matt Burns: Strength, strive innovation. Hey, everyone, it's Matt, here for another episode of Thinking Inside the Box, a show where we discuss the innovative ways organizations and their leaders overcome um, complex issues at work. If you're interested in checking out our.

Matt Burns: Other content, you can find us at.

Matt Burns: Our shiny new website, insidetheboxpodcast.com and on all of your favorite podcast platforms by searching Thinking Inside the Box. And if you enjoy the work we're doing here, consider leaving us a five star rating, a comment and subscribing. It ensures you get updated whenever we release new content and really helps amplify our message. In today's episode, I chat with Julia Pollock, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. Julia's team uses data from the ZipRecruiter marketplace to measure the health of, um, among other things, the US. Labor market, identifying hiring trends, and helping employers and job seekers alike prepare for the future of work. Their research is frequently cited in leading media outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NPR. In the simplest of terms in North America, there are more people leaving the workforce than joining it every day. And the World Economic Forum's recent Future of Jobs 2023 report predicts that between now and 2027, 44% of, uh, workers core skills will be disrupted in one way or another. Technology is just moving faster than companies can design and scale up their training efforts. So how does an economist see these trends? In the simplest of terms, what advice would she have for employers and job seekers to navigate? And how does this labor market see remote and hybrid work today, as we collectively navigate the future of work, julia's unique perspective provides needed clarity when considering evidence based strategic decisions. What got us here just won't get us there. And this was another memorable conversation that.

Matt Burns: I hope you enjoy as much as.

Matt Burns: I did recording it. And now I bring you Julia Pollock.

Matt Burns: Julia, it's been a long time coming. I'm looking forward to this chat. How are you doing today?

Julia Pollak: Very well. Thanks, Matt. How are you?

Matt Burns: I am doing well.

Matt Burns: It's, uh, an exciting time, I think, in the world right now with a lot of stuff going on. And therefore, I cannot wait for the perspective of a chief economist to walk us through kind of the macro of all of it. For those who don't know Julia Pollock, though, maybe a bit about your background, your experiences, and what's led you to today.

Julia Pollak: Sure. So I'm the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, where I have a front seat view of, uh, the labor market and its inside mechanics. I lead a team there that uses real time data from our ZipRecruiter marketplace. Billions, uh, of interactions between employers and job seekers to measure the health of the labor market, to identify new hiring trends, and then also to use those insights to help employers and job seekers succeed and figure out how to get ahead and achieve their goals in this labor market. Uh, before being at ZipRecruiter, I taught economics to undergraduates at Pepperdine University. So I really like that teaching and explaining role that I sometimes have. Um, I did my graduate studies at the Rand Corporation's Grad school, which uh, has a really interesting program that's quite unique, uh, because it blends study with work. So one works on client funded Rand projects as a policy analyst while also doing one's coursework. It's a very practical and applied degree. I do too. Before, uh, that, I worked at a policy think tank in DC. Um, I did my undergrad studies at Harvard and economics, and then afterwards I joined the Navy. But I wasn't a US citizen. So I'm probably the only Harvard grad who ever went to the military as an enlisted grunt, turning wrenches on helicopters, uh, with a bunch of mechanics. Uh, but I loved that so much, I ended up, um, being a drilling reservist in San Diego for eleven years. A, uh, weekend warrior. So on weekends and two weeks a year over the summer, I would head down to San Diego to get dirty and greasy.

Matt Burns: It's quite a varied background, and it's one of the things that stood out because again, you have this range of experiences that talks about Harvard and economics and Pepperdine and instruction, and then of course, the US Navy as a reservist. And I'm just curious, how do those all experiences come together today for you as a chief economist?

Julia Pollak: Oh, great. Um, you know, I think, uh, there is actually sort of a common strand, which is, uh, the military and the workforce. So, uh, in college I studied economics, but I came to the United States when there uh, were still huge debates about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, um, 2005. And uh, I studied foreign policy and military strategy, military history a lot. And so my first job in DC at that think tank was actually, ah, as a defense Policy research assistant. Um, but my original driving passion had been labor market issues because I was born and raised in South Africa, a country that uh, is so beautiful and so wonderful, but also so tragically marred by a 30% to 40% unemployment rate. And it's a place where you see able bodied adults sitting, uh, in front of their homes with nothing to do. And um, witnessing the sort of terrible problems that flowed from a dysfunctional labor market. I became really fascinated with economics and the sort of problem of connecting people to opportunities but in college, I became quite obsessed with sort of military issues and, um, foreign, uh, policy. And so I went and did military policy work. What you learn whenever you do defense policy work, though, is that you are really doing labor economics. So, almost every issue I ever worked on got back to issues of recruitment, retention, training, motivation, et cetera. And I found that I was doing a lot of labor economics work, uh, in the middle of that military policy work. And so, um, I think it reminded me that these issues are truly, truly fundamental. Um, another thing I found fascinating, just going through the experience of being in boot camp, in military boot camp, and in initial training, uh, was that this is one place in America where the government makes a huge investment. In non college educated people where they are given, uh, expensive uniforms and equipment and, uh, sort of stripped of the things that differentiate them. All put in the same barracks, um uh, and given exactly the same opportunities and training. And I found that that was such a transformative experience for many of the young people around me, uh, many of whom grew up in the wealthiest country in the world. But in some of the harshest circumstances, I had, uh, enlisted sailors, uh, around me, whose parents were in jail, whose siblings had committed suicide, who had grown up in trailer parks, who had been, uh, shunted from one place to another, who'd grown up in the foster care system, et cetera, et cetera. And, uh, I found that transformative miracles can happen when the government makes the right investments in young people who perhaps are not cut off for college, but have a lot to give.

Matt Burns: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And, um, in a lot of ways, it's public service of a different stripe, um, to use a military term. I mean, I think it's about providing that, um, support domestically and internationally. And I think we're entering into an era now where, and not to go down a rabbit hole of climate change, but increasingly we're seeing armed forces around the world be deployed in a number of different capacities, not just in traditional military capacities. And that idea of public service is definitely being bended and twisted. And I think it's an interesting experience and an interesting line of sight. I think we hear lots of narrative about the military industrial complex. We don't often hear about the social implications of having such a large workforce, um, which is a great segue into the meat of this conversation. And I'm very excited to talk about demographics. I, uh, think you and I might be the two people on this conversation that are the most excited about it. But for those who haven't tuned out quite yet, this is where we get to the cool stats. Let's set some context first. So, um, in the simplest of terms today, as I understand it, more people are leaving the workforce every single day, at least in North America, Western Europe, than are joining it. That's, like, point number one. So from a macroeconomic perspective, macro demographic perspective, the total workforce population is shrinking as a total number. Secondly, in the World Economic Forum's recent Future of Jobs 2023 report, they predicted that between now and 2027, 44% of workers core skills will also be disrupted, whether it's AI, whether it's feature, digitization, and frankly, technology is moving faster than companies can possibly design and scale up their training efforts. And this is from somebody who was a corporate HR executive for many, many years in the world's largest companies. It's just to turn a ship that big and make that level of investment in skills when skills are quickly becoming atrophied is a very, very daunting task for any organization. And then yet, at the same time, the US. Job market remains strong despite high interest rates. The economy added 187,000 jobs in July, which was less than expected, and the lowest number since December of 2021, even as unemployment edged back down to 3.5%. So, to me, it's a clear sign that there's continued growth from the job markets, despite the fact that there's the Federal Reserve trying to cool the economy in the United States. As a chief economist, looking at all these things over breakfast in the morning, and you're juggling family responsibilities and all the things that you're doing, what are some of the things that bounce around your head when you step back and look at the 20,000 foot view?

Julia Pollak: So, number one, yes, demographically, we are becoming more and more like Europe and Asia. We have a rapidly aging population. The working age population is no longer growing. The birth rate is falling. Immigration is pretty high, but not nearly as high as, say, in Canada or other countries that have decided to sort of overcome low birth rates and low population growth, uh, by bringing in working age people. So we're not doing that to the extent needed to sort of expand the growing of the working age population. That said, there is so much more potential in the working age population that we have. And so despite the Fed cooling the labor market, and despite those demographic trends, we have actually seen net employment growth continue to be positive, uh, for the last three years. Um, and that's largely because the prime age working population is participating now more than ever before. So, age adjusted participation rates are actually the highest ever. Uh, the prime age population, employment to population ratio is the highest since 2001. For women, it's the highest ever. And what we repeatedly see in the United States, every time we have a sort of sustained economic expansion, is that there's no limit on how many people we can bring into the labor market. There's just a speed limit on how quickly we can do so. Uh, and if you compare our participation rates to those in other developed countries, they're actually pretty low. So we have far fewer women participating and fewer women participating than say they would like to. So we have a situation where women say they want to be working more than they're working. They also say they want more children than they're having. Um, and clearly the sort of policy environments and the economic environment are making it difficult for them to achieve both of those goals. Um, uh, but we also have a problem of working age men, uh, and young men, neither being in education nor employment, in increasing numbers, um, living in their parents basements, not getting married, not having children, not going to work. And that is also kind of a worrying problem that I think could be turned around.

Matt Burns: And what are some of the ways you think we couldn't turn that around? I mean, I know it's a big question, but what are some of the things that you think about when you consider the solution to some of those?

Julia Pollak: So let me go back to, uh, a point I made earlier. I think there's a huge imbalance in the United States in where we're investing. So we make enormous investments, government public investments in college education. And those are only going to grow now as we find new ways, uh, uh, to forgive student debt. The administration's plan to wipe it out entirely was turned over by the Supreme Court, but they're now coming up with far more generous sort of income based repayment plans. And a lot of student loan debt is probably going to be wiped out. We make a much smaller investment in the, uh, education of non college educated young people. And so we sort of channel a lot of young people who really shouldn't be going to college and won't benefit from going to college, and won't complete their college educations onto that path, when there are better paths like, um, vocational training, technical training, the kinds of things that are more widespread in Germany, say. Um, so the first thing I think we could do is just expand the non traditional pathways into work. And that would help employers, too, because there's a massive shortage of people in the skilled trades. Uh, I think there are other things we need to do. I think drugs have been an enormous, enormous, uh, drag on the labor force, and just the personal and, um, social sort of ills of that problem are very, very clear. I just visited Portland, and I was shocked by downtown Portland. I mean, it was just, um, I called it a zombie apocalypse. There were people standing on every street, uh, with glazed stairs, on trank, um, ah, and it was just horrifying to see all these, um, able bodied adults who looked like they'd been very, uh, attractive, fit, healthy people just a couple of years ago, uh, who are not lost. So I think we need to do a much bigger job of solving that problem. And then early childhood education is actually the place where investments are shown to have the biggest bang for the buck. So if you throw money at 18 year olds, it's too late. If they haven't learned to read, write, or spell, good luck putting them in college, really. We need to be making a much bigger investment early on, which would also free up parents and predominantly mothers to have the careers that they want. So I think there needs to be a multipronged, uh, approach, and I think it should be a much more urgent priority of government.

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Matt Burns: It's a really fascinating conversation, and obviously, I have a unique perspective sitting here in Canada looking at the problem, because I see it. And I've worked predominantly for large US based organizations. I have family in the United States, so I have a great appreciation for both nations and how they've approached this challenge. And the challenges, in a lot of cases, are similar. Um, and I think I have a greater appreciation today, more so than I ever have before, about the interdependency of all these systems and all these networks and how they fit together. And maybe it was because before, and I use the term before, maybe it never worked that well, but it seems like it worked better ten years ago. When I say the institutions, I mean things like government, like education, like the workforce, like skills training. Um, and all the things you talk about, to me are all interconnected and interwoven in some way, shape, or form. And it's a challenging situation to wrap your arms around, because, to your point, we have some demographic limitations that we're working within. The opening line of this podcast is, constraints drive innovation. So from the very basis of we have some constraints, we have to work from within. And then, secondarily to your point, we have this massive skills gap, where traditionally, the solution to that problem was four year university program, undergraduate degree, office job, 30 year career, gold plated watch, retirement doesn't exist anymore, right? Doesn't exist. And frankly, for, uh, the generation and a half that it did, amazing it didn't exist before that, and it's likely not to exist ever again in the future. That's a window of time. But most of us have been sold on this idea of if you go to high school, if you go to university, if you get that job, you'll eventually be able to acquire enough of those things such that you can have that same kind of white picket fence, two cars in the garage, nuclear family type situation, only to find out that most of us that really isn't accessible for a lot of people anymore. Um, and that the traditional pathways that have been proven I'm using air quotes here for those who can't see are not proven anymore. And I think your plea for more investment in things like vocational training and early childhood education and mental health services spot on. I mean, we have to do those things in order to address some of the things that tie back into employment. I've always looked at employment, um, measures as lagging measures of societal success and health. In some ways, it's like, to your point, if we have a large percentage of the population that's unable to work for whatever reason, we have a systemic issue that we need to address, societally speaking. Because most people that I know get up in the morning, they put their pants on one leg at a time, and they want to contribute. They want to feel purpose. They want to be able to support their families. So there's not a widespread apathy that I see spreading. It's more of a function of connecting opportunity with interest. And I think the traditional institutions, unfortunately, have double clicked down on things like university, where even when I went five years ago, ten years ago, it wasn't all that relevant then. I mean, I'm very blessed to have done an MBA program, and I did an amazing program that took me to Canada, United States, Brazil, Mexico. And we had students from all four countries in a cohort over two years learning from each other about the Americas. Like, it was an incredible experiential learning opportunity. And being in each of those four cities vancouver, Nashville, Sao Paulo, Mexico City for rotations was again, incredible. The academia that underpinned it was not great. Um, and I couldn't tell you that I came away from that experience smarter from an academic perspective, but I came away so much more enriched from a societal perspective, and came away looking at the world differently and making friends and viewing my place in this world differently. So, in that sense, I guess the investment was worth it. But if the goal of the program is, to your point, to prepare young adults or children or even adults for employment, or to be able to support themselves and their families and their communities. We're falling way short. And I get excited about technology as a solution to this problem, because I think about things like artificial intelligence and virtual reality. And if we can put better tool sets against the traditional frameworks, we might have a chance, might have a chance to be able to accelerate things like knowledge adoption, knowledge retention, engagement of learners, and close some of that deficit. But then it goes back to your earlier point, which is application of it. And that's why I love your program, which is, okay. You could put somebody through a four year university program. But if they come away from that program and they don't feel that they're actually prepared for the workforce that is out there today, we're not really doing them a lot of favors saddling them with debt, even if it is repaid and taking four years away from their life, that they could be spending their time doing other things to build more relevant skills for today's environment. So it's a complicated question and a complicated problem, and I appreciate you kind of tackling it with us, because I think it speaks to the broader forces at play. And to me, um, it really speaks to um, a couple of things that are happening. So we look at some of the industry specific changes. So I think going into the Pandemic, most um, organizations were seeing, most industries were seeing an increase. And certainly through the Pandemic, the technology industry in particular saw a massive spike in terms of employment as most tech companies massively M scaled up. And that could be everything from Amazon to um, any type of major tech organization, um, whether it's in any type of tech modality, started to grow really rapidly. And then coming out of the pandemic into this last year and a bit, we saw them start to lay off workers as they started to course correct for overhriing in some cases, while still the other parts of the economy were growing. So we're talking about layoffs, you're seeing Meta's laying off people, amazon's laying off people, microsoft's laying off people, but the broader economy, to your point, is still growing in other employment spaces. Um, it's to me a really interesting um, perspective. But I think, I guess my question for you, and maybe just take this down to the leader level. So if I'm a leader in an organization, and I'm faced with all the challenges that we've talked about, and I have a limited ability to affect change, I have a budget, I have a mandate, I have passion for my team and for my organization. If I'm already feeling the pinch of resource constraints or uh, talent shortages, what are some of the things that I should be thinking about? Whether that is internal development, and succession or whether that's internship programs. What are some of the problems I should be thinking about solving for that are within my control. So I can help address some of.

Matt Burns: These things we're talking about here.

Julia Pollak: So I think long term, we now are in a supply constrained labor market environment going forward, right, where we don't have a growing working, uh, population, but we do have strong demand for goods and services that are generating um, further demand for workers. And so one natural sort of problem, uh, that many, uh, employers want to solve is well, how do I go and create this pipeline of talent? How do I go and, um, uh, build partnerships with community colleges or colleges and find people and groom them and give them the tools to be successful in my organization later on? The problem in America is that a lot less of that investment happens at the company level than in some other countries because we do have such a flexible, fluid labor market and employers are worried about pouring huge amounts of resources into a worker only to have them leave two months later. They don't want to be training workers to go and work at their competitor. So it's a uh, hugely challenging problem. One exciting opportunity I see is that generative AI, in the few studies that have come out so far this year, it turns out, has a different effect on the labor market from the one that many people had feared. Or at least in these preliminary studies, economists have been somewhat surprised. So the traditional fear, uh, of labor saving technologies and productivity enhancing technologies like artificial intelligence is that they will make your organization able to go from having ten content writers to having just one who's ten times as productive, right? So it'll boost the superstar and leave everyone else without a job. That is the traditional kind of fear. What has happened in major studies now, where AI tools, generative AI tools have been given to workers is that they have raised productivity substantially. So in a Fortune 500 company where 5000 customer support staff were given a Generative AI tool, uh, productivity, uh, went up 14% in that organization. But the biggest productivity improvement was among the lowest quality, lowest skill, brand new novice employees, not among the superstars. The superstars got no productivity boost when they were given a script to deal with customer complaints. They didn't need it. They could have written the script themselves. Uh, but people who had language barriers, people who were shy, people who took a lot while to figure things out, or who didn't remember the employee handbook very well, um, they were brought up to speed much more quickly and they actually saw a 30% productivity boost. And so if I'm sitting in HR, looking at the workforce and looking at my constraints, and looking at how difficult it is to recruit and retain talent, I'm thinking, wow, this new technology relaxes the constraint and allows me to succeed with perhaps employees I would never have considered before. Maybe I can hire people who have lower skill levels, less education, and just giving them the right tools, bring them up to speed far more quickly. So that, I find, is a huge, uh, potential blessing of, uh, AI, this tool that also fills us with enormous trepidation.

Matt Burns: I'm glad you said that, and I'm glad that the studies bear that out, because that's also been my anecdotal experience with people I've spoken to in senior HR roles. I also was lucky enough to have Katie George, chief people officer for McKinsey on the show recently, who also talked about the impact of generative AI in their organization and the organizations that they support and similar findings. We're seeing that the adage an employee who has AI will outperform an employee who doesn't have AI is certainly holding true mhm, but we're not seeing net reduction of people as a consequence of introducing AI to replace them. It's more of an augmentation complementary force. Um, and to your point, what it's doing in a lot of cases is closing some knowledge gaps that people have in organizations. I think about the example of Google. So going into the pandemic, google was, of course, an organization that many held up on a pedestal as being an organization that has a lot of things figured out. I mean, they do a great job measuring sentiment analysis. They're, of course, a digital native organization, um, and an aspirational brand for many employers, especially HR people to work with throughout their careers. And when they did the analysis of the impact of their organization during the pandemic, they found that the people that struggled most, to your point, were people that were new in the organization or new enroll because they didn't have the internal networks to be able to pull upon. Know, I'm new in role, and hey, I don't know where to go for this, so I lean over my cubicle, julia, where do I find this or who do I talk to for that? And those types of quick answers to questions were limited in an environment that became digitally first, where you had to book time in somebody's calendar or just randomly text them or on a zoom call or something. Um, but when they supplemented that with levels of generative AI, but also better SOPs and better instructions and better communication vehicles, they were able to disseminate knowledge more effectively throughout the organization and close that gap to where people could work in a more hybrid modality, increase their productivity and the shortfall they saw early in the days. Just pointed out the fact of M in most organizations, and many that I've worked in, you kind of just get a little bit lazy around the fact that you don't have to be intentional with your communications. If it's the proverbial water cooler everybody meets at, well, if you don't have. That anymore. You do have to be intentional about delegation, communication, task instruction, follow up feedback, um, and you need to find mechanisms and measures for that which many leaders and organizations traditionally struggle with generative. AI addresses many of those challenges and provides the user with an opportunity to be able to really affect positive change. But the value of the tool is in the messaging generative, meaning it needs to have something generate a starting point, and it is predicated on the quality of the prompt in terms of the, uh, output that you get. So that's why you're seeing the explosion of things like prompt engineers on websites like Fiver and other resource websites that people are getting very good at developing very good prompts to deliver very good outcomes. And I absolutely think you are seeing HR leaders make that decision. I think that the challenging thing for HR leaders is always they wear two hats. So in one hand, they're having this conversation, the talent conversation, workforce constraints, demographic information. I have Vacancies, I have C suite executives saying I need to hire these roles. Where are they? At the same time, I have budgetary constraints. But on the other hat they're wearing is this whole ethics, integrity, privacy conversation. And AI is scary because AI turns over power to other people in the organization. And it puts a lot of power in the hands of individual contributors that can now replicate and create information at rates that never could before. So there's an element of fear in a lot of new technologies that HR people will also butt up against. So just as many HR leaders that I talk to have CEOs who are super excited about chat GPT, who are terrified of chat GPT, and as a consequence, how they treat and view AI and their technologies represents and reflects upon that approach. It's a tough spot to be in because you have to balance access with integrity of access. And we're also in a world of this day where there's fake news and sources have to be validated and verified. And we're also in a world where it's never been easier to disseminate and spread information, whether it's true or not. So I think you're right. I think it's a really exciting space. And I think it's incumbent upon leaders to understand the implications of these types of innovations, but also how they're going to incorporate them into their organization responsibly and respectfully, because you can do that and write job descriptions and write interview guides and prepare summaries. And I'll say it, I use chat GPT probably a couple of hours a day in my other business, where it shortens the path to an answer for me, it doesn't give me the answer, but it gets me most of the way there. And then I supplement that with additional research or additional inputs and things that ultimately take it over the line. So I think in that sense, it's a great tool?

Julia Pollak: Um, absolutely. I advise job seekers to use it as a, ah, mentor and a friend. Job search is often a fairly lonely process, at least when you're in a job and you're the new hire. You're expected to ask people for help, and there usually are some resources available to you. But job seekers often feel very vulnerable and very lonely, and they blame themselves for not getting feet callbacks. Um, and often they don't even know what they are looking for and what they want and what they're qualified for. And I encourage them to use Chat GPT as a friend. Here's my resume. What jobs would you suggest that I look into? Okay. What are the benefits of this job? What do these typically earn? Um uh, how would I even go about looking like a strong candidate for this job? Can you write a resume for a really great candidate, a top candidate for this job? Uh, those kinds of questions that might be embarrassing to ask somebody are great questions for Chad GBT.

Matt Burns: Sure.

Matt Burns: And it removes the artificiality and the pageantry of these processes. And I think it ties into university in kind of a weird way, which is most adults don't learn through memorization and recitation. That's just not the way we learn as adults. But we enforce this standard because it's just the way we've always done things. And there's lots of complaints about people who are very good at the interview process and writing resumes, but aren't actually good in job performance. Well, this is all coming into play and all conspiring to a, uh, reality where leaders need to be a bit more hands on in terms of their employees on a day to day basis. And what I mean by that is providing direction, providing support, providing coaching, providing counsel. You can't just turn people over to their own devices for a month and then come back and touch base with them and expect there to be engagement and two way dialogue. So, it is a really interesting time, and, uh, I would be remiss if I didn't ask it because I have an opportunity, a small window of time with you here. What are the studies showing us? What's the data telling us about remote work? So, in a world where constraints are obviously we have demographic constraints, one of the solutions many organizations are looking at solving for is expanding the geographic range in which they can hire talent from. So what are the reports telling us about hybrid and remote work?

Julia Pollak: Sure. So, uh, on the job seeker side, it's tremendously popular. At any one time, 60% of the job seekers, uh, on ZipRecruiter and even nationwide, even in our external nationally representative surveys, uh, are looking for remote work. They prefer to find a remote job. 20% only want to find a remote job. 40% would prefer to find a remote job. Why? It saves them time and money. 70 minutes a day. $5,000 a year in transportation costs. They can work from anywhere. They can work on the couch with the game going on, with the dog at their feet and a sick kid in the next room, uh, and a load of laundry in the washer, and a chicken in the oven. It totally makes sense for a lot of people. For businesses, uh, the benefits have become a lot more salient since the pandemic. Uh, and retention has emerged as the number one benefit that employers cite. Recruitment has also, uh, become a huge benefit. Access to a much wider talent pool, more qualified candidates, candidates in lower cost parts of the country. So basically, you can find better talent for cheap, cheaper, um, by offering, uh, remote jobs. But there are also drawbacks and downsides that employers are continuing to struggle with. So, uh, the issue of productivity is highly controversial. Uh, some companies think that remote workers are more productive, some think that they're less productive. Uh, and the academic literature is also all over the map. Uh, uh, a few years ago, there was a study looking at call center workers that found that they were 15, uh, percent more productive, working remotely. They gained almost a day, a week of additional productivity. Uh, the most recent study looking at, uh, data entry workers in India found that remote workers were 20% less productive. Um, and I think the true answer is, it really depends. It depends on the tasks, it depends on the organization, the onboarding, the training, um, all kinds of things. It depends on whom you select. There are some people who work best alone and are self motivated. Um, there are others who are not, uh, and who want remote jobs precisely because they're juggling five remote jobs simultaneously and gaming the system. So you have to be really smart as an organization to motivate and monitor and incentivize productivity and measure what matters, um, and make it work. And then of course, there's the whole issue of collaboration and innovation. Uh, and there, I think, again, the answer is, it depends. It depends on the investments that companies make. Depends on them bringing people together in person sometimes. So that there is that, uh, personal interaction that develops, um, and then creating lots of opportunities online for them to coordinate and communicate as well.

Matt Burns: Yeah. A theme of this podcast, inadvertently, over the last four and a half years has been intrinsic, um, motivation and its impact on discretionary effort. And we started talking about that four and a half years ago, not realizing we'd end up in a world where we'd all be hybrid or remote. But I think the lesson still holds true in that, to your point, garbage in, garbage out.

Matt Burns: If you have a good workplace culture.

Matt Burns: You hire the right people, you support them, you train them, they feel committed to the cause, they feel that they're being invested in. They have a good connection with their coworkers and their manager. More often than not, you're going to get good performance. You're going to get a good output, not 100% of the time, but more often than not, if you don't have those elements, you will not have as good of performance. That bears out in the science. That discretionary effort, especially in a knowledge based economy, starts with an intrinsic motivation. You can use the carrot and stick for a period of time and it's certainly effective, but you can only use carrot and stick for a certain length of time before people get burned out by that. And you can absolutely exhaust and exploit resources playing that kind of that back and forth kind of game with them. But this idea of intrinsic motivation is super key. And the great news is that we all know how to do it. It just means starting to treat people the way we want to be treated in a lot of cases and just being thoughtful about the design of our workplaces and the tools and the training and support we give to leaders and employees to be able to execute against all these expectations. It's a really exciting time, I think, frankly, because it blends this, it's almost a symbiosis of human behavioral psychology and artificial intelligence and trying to find the sweet spot in between. And I think there is a path there, but I do think it's going to be a bumpy road to get to that place because there's a lot of history and tradition and legacy that we're butting up against a lot of. We always did things this way, so we can't do things that way. And if one thing we all can agree on is that artificial intelligence is a massive accelerant that we have not seen in quite some time and it's going to dramatically affect a lot of the ways that we do things. Maybe not in some cases, visibly for some people, but certainly in the behind the scenes. Um, and I think that's where it gets really exciting to be a leader and to be in your position, to be able to see kind of what's coming down and what's happening in um, the future. Maybe we'll end things on that note with an impossible question, which is crystal ball. What do you see happening in the next 12, 18, 24 months from a massive or macro demographic and employment perspective?

Julia Pollak: Sure, so I see huge tailwinds for the economy. Inflation, uh, is coming down more quickly than wage growth and that means that workers are getting real wage increases again finally. Uh, it means that consumer confidence, job seeker confidence are likely to rise in the coming months. We uh, have seen the stock market recover pretty well this year so far. And that, I think, is making CEOs more confident as well. Um, there are huge risks and very high interest rates are weighing on a lot of organizations. Um, but hopefully that will at least the pace of rate hikes has gone down, and hopefully, at some point, interest rates themselves will start coming down, uh, and people will feel some relief, uh, and ability to go out and invest and grow again. Um, as for leaders looking at the huge future risks ahead, I would encourage them to do what our CEO, Ian Siegel at ZipRecruiter did at the start of the Pandemic, which is to, uh, confront the risks of remote work, say, or whatever problem you're facing, head on. So he was worried that taking the whole organization to being remote overnight would mean that personal connection would break down and that people would be less connected to the mission and the company and to each other. And he wondered, how on earth are we going to do our quarterly All Hands meetings now? Well, what he decided to do was turn those quarterly in person pageants of All Hands meetings on the stage with an enormous amount of production behind them, uh, into weekly zoom, all Hands meetings for everyone. And now they didn't need to be one in Tempe and one in Santa Monica and one in Tel Aviv. You could have everyone in the in the same meeting at the same time, uh, and, uh, actually make people more connected. He became even more transparent about exactly how the company was working. He started presenting internal dashboards that he looks at the things that keep him up at night about the company. Uh, and so I think we all ended up feeling more connected to each other, to leadership, uh, and to the inner workings of the company than we had when we were all in the same office. So that is my advice always to leaders where there are risks and fears and challenges, grab them, name them, put them on a slide, tackle them head on, and figure out how, within the new constraints, you can attack that problem and turn it into an opportunity even better than you were doing before.

Matt Burns: It was so nice to have this conversation with somebody else, because I've been having it in my head by myself for quite some time. So thank you for indulging my questions, Juliet. It's great to get to Connect, great to have a conversation. For those who want to get a hold of you offline. What's the best place to do that?

Julia Pollak: Well, I'm still quite active on Twitter called X now, so, Julia on Jobs, that's one place you can find me. Uh, or on LinkedIn. I think those are the two main ways, um, people find each other if they're not 18 and on Instagram all the time, which, uh, I'm not. Uh, there are too many channels in my life, so I'm sticking with those two.

Matt Burns: We'll put those two details in the podcast show Notes. Julia, thanks for your time tonight.

Julia Pollak: Take care.

Matt Burns: Is a digital transformation consultancy working at the intersection of strategy, technology, and people operations. We partner with organizations, private equity and venture capital firms to accelerate value creation and identify the organization's highest leverage initiatives. And this can take place in many forms, from strategic planning and alignment to technology procurement, implementation and integration. Um, along with organizational design, process reengineering and change management. With our proven track record of working with complex, high growth organizations, we provide a Ah lens that goes beyond the balance sheet, increasing enterprise readiness, resilience and value. For more information, check us out@bentohr.com.