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- Work-from-home jobs are often desirable but can be hard to find nowadays.
- Yet some WFH roles are so unpopular they don't get much attention from job seekers.
- One challenge, a labor expert told BI, is that workers want to see an obvious career progression.
You'd do almost anything to work from home.
Well, anything except being a customer support specialist or a call-center rep.
That's the upshot of a recent review of open jobs from Adzuna. The job-seach engine looked at how often people clicked on various roles listed in the US. It found that even when it comes to the golden ticket of WFH gigs, which can seem harder to snag than seats at a Taylor Swift concert, there are just some jobs Americans won't do.
Some aren't much of a surprise: fast-food worker, trash collector, and cashier. Others, like pharmacy tech, restaurant host, or working the front desk at a hotel, might seem like a step up, but they're among the hardest-to-fill jobs.
It's not just about the green: If you want to work as a merchandiser, where the average advertised salary is about $75,000, according to Adzuna, you'd practically have your pick of jobs.
Gen Zers want to see what's next
Part of the reason these jobs could be hard to hire for is because some workers — and perhaps especially Gen Zers — won't say yes to a role that doesn't have an obvious next step, James Neave, head of data science at Adzuna, told Business Insider.
"They really prioritize things like flexibility and career growth and mental-health support," he said, referring to younger workers. "It comes down to kind of broader cultural shifts in the workforce in terms of what certain demographics are looking for in jobs."
For many of us, the pandemic rebooted our relationship with work and how much we want to give over to our employers. That means, according to Neave, that companies having trouble plugging people into open jobs will need to be more thoughtful about what they're offering.
Employers need to consider whether workers have sufficient opportunities for training and promotions. Workplace culture and things like benefits are also important, he said. So is pay. "Salary, of course, is the big lever here," Neave said.
WFH won't necessarily attract workers
Even allowing someone to work from home, which has proven so attractive that some workers are juggling more than one remote role, isn't a magic fix. Customer support specialists in work-from-home roles had an average salary of nearly $60,000 in the fourth quarter, Adzuna found. But job seekers weren't clicking away on those listings.
To determine which jobs were least appealing to applicants, Adzuna reviewed job titles that had more than 50 open positions in the final quarter of 2023. Some jobs that are broadly in demand might see fewer clicks per ad because there are so many openings, Neave said. And other high-skill jobs that made the least-popular rankings — including java developer and veterinarian — might have more to do with how such roles are usually filled, he added. "The jobs come to them," Neave said, referring to software developers.
For other roles that do seem genuinely hard to fill — think sales floor associate or hotel housekeeper — employers might need to get creative, Neave said. "Maybe they need to take a step back and have a bit of a rethink about how they define these roles," he said.
Neave said building in more responsibilities to some roles could help attract people who want more than just a 9-to-5 gig or who don't want to do the same thing every day. "That has been what many millions of humans have probably done for thousands of years," he said. "But, you know, times are changing."