Remote work continues to be a hot topic as COVID subsides in many regions of the world and companies attempt to call their employees back into the office. The issue is that many employees, specifically those classified as “knowledge workers” are resisting.

As in many industries, hybrid and remote work are the new normal for marketing tech/services and insights professionals. With this “new normal” many of our traditional business models are being challenged.

Although the business environment of less travel and face to face meetings and more (much much more) videoconferencing persists, it also presents companies with unparalleled opportunities to hire talent in locations they may not have considered in pre-COVID times, where working from a centralized office was the norm.

Lately we’ve been coaching a number of Founders struggling with rejection. Whether it’s losing business to a competitor, pitching a Venture Capital firm for funding and receiving a “not interested”, or losing key employees who jump ship for another firm we can likely all agree that rejection isn’t an awesome feeling.

Although hiring for positions like sales or engineering has historically been more challenging due to fierce competition for top performers in these roles, businesses of all types (and particularly those in the marketing tech and services sector where we spend the bulk of our time at ScaleHouse) are struggling to hire due to labor shortages.

These labor shortages are becoming increasingly problematic as demand for professional services bounces back post-pandemic. A report from Korn Ferry finds that by 2030, more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled people to take them.

If you’re an employer looking to hire, what can you do to attract top talent?

Service based business are notorious for revenue volatility, and that played out to the extreme in 2020 when, for a period of time, business came to a standstill due to COVID and many ad hoc projects were put on hold.

ESOMAR member, Priscilla McKinney, the Founder and CEO of Little Bird Marketing was kind enough to have me on her podcast last week to talk about my candidacy for ESOMAR President.

Well, here we are; Q4 2020. When staff first started to work from home in Q1 (depending on where you are in the world), it’s unlikely many of us imagined we’d still be managing an almost entirely remote staff today.