Since work-from-home became more than a short-term pandemic solution, companies have started offering remote positions in an attempt to attract and retain talent. A popular opinion has even emerged that it has become much harder to fill in-person positions. However, when we investigate this claim, we see that while that was previously true, in-person jobs are now increasingly easier to fill.
College graduation season is here. But starting your career can be tricky. There are the coveted big corporate jobs, which can provide structure and stability, and then there are the new dynamic startups, which can provide fast growth. Does starting at a fast-growing startup put you at an advantage for your career? First, when we compare the salary growth of people who started their careers at fast-growing startups with that of slower-growing startups, we find that while they were initially paid less, their salaries overtook their peers after just three years, and continued to grow at a faster pace thereafter.
In our recent collaboration with Business Insider, we studied talent flows from quant hedge funds and prop trading firms to the tech industry. This week we focus on who exactly is hiring this technical talent during the hefty non-compete period. While rival funds and trading firms are frequent destinations, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft are still the most common destinations for engineers, data scientists, and researchers.
Following the conclusion of their studies, many fresh law graduates apply to state and federal clerkships with the hopes of serving directly under a judge in preparation for a lucrative career. But how do these prestigious appointments impact law graduates’ earnings over the course of their careers? The number of law graduates has been steadily declining over the past decade. In fact, Law School Transparency – an advocacy group focusing on the legal profession – reports that the number of law school applicants has decreased by as much as 23% since 2010.
Pay transparency laws have become an increasingly popular tool to battle pay discrimination like the gender pay gap. Colorado implemented a policy requiring disclosure of salary ranges in job postings under the “Equal Pay for Equal Work” Act on January 1st, 2021. Other places, notably New York City, whose pay transparency policy was to be enacted starting on May 15th, 2022 but was postponed to November following pushback from businesses, are following suit.
The United States has some of the best graduate programs and, unsurprisingly, attracts some of the brightest people around the world. But the US has a big problem – it loses 1 out of 3 students it attracts. With the news that the America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed in both the House and Senate, which includes exemptions for international PhDs with STEM degrees from annual green card limits, we decided this week to take a deep dive into the international enrollment in the US graduate programs and see where these coveted students continue their careers after graduation.
Podcasts are increasing in popularity at a stellar rate. And with the increased accessibility of recording and editing tools, this new form of broadcasting has transformed from a specialized occupation to something that the layman can do as a side hustle. So who actually ends up hitting _record_ and starts their own podcasts? By tracking the share of workers who list podcasting as their side hustles, we see that the share of workers has been steadily increasing across the last decade.
Last week, Bloomberg News featured our Chief Green(washing) Officer research from the end of last year. This inspired us to revisit the role of “Chief Green Officer” (CGO), or as it is more commonly called “Chief Sustainability Officer” (CSO), to learn more about their responsibilities and impact. Below are the ten industries where the role is most common. Notably, the list is headed by industries with rather heavy ecological footprints, suggesting that there are efforts by companies to curb their unintended impacts on the environment.
The pandemic has thrust work-from-home into mainstream culture and has had an enormous impact on where people choose to live. Now that companies are looking to bring staff back into the offices, it might prove more difficult than they had once thought. The figure above shows the share of workers residing in a city other than their company’s location. Interestingly, 2021 showed a bit of a reversal in the work-from-home trend, with the percentage of decentralized workers decreasing slightly.
In the free text of employee company reviews, we notice a strong and early uptick in mentions of inflation in negative reviews. Employees aren't just mentioning inflation more in general, but are distinctly mentioning it more in conjunction with compensation. At companies where multiple employees mention inflation in reviews, have average salaries been keeping up with inflation? Turns out, the reviewers were right to complain - their salaries have barely been keeping up with inflation, while other large US companies have kept up
This week we turn to female leadership and its effects on a company's workforce. We focus on Inc 5000 companies, tracking the share of CEOs who are women for these fastest growing private businesses we see that the vast majority are run by men. Notably, the Software industry is the most skewed toward male CEOs. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise since female enrollment in CS degrees just reached around 20 percent recently.
It stands to reason that salespeople leaving a company in droves is a bad sign, especially if that company depends heavily on selling products or services. But what does the data actually say about the consequences of high or low sales turnover? This week, we look at how company revenues and employee sentiment are actually affected when sales attrition varies. Pharmaceutical and medical device companies specifically depend heavily on sales. By looking at Abbott Laboratories as an example, we can see what happens to revenue when a company manages to reduce sales attrition:
Move aside millennials, there is a new generation of Americans that will be blamed for everything that is wrong with the economy. As the great resignation is going full steam ahead, recent articles in Time, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal all focused on this younger generation of workers and the ways they are redefining work culture. So this week we decided to break down who contributes the most to the Great Resignation: older folks who are looking for early retirement, or millennials and generation Z who are looking for higher wages and better working conditions?
Amid the escalating crisis in Ukraine, we wanted to take the opportunity to pay homage to the impressive tech hub that Ukrainian people have built in the last few decades. First, looking into the most common occupations in Ukraine, we see that the majority of jobs are in the tech industry, with software development taking the lead. This wouldn’t come as a surprise to those who follow Ukraine as a tech hub in Europe. In fact, TechUkraine, a tech platform supported by Ukraine’s Ministry of Development and Trade has been warning about the ripple effects of this invasion on the budding tech industry.
While a lot of focus around the great resignation has been on people quitting their jobs, the reality is that the vast majority of people are quitting to start a new job – a phenomenon called The Great Reshuffling. But this trend raises an interesting question, how frequently do employees not only change jobs, but change careers, i.e. start a new job in a different field?
Last week we looked into a day in the life of a Chief Data Officer, and noted that CDAOs seem to be commonly recruited straight out of academia. The week before that, it was the former academics that founded successful unicorns. This week we will shift our focus to understanding talent flows in and out of Higher Ed institutions. Existing economic literature shows that, in the context of teaching careers, outside options matter greatly as higher quality teachers enter the workforce during recessions.
Twenty years ago, CapitalOne appointed Cathy Doss as the first Chief Data Officer. Since then, the world, and especially large companies have become more data driven and the Chief Data (and Analytics) Officer (CDAO) role has become a common member of the C-Suite. In 2002, CapitalOne was ahead of its time. It took another 12 years for the role to truly pick up in popularity. But then it did, very rapidly:
Before the PayPal Mafia ran tech, the Traitorous Eight were the “it” entrepreneurs that founded unicorns after having left Shockley Semiconductor. And before them, it was the folks from Bell Labs. But how about today? Is there a new PayPal Mafia in the making, whose employees will shift the tech landscape? Which companies are churning out the most successful entrepreneurs of tomorrow? Although consulting companies continue to boast the number of alumni who founded unicorns, we see that big tech companies still have an edge.
A couple of weeks ago, we talked about how toxic work culture is driving the big resignation, in our joint article with Culture X that appeared in the MIT Sloan Review. Today, we want to know which aspects of work contribute the most to employee satisfaction and what companies that do well have in common. Using employee review scores, we look at which topic ratings impact overall company ratings the most. Below shows the effect other topics have on overall satisfaction, holding constant time and company, only identifying from the variation of scores within a company.
The financial industry is increasingly concerned with social sustainability, which has resulted in huge interest in Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) roles in this sector. And these positions have been growing most within private equity, where ESG has outpaced growth of other roles since 2020. ESG Hiring Rates have been growing steadily in the last decade. Most notably, hiring rates appear to spike in the aftermath of major social movements.
