I’ve written many times in this forum about leveraging a remote work policy to attract and keep top flight talent. Here’s what I said last month:
“Remote work, highly coveted by many workers, can also be used to entice talent that wouldn’t otherwise be interested in joining your company. This has become all the more true as remote work policies become more conservative over the past year. According to an article in Business Insider, in August of this year, “On LinkedIn, only 9% of job postings last month were fully remote, down from a peak of 21% in March 2022.”
According to the same article, “People are so desperate to work from home that some have taken pay cuts as steep as 20% to land a remote role.” That would be enough of a discount to quell my fears about any remote work productivity penalty.”
Well, if remote work isn’t enough of a sweetener, I’ve got something else for you: Overemployment. No, I’m not talking about the macro economic principle. Overemployment, for those who don’t know, is the practice of taking on more than one full time jobs. Low wage workers have done this forever just to make ends meet, but now white collar workers are doing it to simply sock away more cash.
I first heard of this practice while in Ukraine. There, at least before the war drove many employers to withdraw from the country, it’s common practice for programmers to take on different full time jobs with international companies. I met a 22-year-old who was working three jobs and making $9,000 a month—an enviable sum of money in a country where the average worker makes less than $400 a month.
My impression is that this practice is less common in the USA, but it nonetheless exists and might be gaining in popularity. Business Insider recently published a good article on the Overemployed community in the U.S. Here are some interesting excerpts from the article:
“Those who consider themselves OE rank each of their jobs by the priority they place on it. J1 is the favorite, the one they'll tend to before the others. J2 is the backup, J3 is the backup of the backup, and so on. The trick is to maximize your TC (total compensation) while minimizing your HPW (hours worked per week on each job).”
“This commitment to secrecy is the first pillar of the OE ethos. They freeze their employment histories with Equifax and hibernate their LinkedIn profiles, so employers can't see they're holding multiple jobs. They tell no one what they're up to, barring their spouse and maybe their accountant — hence their many references to "Fight Club."’
“ And don't skimp on the tech that will make your life a bit easier. Mouse jigglers create the appearance that you're online when you're busy tending to your other jobs. A KVM switch helps you control multiple laptops from the same keyboard.”
If the article is to be believed, many of these overemployed people are good at their jobs—all 2-5 of them! This begs the question: Should employers embrace overemployment?
I think it might make sense for utilities to advertise hard-to-fill jobs to the overemployment community. Utilities, as you know, struggle to compete with tech and finance firms that typically offer more competitive salaries. This is especially true for accountants—across all industries. What if you could get talent you wouldn’t otherwise be able to by swallowing your ego and accepting that your company is a J2 or J3?
“Those with multiple jobs also seek out positions they hope will be OE-friendly — light on meetings, as well as on the workload. The process requires a lot of trial and error, like trading cards until you get the perfect hand. Cole, a software engineer, started looking for a J2 because his J1 required so little work — often as little as two or three hours a week. "I just felt like I had a lot of extra time on my hands," he says, "and I figured I could use that time more productively than just watching videos on YouTube." But he's been forced to cycle through several J2s, looking for a role that matches his J1.”
Maybe your power company is the J2 Cole has been looking for.