Remote job adverts demand 25% more skills than identical office roles, across 50 million European postings
An analysis of 50 million job postings across 28 European countries found that remote postings list 25% more required skills than postings for the same occupation, from the same employer, in the same year. The study, by Wang, Zhang and Liao, is published in Administrative Science Quarterly and tracked 13,890 distinct skills. Remote postings also asked for more years of experience and slightly higher educational credentials.
Two findings sharpen it. A controlled experiment with 1,250 hiring managers drawn from the same 28 countries reproduced the effect, so it is not an artefact of which employers happen to advertise remotely. And the inflated bar is concentrated in fully remote roles: hybrid postings look much like in-person ones.
A separate study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology on 7 September reached a parallel conclusion from the other direction. A vignette experiment with managers, combining an implicit association test with explicit measures, found a consistent “think work, think office” association, and employees working fully from home received significantly lower promotion recommendations while hybrid workers did not.
Why this matters
If you are an experienced professional trying to move into your first remote role and you keep reading adverts that seem to want someone impossibly over-qualified, this is the measured version of that experience. The bar on remote adverts is genuinely higher for the same job at the same company, by about a quarter more listed skills. The obstacle is not your seniority. It is that employers write remote adverts defensively.
The practical implication is the hybrid finding. Hybrid-advertised roles carry neither the inflated skills bar at hiring nor the promotion penalty afterwards, which makes a hybrid role a realistic route into remote working rather than a compromise. Where a remote advert lists an intimidating stack of requirements, treat it as padding rather than as a specification, and apply.
Context
The posting data runs from 2018 to 2021, so it straddles the pandemic shift rather than describing the 2026 market, and the promotion study surveyed US managers. Both caveats belong with any use of the findings. The direction, though, is consistent across two disciplines, two methods and two continents.
For more on identifying roles where an employer is genuinely open to someone making their first remote move, see our work on remote gateway roles.
What to watch
Whether anyone replicates the posting analysis on post-2022 data. The pandemic years are the weakest part of an otherwise unusually large study.