Earlier in the pandemic, anywhere from 40% to 95% of workers were considering quitting their jobs, resulting in a movement later in the pandemic called the Great Resignation. Some people that quit their jobs have looked into new sources of income, such as freelancing, coaching, or running their own Twitch, YouTube, or OnlyFans channels. For those that are successful, going back to working for a company is not very tempting, meaning they have a large amount of leverage when approached by employers. Not everyone who has quit their job has the time, energy, or skills to do those types of things, though. Therefore, they need to find a job themselves, and they will have leverage for ones for which they are qualified.

For those who have not quit their jobs during the Great Resignation, it is either because they are happy at their job or because they are paralyzed by the fear of not finding a new one. Even those identifying as happy at their jobs are becoming less happy because they are realizing that they prefer working from home while their employer is asking them to come back to the office, or because they were not actually fulfilled in their job in the first place. For many unhappy at their jobs, conditions have become so bad that they are not sure how they can manage their jobs and their lives at the same time. For these workers, lack of recognition for performing well at their job and lack of support for improving are becoming all too common, and so a growing response is to create unions – both in “unskilled” service work like shipment factories, grocery stores, and cafes, and also in knowledge work like tech companies – to demand better work conditions, pay, and benefits. Many of these unions are seeing increasing amounts of success, and thus have greater leverage because employers fear losing even more workers to the Great Resignation.

In other words, nowadays people have much more leverage against employers than they ever have. However, they either do not know this, or they do not know how to use it. 

• For employable people outside of a particular employer, leverage can be utilized in either response to an employer contacting them, or while applying to a job at that company. In response to the employer, leverage can be used before even talking to them on the phone because they were qualified enough to be contacted. While applying to a job there, people can use leverage when they find a job because they qualified. Therefore, the employable need a way to illustrate they have leverage for a new job because they are not looking for a job and/or because they are qualified.
• For those already employed, leverage can be utilized to make demands to increase the quality of their job, either outside a union or within one. Outside of a union, employees can use their job performance as leverage, or because they should be supported to improve. Failing that, employees may decide to form a union and cite its strength as leverage. Therefore, employees need a way to illustrate their leverage from their job performance and/or their union’s strength.
• Once they figure out how to illustrate their leverage, both the employable and current employees then need a way use that leverage – to make demands alongside their leverage.

Technical Requirements

To assist the employable illustrating they have leverage for a new job because they are not looking for a job and/or because they are qualified, these types of leverage are commonly illustrated separately, and in vastly different ways. 

To illustrate that they are not looking for a job, the lack of application in an employer’s system is often taken to mean that. However, they may not have heard of it, or they may not have gotten around to preparing materials for that specific job because it is a lot of work. Instead, taking inspiration from job boards might make more sense, where a candidate explicitly indicates whether they are actively looking for a new job, open to offers, or not looking for one at all. Also, to further expedite the interviewing process, additional information such as their location and commuting preferences would be helpful. While all candidate preferences are therefore useful, some are more relevant to employers at first than others. Therefore, any solution must not only list all of them, but also weight them according to their relative importance. 

For actual jobs they are open to, though, candidate preferences should be taken further to include the types of jobs they are open to and the skills they would use in them. Furthermore, additional proof that they don’t need a job may be helpful even if they are doing something vastly different than they used to do when they were employed by companies. For example, freelance work, successful social media channels, or coaching businesses, etc., should be shown even though they would not otherwise be considered relevant to a new job.

To illustrate high qualifications, past experience at an impressive employer is often used to suggest them. But in reality this has little or nothing to do with how qualified they are for jobs at other companies. Therefore, experiences should be shown as proof of qualifications without mentioning the specific companies that brought them that experience. As a backup, recruiters then start looking more deeply at a candidate’s past experiences to see how qualified they are. However, this is limited by the amount of technical knowledge the recruiter has – which is often very little – so it is likely to take the form of identifying specific technologies and languages that the job listing specifies. Instead, it would be much more effective to explicitly map the job requirements to their past experiences. Furthermore, it would be even better to allow employers to filter experiences with job requirements they are especially interested in.

While two solutions for these types of leverage would be useful in their own right, it is important to keep them together so that a candidate match can quickly be ruled out before looking into their past experiences. 

Therefore, a solution is needed to combine weighted candidate preferences with filterable, anonymous experiences mapped to job requirements. 

To assist employees illustrating their leverage from their job performance and/or their union’s strength, these types of leverage are also almost always illustrated separately and in vastly different ways. 

Leverage from an employee’s job performance is often communicated implicitly rather than explicitly. For example, past relevant work is assumed to imply that they have performed well at their current job. However, this does not take into account the possibility that they moved on from a previous job – even at a highly-respected or hyped company – because they do not perform well. Instead, it would be better to ignore their previous employe’s impressiveness since they were hired at their current job, and to enumerate why they were hired and how those reasons continue to be relevant. For employees that have been at their current job for more than a year, their previous years should not be ignored. Instead, previous years should continue to be communicated to show how they have performed and improved at their job. Furthermore, rather than just showing both their initial qualifications and their past job performance, they should be combined in such a way that shows how their initial qualifications have converted into good job performance. 

Additionally, a lack of complaints from their coworkers is often taken to mean that they are performing well at their current job. However, their coworkers may not have been explicitly asked, or they may be hesitant to outline ways that the person has underperformed. Instead, it would be better to include their coworkers’ feedback. However, rather than asking coworkers to frame the feedback, though, which puts an extra burden on them and does not standardize feedback from across coworkers, a better solution would be to weight an employee’s claims about their performance by their coworkers.

Finally, one’s union strength is often not communicated at all, since the employer is expected to already know about it. However, this may not be the case if the union has not (yet) been formally recognized by the employer. Even if it has, its strength may not be considered by one’s manager. Therefore, it would be better to directly communicate union strength to indicate they have some leverage. Furthermore, rather than listing it by itself, which makes it easy to ignore or brush aside, union strength should be used to emphasize all other kinds of leverage being illustrated.

While multiple solutions for these two types of leverage would be useful in their own right, it is important to keep them together so that a holistic view of an employee’s value to the company can be shown as leverage. Therefore, a solution is needed to chronologically show job qualifications and performance weighted by coworkers all in the context of union leverage.

To help everyone make demands alongside their leverage, the demands need to be contextualized by their leverage, rather than just listed next to it. Also, while good qualifications and performance can be used for leverage, they should not be the only way that leverage is illustrated.

For the employable people outside of a given company, they need to use leverage to get a new job and at the highest possible level (i.e., assist their negotiations). This will likely take the form of their preconditions for working for the given company, as well as requesting information about the company to compare it to others. Given that some are demands and some are, possibly optional, questions, the importance of responses should be shown differently. This is especially true because even demands would best be phrased as questions that require an employer’s answer on whether or not they support the demands, and how. This is commonly done for questions by marking the required ones with an asterisk and possibly using red coloring suggesting that answering them is “urgent.” However, such a binary system of optional and required may not be sufficient to communicate how important demands and answers to questions are. Therefore, a multi-layered ontology of importance should to be used.

For the employees of a given company, they need to use leverage to get rewarded for good performance, and, when admonished for underperforming, get support from management. For good performance, this will likely take the form of getting promotions and raises. On the other hand, underperforming could be because the employee needs to learn more so they can get better at their job, or it may be because their work conditions do not enable them to perform at the expected level. In both cases, management should support them, either by paying for additional education or training, or by better accommodating their needs. In either case, this would take the form of demands of management directly linked to indications of good performance or needs for improvement. 

Given both above cases, it’s clear that everyone has leverage to get information or make demands from an employer regardless of how well they have previously performed, even though they often think that they don’t. It’s just that the type of leverage will change depending on context and time. Therefore, a solution is needed to contextualize questions and demands with importance and leverage from both good qualifications/performance as well as human needs.