Ben Zweig

In the wake of the global pandemic, the relationship between employees and employers shifted dramatically. Workers left their jobs in droves to find work that was a better fit with their values, leaving companies with a shortage of the talent they need to operate. Remote work offers an opportunity for companies to find the talent they need. Every disruption—and this one is no exception—creates winners and losers. In today’s labor market, the winners will be companies that lean into remote… Show more

In the wake of the global pandemic, the relationship between employees and employers shifted dramatically. Workers left their jobs in droves to find work that was a better fit with their values, leaving companies with a shortage of the talent they need to operate. Remote work offers an opportunity for companies to find the talent they need. Every disruption—and this one is no exception—creates winners and losers. In today’s labor market, the winners will be companies that lean into remote hiring and take full advantage of the global talent marketplace. The potential gains are astronomical.
Taking advantage of global talent requires deep visibility into the state of remote work and the global talent footprint. Revelio Labs and Lightcast have come together to tackle the big task of surveying the footprint of global talent in this new economy.
While the overall potential of moving to remote work is enormous, there is a substantial diversity among which jobs are suitable for remote work, which skills can be found in which geographies, and which talent pools offer the highest payoff.
We are in a pivotal moment, where labor markets stand to become more efficient than they have ever been before. With unparalleled visibility into talent pools across the entire globe, companies across every industry can expand their pool of potential workers and take advantage of an entire world of skills and capabilities.
Though we’re in the early stages of developing comprehensive intelligence of the global workforce, this report offers strong evidence for the potential of remote work and actionable takeaways for putting it to use. We encourage readers to read this report with an eye toward the future and think creatively about ways that specific organizations with specific needs can take full advantage of remote talent. Show less

Our immigration system in the US is arbitrary, unjust, and unproductive. Instead of federal caps on foreign-born workers, we should have a market-based approach to visa sponsorships, where employers are the buyers and municipalities are the sellers. This will result in domestic companies being able to access the talent they need, cities getting the growth and revenue they need to flourish, and foreign-born workers getting a break from the constant stress of an archaic lottery.

Research shows that lateral mobility offers a win-win for employee satisfaction and employer performance.

Research using employee data reveals the top five predictors of attrition and four actions managers can take in the short term to reduce attrition.

This paper proposes an approach to estimating fungibility between skills given multiple information sources of those skills. An estimate of skill adjacency or fungibility or substitutability is critical for effective capacity planning, analytics and optimization in the face of changing skill requirements of an organization. The proposed approach is based on computing a similarity measure between skills, using each available data source, and combining these similarities into a measure of… Show more

This paper proposes an approach to estimating fungibility between skills given multiple information sources of those skills. An estimate of skill adjacency or fungibility or substitutability is critical for effective capacity planning, analytics and optimization in the face of changing skill requirements of an organization. The proposed approach is based on computing a similarity measure between skills, using each available data source, and combining these similarities into a measure of fungibility. We present both supervised and unsupervised integration methods and demonstrate that these produce improved outcomes, compared to using any single skill similarity source alone, using data from a large IT organization. The skills’ fungibility matrix created using this approach has been deployed by the organization for demand forecasting across groups of skills. We discuss how the fungibility matrix is deployed to generate skill clusters and present a forecasting algorithm that additionally incorporates past/future engagements and a mechanism to quantify uncertainty in the forecast. A possible extension of this work is to use the fungibility measure to cluster skills and develop a skill-centric representation of an organization to enable strategic assessments and planning. Show less

This dissertation consists of three essays which aim to extend the methodology and
analysis of the study of social mobility. In the first essay, differences in intergenerational
mobility across race and across the parent’s earnings distribution are explored through a
nonparametric framework. Components of mobility are differentiated and analyzed separately in
order to get a comprehensive account of heterogeneities in mobility. Several important
differences are found including… Show more

This dissertation consists of three essays which aim to extend the methodology and
analysis of the study of social mobility. In the first essay, differences in intergenerational
mobility across race and across the parent’s earnings distribution are explored through a
nonparametric framework. Components of mobility are differentiated and analyzed separately in
order to get a comprehensive account of heterogeneities in mobility. Several important
differences are found including higher expected mobility for white households, higher
idiosyncratic mobility for black households, larger disparities in expected mobility at the high
end of the earnings distribution, and much higher rates of overall intergenerational persistence
for black households.
The second essay addresses a source of bias in the comparison of mobility across
subgroups. An increasingly popular method for estimating differences in intergenerational
mobility across subgroups is the use of transition matrices. This has encouraged the practice of
partitioning the sample into several discrete parts in order to draw comparisons. There is a notable bias that arises from the practice of discretization, which can lead to misleading
conclusions. In this paper, that bias is explored and a new method for its correction is proposed.
The third essay explores the heterogeneous effect of macroeconomic shocks on
intragenerational consumption mobility. The dynamics of consumption is of considerable interest
but has gotten limited exposure in recent research due to a lack of household-level panel data.
This paper pools the panel datasets that are available through The World Bank Living Standard
Measurement Surveys in order to get robust measures of the annual mobility of household percapita consumption. Through a differentiation of mobility between its downward component,
vulnerability, and its upward component, adaptability, asymmetries are explored in the
contributions of education and household size toward mobility. Show less