Labor Unbound by Geography

I, like many college students, have been applying to internships for the summer. The amount of time and effort I’ve expended into online job boards has led me to do a lot of thinking about these online tools that connect laborers with businesses and how these tools shape the nature of finding work and work itself.
One instance that inspired a lot of thinking on my part occurred as I was scrolling the LinkedIn job postings one day. On LinkedIn, you can see how many other people have already applied to a position. In the case of this particular job I was applying for, the number was 280, and that was just through LinkedIn and didn’t include other job sites and the company’s own website. The total number was surely over 600 and possibly even 1000. I was in disbelief and extremely doubtful at my chances. There are jobs that I would hire myself for. That is true for anyone, but would I pick myself as the one in 600 person? No, certainly not. Perhaps the company had 5 positions to fill. Would I pick myself as the one in 120 person? The answer is still most likely no.
From this experience I realized that online job sites have effectively “globalized” the labor market. With sites like LinkedIn, anyone, anywhere, as long as they have an internet connection, can apply to the same jobs that you do. Before the internet, companies would post open positions in local newspapers, or people would find jobs via word of mouth or by bringing or mailing their resumes to companies they were interested in. In such a world, the pool of labor was more local and fragmented than it is today.
Remote work only compounds this removal of geography from the process of matching labor with businesses. This particular job on LinkedIn that I applied for offered the option to work remotely, and that surely played a role in the high number of applicants it received. With remote work, now not only is geography removed from the hiring process, but it also removed from the work itself. This has further expanded the number of people who find and pursue an opening. For jobs where remote work is feasible, geography has entirely lost its role.
Are these developments good or bad? As far as overall economic output is concerned, they are likely good and make the labor market more efficient. If companies have access to a bigger pool of labor than before, chances are that they are able to better match labor to their needs. I would hope out of the 280 people who applied through LinkedIn for the same position I did that they found at least a few promising candidates. Online job sites and remote work also allow candidates to discover and access opportunities that they may have never known about or been able to take before, so it is beneficial in the sense that they too have more options and can find something that best matches what they’re seeking without being impeded by their locale.
Such developments have clear costs, however. On the part of companies, many, at least the big, well known companies that everyone is going to apply to, now have to spend the time and resources to sort through enormous numbers of resumes, and at a certain point deciding who to interview surely becomes somewhat arbitrary. Is the 1/600 candidate really that different from the 2/600 candidate or the 3/600 one? This is surely why networking is so important, because it makes a candidate stand out. Networking too has become de-geographicized, and at least to me, feels artificial for that reason. Perhaps local candidates still have an advantage as well, because a company may think they’re more seriously interested in actually being there.
On the part of those seeking work in the delocalized labor market, they’re still the same fish but oftentimes face a bigger pond of competition. Furthermore, it is demoralizing and impersonal to spend time copying and pasting your resume into an application only to be rejected by an automated email weeks later once they finally look at your application. It, like many technological developments, further atomizes society by reducing the need for people to depend on and engage with those around them. The individual now no longer needs to interact with his or her local community at all to find or carry out work, but perhaps that’s not too big of a deal. Work doesn’t necessarily have to be, and isn’t for many people, where they find community.