Work is a Verb
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The pile is at the famous names. The better job often isn't.
Last month Hilton told Fortune that about 12,000 people applied for 72 internships this year. Its chief human resources officer, Laura Fuentes, was candid about what that does to the people on the other end: "[With] the volume that our recruiters are receiving, it's nearly impossible to respond and manage that pipeline."
About ten days later, the National Federation of Independent Business published its September jobs report. Of the small business owners hiring or trying to hire, nearly nine in ten said they got few or no qualified applicants.
Same market, opposite ends. The famous name gets a pile too big for anyone to read. The small owner can't find the one person who fits. NFIB's members are mostly Main Street firms rather than remote software companies, so I won't stretch their numbers over our corner of the market. But the shape will be familiar to anyone who read WiaV #45, about why the match keeps failing. And the employers on the far side of that gap, the small and mid-size companies that make up most of the companies we list, are usually the better bet.
The research on raw application counts by company size is mixed, and plenty of small companies get big piles too (particularly when they are remote). What shrinks is the competition that counts. A pile of thousands gets sorted by proxies, like a brand-name former employer or an exact title match, before a person reads it closely. At a company of 80, the person reading your application is more often someone you would actually work with, looking for someone who fits rather than someone who survives a filter. Being clearly qualified and clearly interested is rarer there, and it gets noticed.
If you want remote, smaller companies are also where flexibility is most often the default. Last year's Flex Index, which tracks the office policies of thousands of US companies, flexible or not, found about two-thirds of companies under 500 employees were "fully flexible," against roughly one in ten of the very largest. Read that label carefully. It means no company-wide office requirement, so it counts fully remote companies alongside companies that keep an office and let employees choose whether to use it, which can look a lot like hybrid. Telling those two apart is a big part of why Remotivated exists. The pattern by size is still worth knowing, and it holds outside tech too: the largest companies are far more likely to set an office-time requirement for everyone. Our own listings lean small as well: of the companies with open roles on Remotivated whose size we know, more than two-thirds have fewer than 1,000 employees.
The reason I care about most is simpler. Small and mid-size employers are very often a more human place to work. Not because the people are nicer, but because there is less distance: fewer layers between you and the people making decisions, and work that is visible to the people it affects. The research points the same way. Eurofound's European Working Conditions Survey finds people trust management more, and more often say conflicts get resolved fairly, in smaller workplaces than in large ones. British research using 1998 survey data found small-firm employees more satisfied with the respect they got from supervisors, their sense of achievement, and their influence over their own work.
That closeness cuts both ways. With few layers, one bad manager is the whole experience, and there is nobody to escalate to. Smaller employers also tend to offer thinner benefits and less training, and a company of 60 has less room to absorb a bad year. None of that is a reason to stay in the big-brand queue. It is a list of questions: what the benefits actually are, how people learn and grow there, who you would report to, and how the company is funded.
So for your next ten applications, try swapping half the famous names for companies you had never heard of a month ago. Check them properly before you apply: the real remote model, the hiring zones, the pay, what the first year looks like. Then write to them like a person.
At those companies, a person is more likely to be reading.
Over the past few weeks I've been on one-to-one calls with many of Remotivated Pro's first members.
We've worked through their job hunt strategy, set up their AI toolkit with the free Job Hunt Skills plugin, and built proof assets: the work samples that show an employer what you can do before you're in the interview.
Those calls are still on offer. Join Remotivated Pro while this runs and you get a one-to-one, 20-minute call with me. We can set your job alerts up properly, get your AI toolkit running, or talk through where your remote job search is stuck.
You also get a seat in the founding-member group sessions, which start soon. They're 45-minute working sessions with me and the other early members: bring a posting you're weighing, bring a challenge you need help working through, or just listen.
Any Pro plan counts: monthly, annual or lifetime. It's a thank you for joining early, and it won't be around forever.
