The Great Big Resignation and now this !

6 min readOct 7, 2021

It is by now clear to most of the industries, employers and employees across the world (including the US) that the pandemic shook the core grounds on which entities and individuals relied on, and in most instances stood on assumptions that are at best defied and at worst decimated.

The Great Big Resignation is a reality and media covers it very regularly. Who is driving it , How employers drove workers to quit and many more. Some of the noteworthy points that our research team observed

Restaurants, hotels are struggling to find workers and you can see their desperation to hire in the way they are responding now — flexible hours, temp workers, increase minimum wage and more perks (like education fee fully sponsored etc.)
On the other hand, high tech industry boomed and the rich became richer. All the big tech companies doubled, tripled and in many case multiplied their top and bottom line revenues by leaps and bounds as the entire world started relying on internet for communication. Online web conferences, internet bandwidths exploded. This is the right set of conditions under which the big tech prospers and indeed they continue to do so
While high tech companies continue to flourish, they are not isolated from The Great Big resignation either. Employees who were valuable and support core systems became more valuable and if they are valuable at one high tech company, chances are they are valued equal or higher with similar companies. In some cases, since most high tech skills are transferable (unless of course you are working with a legacy tech — even in such cases as long as the tech is supporting an essential business, it is still sustainable. Yes I am referring to the mainframes, which is still very much alive and supports many critical systems that keep the world running, though the growth rate might be a flat line)
Freelancing gained momentum and is discussed in the labor market quite a bit. Sign up on any platform and watch the activity. There are many projects, and there are many freelancers posting their profiles and expressing interest to do the project. It is still too early to comment on the success of freelancing at this point. There are some who say that freelancing is for one-off quick projects, that don’t need long term maintenance. While there are others who say — what is permanent ? In the current world of sub second attention span, as long as you can mobilize a bunch of folks online and rally all of them to say the same thing, the goal is achieved — you make money !

So why are we talking about this ?

We have been working with candidates, recruiters and employers using our platform and the current market, industry conditions paved way for increased adoption. In many ways our platform is helping address the concerns of all entities — candidates, employers, recruiters, staffers in the current hullabaloo and uncertainty.

Symmetrics — a fair metrics platform

Symmetrics.fyi is a labor metrics database for candidates in the US. The beneficiaries of such rich database can be any of the following personas

Workers in any high skilled occupation (immigrants, permanent residents and US Citizens)
Aspirants across the world intending to apply for work visas to the US
Undergrads and grads in enrolled in STEM courses and intending to find jobs
Recruiters/Staffers who consult and help job seekers
Employers of any size looking to mobilize talent and continuously hire

Know what an employer pays — Maturity level 1

Navigate to Employer — Wage KPI report, enter employer name and you have the full profile of the employer with wages and distribution of wages across job titles, city, states etc.

Shows a distribution of lower and upper wages that the employer pays
Total no. of unique Job Titles that the employer hires
No. of Cities where the employer hires
No. of States where the employer hires
Further shows the split of lower, upper and market wages by job title, city and state

You can zoom out and look for the same metrics at the

At Job Title level (across employers, cities, states etc.)
At Job Family level
At Industry level (Software, Hardware, electronics — many more ) and so on…

Compare two employers — Maturity level 2

What if you wanted to compare metrics across two employers ? Maybe you like to know

Which employer pays better on average (for a job title or across all job titles)
Which employer is more diverse geographically (Do they hire in multiple states and cities )
Which employer hires a more wide variety of Jobs and so on… (This is for your future planning to move across domains, titles , skills etc.)

Easy peasy ! Just navigate to What-if category of reports and select the appropriate report. For e.g. select the employers and Go !

At the top the two pies show the employer’s visa approval rate to correlate with wages. Lets be honest — If the employer is NOT able to sponsor many high skilled employees (or had many rejections), wages don’t matter much for a candidate/job seeker
The tables show job titles and upper, lower and market wages for those job titles that the employer pays

If the wheels in your brain are turning now, you guessed it right ! You can do What-if in various other dimensions

What-If I want to move from State X to State Y — and know employers, job titles, cities and their corresponding wages, approval rates etc.

The full list of all What-If reports is awaiting you eyes

Find employers based on your Goal — Maturity level 3

Let’s say you have a goal to make a certain amount of wage. And you want to find

Employers who can (or already pay) meet that goal
Cities that have employers meeting that goal
Job Titles that pay that wage/meet the goal and so on.. and all within the context of a state

Symmetrics has got you covered. Just select your goal and boom ! All you need is available within the report

Distribution of lower and upper wages in a histogram style, so that you know what is the range of wages paid in the state by different employers
List of employers that meet your wage goal and what they pay (lower , upper and market wage)
List of cities (in the state) that meet your wage goal(s)
List of Job Titles that meet your wage goals
And so on…

Extending the same reports, you can have wage or approval goals across

What Next

The above reports are only the tip-of-iceberg for Symmetrics platform. There is a whole roadmap of things that are planned to be released soon — covering not just high skilled, but medium skilled industries, job titles , wages and so on

What are you waiting for ?