CLEVELAND, Ohio — You can live in Cleveland, hours away from Discover’s call center in Franklin County, and the company will still hire you.
That’s because the credit card company is letting thousands of employees work from home, which is casting a wider net for new employees.
Discover is currently hiring for about 1,000 full-time positions for customer-care centers. The employees can live anywhere in a state that has a call center, which includes Ohio, Illinois, Utah, Arizona and Delaware. The company isn’t hiring a specific number of people per state, but about 25% of hires in 2021 were made in Ohio.
Like many other companies in March 2020, Discover sent all employees to work from home at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Soon the company realized call center workers were just as productive from home, said Jill McAree, Discover’s director of human resources.
By June 2020, she said 10,000 call center workers across the country were given the choice of working from home, working in the office or a hybrid of the two.
Only 5% of workers are choosing to work full-time in the office, she said.
Since mid-2021, Discover has hired about 350 Ohio workers who live outside of the New Albany-area. The company employs about 2,300 people in the state.
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In a survey conducted by the Fund For our Economic Future aimed at getting a better understanding of the labor market, 79.3% of businesses said they were paying more to attract and keep talent. Pay was also a top reason employees resigned and why many job offers were declined.
But about 17.3% of the time workers resigned because they wanted to work from home, according to employers surveyed. Behind pay, burnout is second most-cited reason for leaving at 31.1%. Workers also cited work/life balance (30.5%) family responsibilities like childcare (22.7%)
Only 15.7% of employers said they were offering work-from-home options or flexible working hours as their strategy to keep workers.