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Job sharing: A win-win for companies and employees

The labor market is still a seller’s one, which means skilled job seekers have more bargaining power than employers.¹ As a result, companies are left competing in a fierce war for top talent to fill their open roles.

At the same time, young people are struggling to access opportunities due to a lack of work experience, while many older people would like to start scaling back and prioritizing work-life balance.²

Job sharing is one way for companies to build more diverse teams, allow young people to get a foot on the ladder, and help older employees find balance and avoid employee burnout. It also offers an attractive option for women – particularly new mothers – to access opportunities without having to work full-time, which may not be an option for primary caregivers.

Job sharing also comes with challenges. We’ll look at what these are, how to overcome them, and how to implement job sharing in your organization. We’ll also look at how to use skills-based hiring to recruit for job shares and attract and retain top talent.

What is job sharing?
Who benefits from job sharing?
How to ensure job sharing is a success
Skills-based hiring: Find the best people for successful job sharing

Job sharing is when two or more people split the responsibilities and compensation of a full-time position. Instead of one person working in a full-time role, it offers two people the flexibility to maintain their careers while enjoying a better work-life balance. Additionally, it lets employees earn a living working the hours that make sense for them, either on a reduced-time or part-time contract.

By giving your people the tools and opportunities they need to succeed, you can set yourself apart from other employers and attract the best talent. Planned carefully — and with the right division of responsibilities — you can get two skilled minds for the price of one.

We spoke to Sigrid Uray-Esterer, the co-founder of JobTwins, a platform for job sharing and part-time careers. She mentions that, while job sharing is an excellent solution, it’s “not a lifelong concept, but rather a lifecycle concept.” This means it’s a temporary fix that might have an expiration date for your employees and company structure — but it can still help improve staffing requirements, as well as boost employee work-life balance.

As mentioned above, minority groups — especially working mothers — are more likely to be penalized or demoted for straying from traditional career-growth timelines and trajectories.³ This means they’re more likely to benefit from an arrangement that lets them pursue their work without losing their job entirely or having to explain a 10-year employment gap on a resume.

Job sharing can offer candidates and employees a more flexible approach to working. It can also benefit companies and customers.

Let’s take a look at how.

Candidates and employees

By splitting up employee workloads and time, job sharing can help lower stress and improve work-life balance, not to mention increase job satisfaction.⁴ Additionally, it can result in more unified teams that actively support each other in their roles and responsibilities.

Here’s how job sharing can benefit candidates and employees from different backgrounds and circumstances:

New parents

Jobsharing makes it easier for new or working parents to juggle parenting responsibilities and work obligations without losing out on the career front.

According to Sigrid: “[companies] build people up through their careers and invest in them, and job sharing means they don’t lose this progress when employees become parents.”

It’s a win-win: Companies get to keep the investment in their people and skills in-house, and job sharers get more time to focus on their families.

Caregivers

Caregivers help take care of a family member, usually as an unpaid commitment. Women typically fall into this category and represent seven out of 10 primary caregivers.⁵

“Job sharing can involve men more in the unpaid childcare system — and help them be more involved with their families — while giving women more opportunities to progress their careers.” Sigrid Uray-Esterer.

This means job sharing can help level the playing field in terms of the gender pay gap and pay transparency, as well as give people more flexibility regardless of social norms and gender roles.

Those at the beginning or end of their career

A flexible working arrangement can encourage the untapped potential of any age group to apply and help them work around their specific circumstances. For example, a seasoned professional nearing the end of their career might be more likely to apply for the job knowing they’d be mentoring someone at the beginning of theirs, instead of being responsible for another full-time commitment.

On the other hand, younger workers are more likely to apply and stay in a position that offers work-life balance, working-from-home arrangements, and flexible vacations.⁶

Entrepreneurs

Side hustles are increasingly common for Gen Z because, on top of navigating the cost of living crisis, it gives them an opportunity to hone and future-proof their skills.⁷

Therefore, employees may have a side hustle and welcome the flexibility to pursue it. They’ll be more likely to apply for your open position if they know they have the time for it.

Moreover, over 75% of women employees believe job sharing has an important role in attracting and keeping female entrepreneurs.⁸ This is because it gives them the opportunity to use their time in a way that makes sense for them. For example, if they’re interested in a particular sector or field of study, job sharing lets them remain financially independent while pursuing their interests.

Now that you know how job sharing can positively impact candidates and employees, here’s how it can benefit companies.

Companies

Increased productivity and collaboration

Since job sharers have more time for preferred and personal matters, job sharing can increase their productivity at work. Additionally, with two minds working instead of one, it also allows for more inspired team collaboration, which can result in better output and outcomes.

“For higher-level positions like CEOs,” says Sigrid, “job sharing can give you important feedback on job performance you would otherwise never receive.” This means it can even inspire professional development at the highest levels.

More job consistency

Offering personal leave can come with additional costs. However, with job sharing, “you always have someone on the job, even if someone else is on vacation” says Sigrid. Plus, if one employee leaves the organization, the role will continue to function seamlessly: skills and knowledge are retained and the jobshare can help keep everything on track.

Quote - Sigrid Uray Estere, Co-Founder of JobTwins

Improved job mobility

Job sharing also benefits internal mobility, aka quiet hiring. This is because companies can move employees horizontally and ensure a smoother transition by pairing a less experienced employee with a more experienced one. It’s also easier to (vertically) move a job sharer with experience in multiple roles into a more in-demand position — and retain talent while saving on hiring costs.

Increased diversity

Job sharing also helps companies meet D&I targets by supporting more diverse applicants: women, BIPOC, older workers**, and neurodiverse individuals. This is especially important because, according to our** 2022 State of Skills-based Hiring report, ethnically and gender-diverse teams financially outperform non-diverse ones.

Customers

Now that you know how candidates, employees, and companies can benefit from job sharing, let’s look at how it can bring value to your customers.

Better results

Two employees can bring different strengths to the role, so clients can access a wider set of skills and competencies that can help them better achieve their goals.

Additionally, because job sharing enables employees to maintain a healthier work-life balance, they’re typically less stressed and less likely to experience burnout. This means employees are more likely to offer better service to customers by devoting more time and care to each customer interaction. By using a more personalized approach, they’re more likely to elevate the customer experience.

More availability

Your customers always have a point of contact available, so their needs and questions never need to slip through the cracks. Additionally, with multiple job-sharing partners and a more distributed workload, there’s a higher chance of faster response times to customer inquiries or issues.

Customers can also benefit from extended service hours because job sharing often involves flexible work schedules. Therefore, they can access additional support during evenings, weekends, or other non-standard business hours. This means employees can better cater to diverse time zones and needs without utilizing an impersonal chatbot or automation software for client-facing communications.

Done right, job sharing can be a cost-effective and people-first approach to giving employees the flexibility they need to do their best work. However, it comes with a few challenges you need to be prepared for.

Let’s take a look at how you can implement job sharing successfully to secure the best talent out there.

Identify what you need

To make job sharing a success, you need to get management buy-in while “communicating the benefits of job sharing across your company and explaining exactly how it works,” says Sigrid. This way, you can better identify what roles need to be filled across the organization, and what resources and employee attributes you need to make it work.

To showcase organizational alignment, higher-ups in the organization can lead by example by opening up their roles for potential job sharing and, in turn, get more people on board and willing to provide feedback.

Challenge: Depending on where your company is registered and the specific laws and regulations, companies can struggle to register two employees for the same position and might have to find a workaround for listing two employees in the same role.

Solution: Make sure you have a clear understanding of local hiring laws and regulations. Then, find in-demand open roles and determine which types of employees you need to fill them (more on this below).

Use talent assessments

“Job sharing is for everyone, but not just anyone,” says Sigrid.

To ensure you hire the right people, create customized talent assessments to help you find the right set of soft skills and competencies that indicate suitability for a shared role. For example, strong communication skills and empathy, which help complement coworkers and make job sharing a success. In addition, these tests can be used to identify skills gaps for existing employees to help prepare them for job sharing.

Some talent assessments you can use to gauge a candidate’s job-sharing potential include:

Challenge: Companies using traditional, resume-based hiring methods might struggle to find the right types of candidates with the hard and soft skills to complement their coworkers — and make job sharing a success.

Solution: Figure out which skills and specific character traits you want to hire before you start the hiring process. Then, use talent assessments to find the right people.

Put watertight systems and processes in place

You need clear and direct systems and processes to make job sharing possible, especially if you’re working with remote or hybrid teams in different time zones. People need to know exactly what they have to do and be able to access all the resources and relevant information they need at all times.

Here are some ideas you can steal to create watertight systems and processes:

Encourage regular communication and check-ins between job sharers. This can include daily updates on Slack, or weekly or bi-weekly video calls to discuss job responsibilities and share updates and information.
Use a shared task management system for everyone on your team, including job sharers, to track their responsibilities and progress. This can be as simple as a shared spreadsheet or a dedicated project management tool like Asana.
Establish a flexible scheduling system that allows for smooth transitions between job sharers and visibility over their calendars. Set clear guidelines for when job sharers should exchange responsibilities and how they should communicate about their schedules.

Challenge: Job sharing can lend itself to confusion around job responsibilities and issues with day-to-day continuity. For example, sharing workplace communications, access to the right materials, and client relationships.

Solution: Systems and tools that prioritize async and real-time communication, and give everyone the autonomy to do their job.

Think about how to support employees

For job sharing to be successful, employers need to offer support to make it work. This means you need to provide the right resources, tools, and supportive work environment where job sharing is encouraged and respected.

Other ways to support job sharers include:

Foster a sense of community. You can miss out on things if you’re not at work when others are or when you can’t join team-building activities. Therefore, companies should help job sharers stay in the loop and included, even when they’re not there. You can do this by creating a Slack channel dedicated to team updates, shared interests, and upcoming events. This way, even if an event is scheduled for non-working hours, job sharers can still opt in.
Talk to employees about where they need support and how you can provide that.
Provide training and support to ensure everyone is equipped to handle their responsibilities and knows how they can apply for a job-sharing position. This can include training on the shared task management system or answering any questions.

Challenge: Given the nature of job sharing and the diversity in employee needs and experiences, it can be hard to know exactly how to support them. For example, new parents might need access to childcare during working hours, or entrepreneurs might want access to online courses and training materials.

Solution: Ensure fair and transparent workload distribution. Employees need to feel like their jobshare partner is pulling their weight, so it’s important to make sure all tasks are divided equally. You can do this through regular workload reviews and adjusting responsibilities as needed.

Measure success and iterate

As mentioned by Sigrid, job sharing isn’t a permanent solution. This is why you need to measure the success of your job-sharing scheme, and find out if it’s viable.

Regularly check whether job sharing is working for everyone. Hold yourself and your employees accountable for the success of the scheme, and ways to improve.

Here are some ways you can measure job-sharing success:

Customer satisfaction survey (CSAT): This tells you how satisfied your customers are with the level of service and attention they receive from job sharers, or to report on their level of satisfaction with your company in general.
Gather feedback: Conduct surveys or hold regular meetings to gather feedback from job sharers on their satisfaction with the arrangement.
Employee engagement and retention rates: This helps determine the impact of the scheme on employee morale.
Recruiting pipeline: Check to see if your job-sharing ads and postings get more traction and applicants than full-time postings, and if job sharing is helping you meet D&I and hiring targets.

Challenge: You tried job sharing and it wasn’t successful. Or, you implemented it successfully in the past, but can’t get it to work this time around.

Solution: Establish a system for evaluating the performance of job-sharing partners. Regularly provide constructive feedback to each other and address any concerns as they come up. This feedback loop can help identify areas for improvement at scale and make sure everyone is meeting expectations.

To find and keep the best workers, you need to be flexible when hiring. This means not limiting your choices to people who can only work in certain ways or situations. Instead, you can make your job more welcoming to different kinds of workers, so everyone has a chance to succeed.

Job sharing is a win-win for companies engaged in a war for talent, as well as employees from all generations and backgrounds in search of a more flexible working arrangement. It helps groups like women, younger and older workers, and BIPOC access jobs and develop the skills they need to stay in the game or get started on a new career path. Additionally, companies benefit from increased employee diversity, satisfaction, and retention.

In this article, we showed you how to make sure your job-sharing scheme is a success by identifying what you need and using talent assessments to hire the right people and skills. We also highlighted some potential challenges (as well as solutions!) to look out for along the way.

With skills-based hiring, you can vet, train, and retain the best people for job-sharing positions so they’re more likely to succeed in the role — and save yourself time, resources, and recruiting effort. This way, everyone wins!

Want to attract and retain top talent? Skills-based hiring lets you offer attractive flexible working arrangements by identifying the right people and skills for the job.

Download the 2022 State of Skills-Based Hiring report to learn more.

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