Abstract:
How do economic crises reshape firms' skill demand through changes in the organization of work? Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a shock to workplace practices, this paper examines whether short-term disruptions prompt lasting shifts in job requirements. We draw on 11 million German online job vacancies from 2017-2024 and implement an event-study design that exploits pre-pandemic variation in workfrom-home feasibility across occupations. This approach identifies firms' differential exposure to remote-work constraints based on the occupational mix of their job postings. We find that crisis-induced shifts in skill demand were mainly short-lived, but one adjustment persisted: a lasting rise in interactive requirements, reflecting the emergence of hybrid collaboration. This form of organizational change contrasts with the technology-driven automation emphasized in prior crises and was shaped mainly by structural factors -digital infrastructure, firm size, and sectoral exposure -rather than by cyclical variation. Our results show that temporary shocks can trigger selective and enduring shifts in firms' skill demand through evolving workplace organization.