What makes one job more attractive than the next one? The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics seems to have a clue: Earlier this month, a BLS report served as the culmination of a study on job characteristics, explaining how a change in certain characteristics could affect “self-assessed job quality.”
BLS researchers analyzed Federal Reserve data on workers who started a new job between 2021 and 2023, aiming to capture how both monetary and nonmonetary factors affect an individual’s view of their old job versus their new job.
The verdict? BLS said it found “strong evidence that workers value characteristics beyond pay and benefits in evaluating their new jobs, although pay and benefits remain important predictors of job quality.”
Specifically, BLS said, an employee’s interest in their work is particularly predictive of their assessment of overall job quality, even after controlling for changes in pay and benefits.
Of particular interest to HR may be BLS’ finding that if a new hire felt their current role was more interesting than the last one, they were 27% more likely to consider the new job better overall.
These findings are poignant given the wealth of research on employee engagement that cropped up during the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of remote work and the subsequent call to return to office. Earlier this year, Gallup continued to sound the death knell on the state of employee engagement, noting that worker engagement has dropped intermittently since 2020. Gallup researchers estimated that, between 2025 and 2026, 8 million people had disengaged at work.
Additionally, the BLS findings that highlight more engaging work over better pay are noteworthy because, just this year, reports have continued to suggest that pay is the key factor in holding workers’ attention. In this month’s report, BLS researchers said that just looking at pay and benefits “gives an incorrect inference” almost a third of the time when studying job satisfaction.
The analysts also noted that, along with more interesting work, better work-life balance made new hires 18% more likely to consider their new role better than the last one.