Last Week in Talent - Monday, April 17th

April 17, 2017 at 7:00 AM by William Clarke

The Weekly Screen.pngHappy last day to do your taxes, one and all! If you’re one of the estimated 1 in 7 people who wait until the last minute, good luck and get moving! If you’re not, congrats. You have fulfilled your civic duty this year! 

In the meantime, we’ve got the brand new second edition of Last Week in Talent coming in hot with all the talent-related headlines, insights, data points and long reads to help make you the smartest and best-informed talent pro at your Monday staff meeting each and every week.

And if you're headed to San Diego for ERE this week, be sure to check out our handy dandy guide

Without further ado, here’s the news:

Last week Google launched a private beta of its new ATS, HackerEarth raised a $4.5M series A round for its tech hiring and crowdsourcing solution, Teamable raised $5M to find new talent pools using social media. New York City banned employers from asking about past salaries (but then how can I brag about my lemonade stand earnings?). And US hiring slowed to just 98,000 jobs last month, but unemployment still dropped (go figure).

On the insight and commentary side, Fast Company thinks Google’s gender wage gap lawsuit is why we need pay transparencyElle Magazine looks at 12 women’s first salaries out of college, Fortune profiles Blendoor founder Stephanie Lampkin, The New York Times comes out swinging in an op-ed on the gig economy, Quartz figured out that programmers are the most likely people to work from home, and the Stanford School of Business wonders if referrals can actually improve diversity.

In this week’s endorsed long reads, the MIT Tech Review took a look at the fact that no one really understands exactly how AI and deep learning algorithms work, and Hired released a comprehensive report on the state of the wage gap that shows how far we still are from true wage equality.

The News

Google Tests Invite-Only Applicant Tracking Tool
“Google Hire” With Select Companies (Crunchbase): “What’s interesting about the list of partner companies is the diversity. Medisas and CoreOS are Y Combinator-backed startups, which one might assume would give these companies front-row access to Google beta programs. But YC companies are not the only ones in the beta program. DramaFever is a subsidiary of Warner Brothers, Touchlab is an NYC-based Android development studio, and SingleHop is a decade-old IT infrastructure provider based in Chicago with over 150 employees listed on Linkedin.”

Hackerearth Raises $4.5M to Bring Hacker Culture Into Corporate Companies (Techcrunch): HackerEarth, an Indian startup that grew from arranging hackathon to offering corporate innovation services, has closed a $4.5 million Series A funding round. The Bangalore-based company said the funding was led by DHI Group, which operates U.S. IT recruitment portal Dice.com, with participation from Japanese quartet Beenext, Beenos, Digital Garage, BizReach and existing investor Prime Venture Partners.”

Teamable Raises $5M to Widen Talent Pool by Tapping Into Social Networks (Venturebeat): Teamable, which provides recruiting software for businesses, today announced funding of $5 million, led by True Ventures. The startup wants to help businesses connect employees’ social networks to Teamable’s software as a service (SaaS) in order to increase referrals to open positions.”

Indeed Crowd Adds the Option to Get Paid “Per Match” in Amazon Gift Cards (ERE): “Last week, Indeed added pay-per-match to the model. Now, affiliates who submit a candidate can get rewarded if their candidate is “qualified.” An Indeed employee decides whether someone is qualified or not. Payouts tend to be in the $10 range and come in the form of an Amazon gift card instead of cash. Bonuses are paid out immediately.”

New York City Bans Employers From Asking About Past Salaries (NYTimes):  “Underlying the bill is the notion that employers “anchor” the salaries they offer to potential employees based on their current or previous salary — if an employee had faced pay discrimination at a previous job, in other words, the employer’s subsequent lower than market value offer would effectively perpetuate the discrimination.”

US Job Growth Slows to 98,000 (Marketwatch): “The U.S. created just 98,000 new jobs in March to mark the smallest gain in almost a year, a sign the labor market is not quite as strong as big hiring gains earlier in 2017 suggested. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, fell to 4.5% from 4.7% and touched a nearly 10-year low despite the slowdown in hiring.”

Insight and Commentary


12 Women Reveal Their First Salaries Out of College (Elle): “But can college graduates' wages pay off the expenses of adulthood? Twelve women from across the country get real about what they can (and can't) afford on their first post-college salary.”

This Entrepreneur is Ranking Tech Companies’ Diversity (Fortune): “HP tops the list compiled by startup Blendoor with a score of 87. That figure takes into account a leadership team that’s 29% female and 14% people of color. Its workforce overall is 33% women, 7% black, and 14% Latinx. HP is followed closely by Paypal, Intuit, Yelp, Apple, and Cisco. You can see the full list here.”

Google’s Department of Labor Fight Shows Why We Need Pay Transparency (Fast Company):Google recently touted the fact that it had closed the gender wage gap among its global employees and also achieved pay parity across races for the U.S. staffers. The search giant then shared its playbook to help other companies interested in achieving pay equity. But the Department of Labor isn't buying it.”

The Gig Economy’s False Promise (NYTimes): “In reality, there is no utopia at companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart and Handy, whose workers are often manipulated into working long hours for low wages while continually chasing the next ride or task.”

For Programmers, the ultimate officer perk is working from home (Quartz): “In 2015, an estimated 300,000 full-time employees in computer science jobs worked from home in the US. (This figure also includes related professions such as actuaries and statisticians, but the vast majority are programmers.) Although not the largest group of remote employees in absolute numbers, that’s about 8% of all programmers, which is a significantly larger share than in any other job category, and well above the average for all jobs of just under 3%.”

Can Job Referrals Improve Employee Diversity? (Stanford GSB): “A recent article by Sterling, published in ILR Review, uncovers a surprising result: Referrals can actually boost the rate at which black employees are promoted and even lift the promotion rates among black employees high enough to match the rate among their white peers who were not referred under promotions of certain types; however, the effect does not hold for women.”

2017 Women, Work and the State of the Wage Inequality (Hired): “And while one could argue that awareness of women’s issues and engagement are at an all-time high, gender equality metrics haven’t budged in recent years. Just 5% of Fortune 500 companies have a female CEO and only 20% of Congress is female. The wage gap is closing so slowly that men and women aren’t expected to reach pay equality until 2152.

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