📥Your Future of Work Digest #8

👩‍🍼 Are Momternships the New Internships?

Startup Momternships offers women paid 10-week internship programs, during which they discover how to best put their skills to work — “no qualifications or resume gap explanations required.”

Subscribers to the r/WorkingMoms subreddit talk regularly about how difficult job hunting is, and how best to handle resume gaps. 

🎛 Blending full-time employees and freelancers is here to stay

💪 Flexible, blended teams of full-time and independent employees are already the norm - 73% of tech companies have integrated teams of freelancers and employees.

🔑 Key tool amidst economic uncertainty and remote work - 71% say that bringing on freelancers or independent workers gives their business greater agility during times of economic uncertainty. Fiverr reports 80% of corporate leaders planned to increase their use of freelancers during periods of uncertainty.

🧠 Removed psychological barriers - The shift to hybrid and remote work narrowed the psychological barrier to hiring freelancers by reducing the difference between traditional employees and freelancers. 70% of the tech leaders reported that remote work increased their likelihood of utilizing freelancers.

⏳ Time required to hire full-time resources is proving a disincentive - adding motivation to add freelancers to project teams. 67% leaders agree that the traditional recruitment process needs an overhaul, noting that it’s too long and expensive. And, 65% of tech leaders say it can take 4 months or more to hire top product and engineering talent—for 28%, it’s 6 months or more.

🎆 Shift to blended team has created new opportunities for freelancers and freelance platforms - A.team is among a number of relatively new companies that is offering both individual freelancers and pre-resourced teams. Using approaches like the FAST teams method popularized by Stanford University, platforms like Comet.com, A.team, Proteams.com, Torc, Mash, and Vicoland.com curate entire teams for organizations that are long on innovation and opportunity, but short on resourcing.

📡 Using Blockchain to fix Labour Market

Hiring people based on what they say about their own skills, identity and education credentials is terribly inefficient. Self-reported career records are unreliable and non-standardized. Misrepresentation is common. Verifying applicants’ and employees’ data requires manual, weeks-long processes that add unimaginable friction and cost to the labor market.

Velocity Career Labs (just raised $6.5 million) , is a startup that promises to fix this, having built a blockchain network to fix the broken data layer underlying the global labor market.

Some key elements:

New data-sharing architecture - to replace the outdated, fragmented way talent represents their career reputation across the labor market via resumes and other self-reported online profiles. 

Own their careers and personal information - rather than relying on LinkedIn and other third-party job boards which ultimately control an individual’s data.

🧨️ In the future of work, who will do the firing? 

Workers are increasingly wondering what the future of the workplace will begin to look like — especially as technology advances and integrates itself further into the workplace. Will people get hired or fired by a bot that uses a search and performance algorithm tied to social media? 

Imagine this not-so-far-off scenario: A bot tracks your productivity level, and if you are underperforming, the bot sends you an email with a termination of contract.  

In actuality, Amazon just does that already. The algorithms tracking its delivery drivers can decide if they aren’t doing their job correctly, and then send an automated layoff email. 

Amazon is increasingly using software to manage workers in its warehouses, oversee contract drivers and independent delivery companies, as well as the performance of its office workers. Some say Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos believes machines make quicker and more accurate decisions, which reduces costs.  

It’s hard to know the extent and role that machines/bots will play in the future of how layoffs are conducted, but for now, workplace leaders should give greater consideration for how they fire workers via email or Zoom.  

📕 Other Reading

Quote: “People are assuming that if they don’t see somebody work [then] they’re not working.”—Prasanth Nair, CEO of productivity firm Double Gemini, on the rise of “productivity paranoia” (WorkLife)

Read: Corporate leaders are eliminating open jobs deemed unnecessary amid rising interest rates and a looming recession. (Bloomberg)

91% of CEOs of large US companies are bracing for a recession; many plan to lay off staff and cut ESG spending, according to a new survey.

Salesforce is revoking pandemic-era monthly well-being days for its engineering and technical employees.