📥 Your weekly Career Digest #3

Hooray! This edition now goes out to 1,000+ people - thank you to each and every one of you for helping me reach this amazing milestone! 🙏

😮 Hiring power equilibrium is changing, again?

In the last couple of years, it seems like we have been living in a rollercoaster.

In particular, the pandemic has/had given a big shake in the power dynamics between employer and employee, namely through the rise of remote work and the necessary race to digitalization during the freeze of the retail and physical interaction we had at a global level.

Now, with the help of the war, and rise in inflation - some bubbles have burst, and many top tech companies have started making hiring freezes:

I wouldn’t make the above a consolidated statistic - because the need for digitalization has definitely not gone away especially for more ‘old school’ companies, but it’s definitely a sign, and a moderately bad one for that power dynamic I was just mentioning.

Why?

Because that bargaining power employees had taken now may be partially going away.

That's because companies still wield what's called monopsony power, which means employers still have the upper hand in setting wages because of a lack of competition between companies. 

That might ring a bell for everyone who's been hearing about labor shortages for the last year and that "nobody wants to work." A lot of companies right now seem to be willing to leave roles vacant rather than raise wages.

"That's a puzzle, especially for people who think that this labor market is so tight," he said. "Why are companies willing to keep positions vacant rather than fill them?" 

🧙 Solving remote work - enter the ‘Syncronizer’

A very well written piece on The Atlantic suggests research about need for face to face interaction to foster a) collaboration between new teams b) inspiration for new ideas c) effective new worker onboarding. This hits right on the spot the need for companies to think about activities and moments vs regulating overall time in the office, giving a purpose, not a sense of ‘law enforcement’ to employees.

In order to do this though, the article suggests the introduction of a new role: the ‘Sincronizer’, who would be responsible for:

1. Help new workers by ensuring that their managers, mentors, and colleagues are with them at the office during an early onboarding period.

2. Plan in-person time for new teammates to get to know one another as actual people and not just abstracted online personalities.

3. Coordinate the formation of new groups to tackle new project ideas, the same way that modern teams in science pull together the right researchers from around the world to co-author new papers.

4. Plan frequent retreats and reunions across the company, even for workers who never have to be together, with the understanding that the best new ideas—whether in science, consulting, or media—often come from the surprising hybridization of disparate expertise.

I’m all in - with just the distinction that I think it’s not a new role. It should be the team manager’s role, and to a certain extent, of the team members too - by putting this kind of responsibility as one of the goals. But more to come in an in-depth article.

🤖 Deepfakes are now doing interviews for you

In June, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) issued a security warning to employers, citing increased complaints of scammers using deepfake technology for remote IT, software, database, and programming jobs. The PSA warned that scammers are likely trying to gain access to these roles under stolen identities in an effort to access customer data at the companies.

Good news - they are still pretty bad at doing this.

Bad news - they will only get better.