📥 Your weekly Career Digest #4

🧩️ Decentralizing Talent - Fractional Hiring

Since I wrote the article on ‘How companies won’t be hiring anymore’ more and more posts have come up about decentralizing talent. Here is one definition I’ve found of what is seen as a trend, enabled by the rise of remote work and of employees looking for alternative ways of employment:

Fractional Hiring - A recruiting model that breaks the traditional barriers of location, schedule and compensation to secure off-site talent that can do a job well with minimal oversight and in a specified window of time. Put simply, fractional hiring seeks out short-term, decentralized and dedicated expertise that can achieve results in a fraction of the hours it may take a full-time (and often heavily managed) generalist to produce.

One company that does this well is Braintrust (which again, is heavily mentioned in my article above) which is almost acting as a decentralized ‘agency’ model based on web3 core technologies and frameworks (tokenization, proof of work etc).

Remote work changes Geography - An analysis of LinkedIn job postings showed that by February 2020, only 6.0% of U.S. companies had open jobs offering remote work; that grew to 34.2% in February 2022. Trends indicate that the size of the digital economy labor pool could increase and spread geographically, ultimately opening the doors to digital economy work for millions of people who otherwise would not be able to be part of that economy.

🆕 Redesigning Work - New Models

Finally seeing good examples of redesigning work after understanding how needs have changed and will change:

Unilever reimagined the employee contract — the set of promises that employers make to their people. Placid Jover, at the time the vice president of human resources across Latin America, explained a dream “to increase access to in-demand skills and bring greater flexibility to our resourcing options.” To do that, the conglomerate reimagined how to enable employees to work for Unilever while also engaging in other activities such as starting a business, traveling, or caring for a family member. In this model, called U-Work, some employees receive a monthly retainer and earn assignment pay. Importantly, they also get pension support and access to health insurance.

Unilever also released an interesting ‘Future of Work’ report which is worth checking out.

Autonomy’s Four-Day Working Week - Think tank Autonomy is leading a consortium of researchers and activists in a multi-company initiative around four-day working weeks (whether literally worked on four separate days, or with a 20% reduction in hours shared across the existing five). Crucially, their model assumes that workers retain 100% of their original salaries but commit to comparable productivity levels previously associated with five-day weeks. They point out that for more and more jobs, there is no strict correlation between output and working hours.

🎲 Are Personal Advisory Boards a thing?

A good friend suggested to read this article by HBR which suggests that the best way for career advancement is not through mentors (though that is already a good idea if you don’t have any - and I wrote about how to make networking work for you a while back) but through a board of advisers.

I had never thought of it this way, but given I am a big believer in the concept of ‘treating yourself as your own startup’, it makes total sense.

The article suggests stating your goals (writing a letter to your future self, which is a nice idea) and then reaching out to people and giving back - which looks good on paper but is a bit feeble in practice (how can you always give back to these people?).

A company called Talentdrop has built a web3 protocol that plays with the idea of tokenizing people (i.e. you sell tokens for your own person, which can be used to claim services, and can be exchanged and appreciate value based on your career progression) so one way would be to use something similar. More to come on this topic.

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📚Other Newsletters I’ve been Reading

10+1 Things - a curated newsletter featuring 11 interesting things handpicked from the vast universe of information (Rishikesh reads 40+ newsletters, 50+ articles, 2 books and watch 20+ informative or documentary-style videos!)

Less Hunt - director of Engineering of Adalo (wonderful no-code app you should check out if you’re thinking to launch your business idea) just launched his newsletter to list top tech products ‘that will make hair on your arms stand up’

All-in-Write-Ups - very well researched deep-dives on economics, tech, politics; a good window to put things together on a weekly basis.