What’s better than a hosted networking party at a recruiting conference? How about 20 pounds of Tannerite and a small arsenal of weapons, including a semi-automatic AR-15?
I’m practically giddy with appreciation for LinkedIn’s Davy and Goliath battle with startup HiringSolved. Not familiar with it? Here’s the short version: HiringSolved scraped; LinkedIn sued; HiringSolved surrendered. Now, as part of the settlement, the talent profiling aggregator has to destroy the data it collected from LI.
HiringSolved could have simply erased and deleted all the data. It is digital.
But what fun would that be when you can dump it onto 40 or so disks and bring them and a server out to the Arizona desert and shoot ’em up and blow ’em up? Which is just what HiringSolved is doing today and having a lot of fun at LI’s expense.
At least that expense is one of those intangibles. More tangible is the nearly $6 million LI had to cough up to compensate 359 hourly sales workers for their unpaid overtime.
The Department of Labor dinged the company $3,346,195 in back pay for workers in California, Illinois, Nebraska, and New York. LI also had to pay $2,509,646 in damages and agree to do training, keep better track of hours worked, and meet to remind the managers of those workers who got shorted on their OT that they can’t let that happen again.
Being as how the company vacuumed up $1 billion in sales in half a year, the $6 million is chump change. But the publicity! Now that had to hurt a company that regularly dispenses advice about all sorts of things recruiting and job related, including FLSA compliance.
CNN Money began its article about the DOL settlement this way: “Here’s a skill LinkedIn won’t be recommended for any time soon: paying its workers overtime.”
ValleyWag, Silicon Valley’s equivalent of TMZ, headlined its article, “LinkedIn Caught Withholding Overtime Wages From 359 Employees.”
