Employers in the U.S. are so far behind those in much of the rest of the first world. While we here in the States argue about parental leave, elsewhere the talk is about sex breaks.
Per-Erik Muskos, a member of the Overtornea council in Sweden, proposed the city afford its employees a one-hour midweek sex break. It’s a fitness thing. Plus, when your city has under 5,000 inhabitants and it’s growing smaller every year, why, just maybe, you might spur a baby boomlet.
Now this isn’t an extra hour off; Muskos’ proposal is to use one of the already provided fitness hours for sex. “When sex is also an excellent form of exercise with documented positive effects on wellbeing, the municipality should kill two birds with one stone and encourage employees to use their fitness hour to go home and have sex with their partner,” he told the Stockholm newspaper, Aftonbladet.
OK, so sex breaks aren’t on any American agenda (even in Sweden the idea is eliciting laughs), but consider that Sweden offers 480 days of parental leave (divvied up between the parents). In the U.S., there’s no requirement, other than what the FMLA requires for new mothers.
And now we awkwardly transition to slightly less salacious news, like:
- Zocket is a new job site for to match candidates with jobs in the the life-science industry.
- Remember that new site for recruiter/leader training? Well, another one’s coming. A couple of folks you may have heard of, J.T. O’Donnell and Ed Nathanson, and Work It Daily have a new offering for training recruiters. “It’s designed to give recruiters of all levels a way to assess their skills and improve the value they provide to their employers,” Nathanson says. “It’s for organizations who can’t afford to hire recruiting consultants (like J.T. and I), but really need some coaching and support to improve their recruiter’s abilities.”
- Asurint got a minority investment from North Bridge Growth Equity. It’ll use the money to hire more people and expand its background-screening suite.
- HireVue has added Doug Leonard (vice president of enterprise sales at Cornerstone OnDemand) as chief sales officer and Diana Kucer (director of global product marketing at LinkedIn) as chief marketing officer.
- Talentegy (yep, that’s “talent” and “strategy”) is launching in late May/early June, by some Hodes-HodesiQ-SmartPost veterans: Dwaine Maltais, Shawna Berthold, and Stephanie Ralston. Self-funded with seven employees, Maltais tells us the company is “a little over halfway to our goal of 25 Beta clients (and they’re looking for more) and there will be a fully functional 30-day trial available upon launch.” The site will continuously monitor the candidate and employee experience, starting with the application/hiring part, and eventually including performance management and learning. Says Maltais: “HR teams lack the tools and visibility to accurately monitor and optimize their talent functions. So why not solve the problem by having HR just adopt the tools and processes marketing uses? Some HR teams do, but customer/prospect transactions are quite different from HR/talent transactions. There are generally more systems involved and there is far more variance in talent transactions than in consumer transactions.”
- Yes, we can spell. We can’t help that Employrr is its name, and it’s new, out of India and San Francisco.
- Meanwhile, Beekeeper raised $8 million (allowing us to find a nice image for this post, above).
- WayUp has raised another $18.5M; it says it has raised $27.5 million since its 2014 founding. The company says that 15 percent of its users are now “recent grads” (vs. people looking for an internship or first job). It also says 30,000 students are signing up every week.
- And Elevator has launched in beta, for team-based hiring.
