Welcome to “The Most Interesting Recruiting Stories of the Week,” a weekly post that features talent acquisition insights and information from around the web to kick off your weekend. Here’s what’s of interest this week:
“We — workers, experts, journalists, me — just can’t stop talking about work these days. And that’s not just because we spend much of our waking lives doing it,” Vox reports. “Three years into a global pandemic that upended work for many Americans, we now find ourselves at the precipice of a recession that threatens to disrupt the way we work even further. Along the way, terms like the Great Resignation and quiet quitting have catapulted the 9 to 5 into the rest of our days. They manage to be both meaningless buzzwords that elicit eye rolls and succinct ways to capture real workplace phenomena.”
“With inflation still high and the labor market still hot, the minimum salary that employees say they would take for a job — known as the reservation wage — has risen to its highest level. The new bottom line: nearly $74,000,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s November 2022 SCE Labor Market, as reported by SHRM.
“Recruitment teams may feel at loose ends during a hiring slowdown, but you can use this downtime strategically to level-up your skills and optimize your processes,” according to Harvard Business Review. “You can and should be identifying as many opportunities as possible to keep your team engaged and adding value to the business, and to ensure that your team can rebound the moment the market does.”
Joining the list of companies, many in the tech industry, that are revoking job offers is Meta. According to TechCrunch, the organization has pulled back numerous offers from college grads, reporting: “According to engineer and writer Gergely Orosz, about 20 recent grads had offers rescinded to work in Meta’s office.”
From The Atlantic: “Work is not going well lately. Exhaustion and burnout are rampant; many young people are reconsidering whether they owe all their energy to their jobs, as seen in the widespread popularity of ‘quiet quitting.’ An ongoing wave of unionization — including at Amazon and Starbucks — has led to victories, but has also been met with ferocious resistance from management.
“The ‘pink tax’ is the phenomenon of higher prices on products developed and marketed for women,” begins this Fast Company story. It also addresses the additional expenses of existing in a body assigned female at birth, including costs related to reproductive care and cultural expectations around personal maintenance. It’s time to acknowledge that the pink tax is about more than money. Women pay a massive toll — in time, emotional labor, and physical labor — to stay in the workforce, let alone rise to the C-suite.”
“Home Depot will change its policy for hourly employees to pay to the nearest minute based on time punches,” according to HR Dive. “Home Depot has faced a number of wage and hour lawsuits over the years. Recently, employees in California filed a putative class-action suit alleging they were underpaid due to the company’s quarter-hour rounding system.”
From ERE.net: “A recent Leadership IQ study asked leaders and employees, ‘If you changed your name on your resume and applied for your current job, do you think you would make it through your company’s screening process?’ Sadly, only 39% of employees felt they would definitely make it through their company’s current hiring process.”
Read the most interesting recruiting stories of past weeks here.
