You’d think that platforms offering jobs listings couldn’t be innovated on much these days, but London-based Otta wants to prove that theory wrong. It has a platform for matching jobs at tech companies with candidates by aggregating a lot of information about the company (founder bios, employee reviews, salaries, industry) with the roles offered. Think a sort of “CrunchBase for Jobs”. It’s now raised a substantial Series A funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Existing investors include LocalGlobe, Founder Collective and a number of angels.

Angel investors backing Otta include Indeed’s Paul Forster, Alex Bouaziz of Deel, Ben Herman of Canvas.com (now Kin Ventures), Sophie Adelman of Multiverse, and Sultan Saidov and Abakar Saidov of Beamery.

The so-called “Great Resignation” — where people have decided to re-evaluate their jobs and careers in light of the pandemic — has created an opportunity for sites like Otta, which can appear to be a lot more transparent about job opportunities, and also speak to the “pickiness” of today’s candidates, many of whom want to work remotely.

Indeed, Otta says that 37% of its users say their number one priority is meaningful work (whereas only 18% prioritize compensation). That phenomenon means that high-growth businesses, especially in tech, are struggling to attract people.

With over 250,000 companies growing headcount 20%+ a year and 2021 seeing more VC money invested into technology companies than ever before, the war for talent rages on. Fast-growth businesses in particular are struggling to attract the greatest people.

Sam Franklin, co-founder and CEO said: “When we started Otta, people told us job search was soul-crushing. Recruitment felt like it was stuck in the classifieds era. We believe there’s a different way, and we call it candidate-first job search. It’s a new category that flips industry dynamics on its head. Candidates are prioritized, rather than treated like second-class citizens, and this attracts the best talent to our product.”

Remus Brett from LocalGlobe said: “We backed Sam and the team when Otta was just a vision, and since then the business has seen great traction with candidates and companies alike. With the climate emergency and social justice top of mind, Otta has a huge opportunity to connect a generation of thoughtful job seekers with mission-driven companies. Now is the decade to bring a truly candidate-first job search experience to the masses.”

Since launching in January 2020 Otta says it has gone from 1,000 applications sent per month to more than 5,000 every day, although this would of course be dwarfed by much larger jobs sites.

The startup says it will now expand its American presence with an on-the-ground Commercial team, and double the Product and Engineering team in London.

Otta says that while it competes with LinkedIn, “they’re not giving candidates what they actually want and need,” a spokesperson told me.

“We’re candidate-first, meaning we’re building for the job seekers, not the recruiters or the companies. Candidates don’t want to wade through irrelevant job recommendations or see only the job ads bidding the highest price. They don’t want to fight off endless recruiters or have to research whether the business has good diversity stats. They want all of the best companies in one place, they want to be matched with roles according to their values + ambitions, and they want all of the info they need to make a decision,” they added.

Applying for a frontline job can be a game of hurry-up-and-wait, and communication is not always the best when a company is trying to fill dozens of positions at the same time.

Enter Emi, the latest company targeting technology to this portion of the workforce with a conversational artificial intelligence recruiting tool.

The technology automates communication between global enterprises and candidates using a conversational interface. CEO Mateo Cavasotto says this reduces the time it takes to hire people, while also increasing candidate satisfaction, thus improving recruitment productivity.

The idea for the company came a couple of years ago when Cavasotto and Andres Arslanian, CTO, worked as volunteers for a Microcredits NGO in Argentina. They were working to understand how problems among the poverty-stricken population could be solved with technology.

“We were obsessed with the challenge people encountered with trying to grow professionally, how to find jobs and grow their skills,” Cavasotto told TechCrunch. “We agreed that we needed to found a company that increased frontline workers’ access to skills and career advancement.”

The pair joined Y Combinator’s winter 2019 batch and got to work on their technology, developing tools so that companies could hire better frontline workers faster while also providing candidates with a better recruitment experience. The goal, Cavasotto said, was to meet candidates where they are, which is mainly text-based.

Emi focuses on large and enterprise customers, those needing to hire thousands of workers in retail, light industrial and distribution positions.

“We know their challenges are different from others,” Cavasotto added. “Companies implement and integrate the tool into their tech stack, and we act as the layer of communication between the workers and recruiters, automating that process.”

The company started in Mexico, but is also working with customers in the United States, having racked up a strong client list that includes Walmart, Danone, 7-Eleven, Starbucks, Burger King and Cemex.

Cavasotto sees the HR tech space is crowded, with many startups going after the frontline worker space. However, he believes Emi differentiates itself by focusing on the frontline worker — getting them access to a competitive advantage, whereas other peers in the space are focused on the enterprise.

Indeed, with 80% of the global working population considered frontline workers in industries like retail, food service and healthcare, this market is big and can accommodate many different approaches.

To continue growing fast, Emi secured $11 million in Series A funding, led by Merus Capital and Khosla Ventures. This gives the company a total of $13.3 million in funding, which includes a seed round received after YC.

The company is not alone in attracting venture capital for its approach. Just this year we saw companies like AskNicely take in $32 million and SnapShift raise $49 million, while Blink, Shiftsmart, When I Work, Fountain and Seasoned also grabbed funding in the last six months.

In the past year, Emi’s customers filled more than 20,000 jobs, which led to a 20% month-over-month growth in the number of enabled hires during 2021. Meanwhile, its annual recurring revenue grew three times during the year.

Cavasotto intends to deploy the new funding into product development, customer acquisition and to double its 45-person team over the next 12 months in the areas of sales, marketing, product and engineering.

As part of the investment, David Rangel, general partner at Merus Capital and former COO of Iterable, has joined Emi’s board of directors.

“We are very excited about Emi’s unique approach to bringing together frontline workers and enterprise employers,” Rangel said in a written statement. “Their experience with the very largest employers in Latin America gives them an edge over competitors, and their traction to date demonstrates a keen sense for what works for both candidates and enterprise recruiters and HR departments.”

Recruiting a winning engineering team can be intimidating, especially for first-time and non-technical founders.

I’ve served at multiple startups and established tech companies worldwide, and have hired more than 100 engineers. Recruiting great engineers involves four main challenges:

• Discovery.
• Engagement.
• Assessment.
• Hiring.

Finding good engineers is a lengthy subject in itself, and there is plenty of information on how to structure offers, so let’s focus on how to engage and assess great candidates.

I have identified a few startup-specific tactics that you can apply immediately even if you do not have a technical background.

Engagement

You need to earn the attention of good candidates. Let’s skip the basics like getting an introduction through your network or running engaging LinkedIn and StackOverflow ads.

You are targeting the top 25% of engineers, which puts you in direct competition with the best recruiters in the industry. Because engineers are approached by recruiters all the time, they have become wary of them. This gives you an immediate advantage as a founder or startup manager.

Think of your opening message as a pitch and make it interesting for them: Talk about the magnitude of the problem you are solving and the impact they could have; tell them about the cutting edge tech you are using, and how they will have the freedom to shape the company’s future. Don’t overdo it, but don’t make it sound like they would be exchanging one cubicle for another, either.

Most people you’re reaching out to are probably not looking for a job, so do not approach them with a dry copy-and-pasted invitation to apply. Look at their profiles, which communities they belong to, their interests, skills, backgrounds, who they follow, their GitHub profiles, etc.

Personalize your pitch accordingly and tell them why they are an excellent fit for your company — and vice-versa.

Assessment

Poor hiring choices can set a project back by months — even permanently — and generate tons of technical debt. Experienced engineering managers are probably familiar with tech hiring, but non-technical founders and technical founders with no management experience should learn two ground rules first:

• Move fast: Contact candidates no more than 48 hours after interviews, promptly answer questions and finish all interviews within two weeks at most. This is one of the few advantages you have over recruiters and established companies.
• Be interesting: They are assessing you just as much as you are assessing them. Build upon your initial pitch as you get to know them better, and keep selling.

You also want to answer two fundamental questions:

As more people moved to remote work over the past few years, there was also an uptick in people choosing freelance or contract work, leaving companies to figure out how to manage that worker segment.

If you are one of those having to find work and manage payments, tax filings and invoices, there’s help from a number of startups — for example, Bill.com and Deel that are business-facing and freelancer-focused ones AfriBlocks, Malt, Worksome, Meaningful Gigs, SteadyPay and Contra — that have developed different approaches to making this easier.

The latest to receive funding to continue developing its financial infrastructure for the freelance economy is Archie, which raised $4.5 million in funding from B Capital Group, Mac Ventures, Worklife Ventures, Hof VC, Dash Fund, Day One Ventures, Behance founder Scott Belsky and other company founders from the likes of Cameo, Blank Street, Ramp, BloomTech and Eight Sleep.

Co-founders Yunas Reguero, Cassandra Aaron and Dylan Hattem started Archie last April and officially launched three months later. What they’ve developed is a collaboration hub for businesses working with freelancers to manage all that comes with it — onboarding, contracts, payments, accounting and tax filings — with the ability to pay freelancers in one click.

Archie co-founders Cassandra Aaron and Yunas Reguero. Image Credits: Archie

Aaron and Reguero, who have been friends for years, saw the trend of over half of the working population shifting to freelance, with that number likely to surpass 90 million by 2028. Despite that opportunity, they thought freelancers still lacked access to financial services and were at the mercy of companies treating them like vendors and paying them in 30 days or longer for completed work.

“We are on a mission to ‘unfuck’ the freelance economy,” she told TechCrunch. Aaron estimates that Archie is saving its customers hours of time that they can now use to focus on growth-related opportunities.

Their approach is catching on. Since last April, Archie is seeing $15 million in payment volume run-rate, up eight times since July 2021 alone. In addition, their growth is driven in large part by word of mouth — freelancers taking Archie with them to new employers as their preferred method of doing business with clients.

The new funding enables the company to boost its engineering team and technology development as it starts to amp up its efforts on the growth side, Reguero said.

Their plan going forward includes leveraging its structured knowledge about payments to underwrite products and build additional financial services for freelancers, including banking, savings, credit and income verification.

“We will continue to focus on growth, building out different layers of the platform,” Reguero added. “That includes providing ways for contracts and other forms to get signed before someone comes on, as well as investing in international payments so businesses have the ability to pay contractors in other countries. Ultimately, we want to make this as seamless as possible.”

More Americans than ever want to escape the rut of a low-paying job, but quitting to pursue a new profession is a risky proposition. Pursuit has raised $10 million in funding for a promising and potentially self-sustaining new model for training up new tech workers in which learners only pay when they land a real position.

The job market is a strange one right now: Tons of open positions, but workers are holding out, demanding fair compensation and good working conditions — and many jobs with those in tech won’t give a second look to an applicant without an appropriate degree.

Pursuit founder Jukay Hsu observed that there are job training programs out there, but not only do they often cost considerable money up front but their support ends when the classes do. And philanthropy in this area, while generous in some ways, is simply not commensurate to the size of the problem.

“Getting the skills is a necessary but not sufficient condition for getting hired,” said Hsu. “You can be talented and smart and capable but there are still structural barriers. If you don’t have a degree you won’t even get an interview.” (And the interview isn’t likely to be much fairer, he added.)

On the employer side, managers are desperate to fill positions but unwilling to take the risk on an applicant with no degree or relevant job history. But as Hsu pointed out, the truth is entry-level jobs are seldom actually skill-limited — more likely you need someone familiar with the tools and flexible enough to learn on the job.

The missing piece is in risk management on both sides of the market: job seekers don’t want to go into debt for training that might not get them a position, and employers don’t want to gamble on someone who doesn’t meet their (not necessarily relevant) qualifications.

Pursuit is building a model for job training that mitigates both these risks. On the job seeker side, learners with low or no income can get training and support that costs them nothing unless they get a job earning more than $50,000, at which point they can figure out payment. That takes the form of four years of payments of 5-15% of the income from the new job.

That’s a hefty commission, to be sure, and there’s something fundamentally distasteful about the idea of lifting someone up and then slicing a piece off their success. But the idea is that the person would be earning way more to start with at the new job and would still have more after these payments. And as the money is going back into the fund, it goes toward covering the upfront costs of the next class of learners. Other options like coding bootcamps cost thousands just to walk in the door. For someone barely able to pay rent, the ability to defer payment is hugely enabling.

Program grad Rook Soto and his family. He says, “Pursuit has legit changed my life. I went from being homeless to owning a home.” Image Credits: Pursuit

On the employer side, Pursuit works with companies to create an actually skills-based hiring process for a pre-set number of positions, but also advises and helps design onboarding and retention processes that address common causes of attrition. There are three years of post-hiring support — “a crucial aspect of our work that helps companies employ and retain talented individuals who don’t come from typical backgrounds (i.e. have college or advanced degrees, etc.),” Pursuit’s A.J. Walton noted.

If it sounds like one of those “good in theory, impractical in reality” ideas, you’re not alone. Hsu was frustrated by the need to prove the model works before anyone would fund the model: “It’s a chicken and egg thing.” But he managed to line up $750,000 to start testing it in 2016, and after observing it long term they are happy to report that it has a success on every front.

“It takes four years to see results. Going from Uber drivers to engineers, that’s a three-year cycle — if it was three months they’d already have these skills,” Hsu said. After four years, however, 86% of the cohort had a job, earning on average more than $85,000 — more than double or triple what they were making before. Ninety percent kept their jobs past the first year as well, so it’s not just like a temp placement program.

Image Credits: Pursuit

Not a bad use of $750,000, right? But the trick is that $750,000 wasn’t spent, as you might rightly expect from any job program — they got a 6.6% return on it, paying it pack in full plus earnings in 2020. Now you understand how that $10 million came their way.

The round was led by Blue Earth Capital, with participation from the Inherent Foundation, Pursuit Operating Board Chair Zac Smith, ETF@JFFLabs, Alphadyne Foundation and Ramesh Chandra, as well as donor advised funds Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable.

“This second financing round is only because we have these results — and now it’s institutional investors in the lead,” Hsu said. “It means we’ll be able to help a thousand people over the next few years, and it makes us financially self-sustaining. If we can prove it here, there are many more investors interested in this.”

That all depends on the ability of the company to scale its offerings. Beyond simply hiring more people and running curricula for more learners, they’ll have to convince more companies to take part. But if the next 1,000 Pursuit fellows follow anything like the trajectory of the last 100, it could be the start of a potentially transformative new path to upward mobility.

If “The Great Resignation” taught us anything, it is that people want to be appreciated, respected and well paid for their work.

Staff turnover in restaurants and hospitality has always been an issue, with people leaving at an average rate of 30%. That’s where Landed comes in.

The company touts itself as the “first end-to-end recruitment engine for the restaurant and hospitality industries,” by automating the process of candidate sourcing, engagement and interviewing. Its matching and conversational AI technology connects candidates to employers based on custom criteria and more than 50 data points so that restaurants and hospitality companies can hire better candidates faster.

Vivian Wang, Landed founder and CEO. Image Credits: Landed

The Bay Area-based company was founded in March 2020 by Vivian Wang, who watched her parents start out as a dishwasher and waitress at local Chinese restaurants and two decades later are software engineers.

“I learned that blue-collar workers want to have a career and move up the ladder,” she added. “Then I watched the gig economy, which is characterized by companies like Uber, Instacart and Lyft, take off largely by commoditizing labor. I felt like their approaches were a bit short-sighted. Blue-collar workers want to gain skills.”

The idea for Landed came when Wang was working for Gap Inc., advising the executive team on corporate strategy related to workforce management, where she saw firsthand the challenge that labor turnover had for the brand and its operations.

Their solution was to leverage mobile technology that would reduce turnover rates in the stores, while also providing long-term livelihood opportunities for workers.

Bringing that same mentality to Landed, Wang and her team aimed to help restaurant and hospitality general managers not be stretched so thin with constantly hiring new team members.

Here’s how it works: Workers download the free Landed Jobs app and set up a profile, where, instead of just typing out their work experience, location, availability and job goals, they can record short videos to show their personality. Landed’s AI-led matching tool then provides employers with the best candidates near them.

On the employer side, they access the Landed Employer portal and put in their hiring goals and criteria. When Landed matches them with candidates, it also assists with setting up interviews, essentially eliminating dozens of hours of manual work each week, and at the same time, yielding a 3.5-times better hiring rate, Wang said.

Landed makes its money from the hundreds of employers using its tools, including Cava, Blaze Pizza, Panera, Chick-fil-A and Taco Bell.

In addition, the company is developing financial products for its more than 150,000 worker users that in the future will include upskilling via certification and education programs.

“Seventy-eight percent of blue-collar workers live paycheck-to-paycheck, and our goal is to break that cycle and support the underserved,” Wang added.

Landed’s revenue grew 20 times in 2021, and to continue on that trajectory, build up its employee headcount and further develop that financial wellness part, the company raised $7 million in seed funding. Javelin Venture Partners and Blockchain Capital co-led the round, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and a group of individual investors that included company founders of Warby Parker, Harry’s, Allbirds’ Good Friends fund and ThinkFood Group.

Wang noted that the company was looking for partners, like Javelin, that are skilled at marketplaces, and Blockchain Capital, as Landed has plans to leverage some cryptocurrency technologies in the future.

With over 90 million blue-collar workers in the U.S., she believes this big market deserves better hiring processes, especially given the current environment.

“It’s a new day for these restaurants and for the workers supporting businesses,” Wang added. “Our goal is to deliver sourcing and hiring automation that engages with talent, eliminates manual and time-intensive processes and is there throughout the entire employee lifecycle.”

Especially over the past two years, many startups have come out with approaches to solving this problem by leveraging technology. Landed is one of the latest companies to secure funding and follows, for example:

• Seasoned took in $18.7 million in Series A capital to help restaurants better advertise job openings.
• Fountain announced an $85 million Series C round for its applicant tracking system.
• Workstream raised $48 million in Series B funding for its text-based recruitment approach.
• Bite Ninja secured some pre-seed and seed funding to continue developing its software that enables workers to pick up drive-thru shifts from home.

Egypt-born and Dubai-headquartered mobility startup SWVL is planning to lay off 32% of its workforce it said in a statement today.

The company’s LinkedIn profile shows it has over 1,330 employees. Letting go of over 30% of its workforce means that around 400 people will lose their jobs at the mobility company.

Tech companies, private and public, have faced a reckoning in the past few months with their valuations taking a beating. The effect of an economic downturn has also affected their finances leading them to cut costs; the top of the list is letting go of employees.

This downsizing from the Dubai-based startup adds to the long list of global cross-stage layoffs in what has been a rough month for tech employees. Over 15,000 tech workers have lost their jobs in the U.S. alone according to reports. Companies such as Klarna, Getir, Gorillas and Bolt (the payments company) have dismissed portions of their workforce while the likes of Snap, Twitter and Instacart have slowed down hiring entirely.

It’s been a very busy 18 months for SWVL leading up to this news. This March, the company went public via a SPAC merger with U.S. women-led blank check company Queen’s Gambit Growth Capital. It listed at $10 per share and targeted a $1.5 billion valuation but has traded between $4 and $8 for the most part. Its current valuation hovers around $500-$600 million.

The layoffs are coming just a month after SWVL acquired U.K.-based mass transit group Zeelo for $100 million according to sources. It’s one of five acquisitions SWVL has made within the past year; others include Germany’s door2door, Turkey’s Voltlines (for ~$40 million), Spain’s Shotl and Argentina’s Viapool.

SWVL said that though these acquisitions have contributed to its overall growth, it will need to make reductions on roles automated by investments in its engineering and product and support functions teams.

“The planned layoffs will impact teams responsible for functions that have been automated following investment in engineering, product and support functions,” SWVL said in a statement.

SWVL said it plans to attain profitability next year. Dismissing hundreds of employees is one way to get there. Others include developing its proprietary technology stack and growing its three models — where it makes $5 million in MRR — across existing and new markets, it said in a statement.

SWVL is present in 13 markets globally: the UAE, Egypt, Kenya, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Turkey, Japan, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan. According to a source, the majority of the layoffs will come from the company’s Dubai and Pakistan offices.

Whether SWVL will continue its expansion into new markets such as Colombia, Mexico and South Africa, and the U.S. — announced during its SPAC merger — is uncertain.

“As a result of the portfolio optimization program, Swvl’s management currently expects that the company will be cash-flow positive in 2023.”

CEO Mostafa Kandil sent out a letter to his employees addressing the layoffs. Here’s a part of it:

Become Free Cash Flow Profitable in 2023

– Swvl is implementing a portfolio optimization program to focus on its highest profitability operations, enhance efficiency and reduce central costs

– Capitalizes on the highest profitability operations TaaS and SaaS which currently have > 500 contracts in > 10 countries generating > $5m revenue per month

– B2C business is also expected to be contribution margin positive before the end of 2022

– Builds on recent acquisitions of TaaS and SaaS businesses Viapool, Volt Lines, Shotl and pending acquisition of door2door which improve profitability margins

– Benefits from a world class engineering and product team and technology stack which allows for scalability and sustainable growth

Resources

No matter how big, resources are not infinite; cash is meant to be responsibly utilized. We need to be as disciplined as ever, which is why today, May 30, 2022, we announced that our portfolio optimization program to turn cash flow positive in 2023.

As part of that program, we have considered various scenarios that will allow us to demonstrate how much we value our workforce. We believe that Swvl has reached such a level of success only because of the team, and we are also sure that Swvl will continue to get stronger.

What we did:

– Voluntary salary deductions from the top management team

– Reduction of current office spaces

– Freezing our current hiring program

– Freezing travel and accommodation expenses

– Tying expenditures to essential business requirements

People

Effective today, May 30, 2022, we are optimizing our operations in some of our markets while reducing our workforce. The reduction follows an extensive evaluation of team redundancy and how this complements our strategy. We have arranged for one-to-one communications with all of the impacted teammates. Each member of the reduced workforce will receive an invitation to have a conversation with a relevant senior leader to receive clarity on the next steps based on each market’s local laws, severance rules, and best practices.

To those who will leave, I would like to say I am sorry. And more importantly, this is not your fault. You will forever be part of Swvl, and our door will always be open to you in the future. We are incredibly lucky and grateful to have worked with such remarkable talent that many companies would be fortunate to have. Besides your work, what will stay with us is knowing that we genuinely did hire people better than us. I am sure you will continue to have a significant impact wherever you go, as you have done day in and day out at Swvl.

Easing the transition for impacted employees:

– Severance: All impacted employees to receive severance based on gross salary and complete cash payout

– Provident Fund, Gratuity & Leave encashment other legal payments

– All RSU to be considered vested

– Expense claims/OPD claims to be cleared

– All Final Settlements to be taxed as per local requirement

– Payout Transfer to be complete in the next 21 days

Medical Insurance: to be extended for all entitled employees

Stock Options: all unvested stocks for impacted employees to continue to vest as per schedule

Alumni Directory: an alumni network directory to support our impacted workforce

No interview policy for Rejoiners

Laptops to be retained by employees subject to data security requirements

Update: In an email to TechCrunch, CFO Youssef Salem said Swvl is not shutting down operations in any country whether from its existing footprint or planned expansions but rather optimizing its network and headcount in each country.

Sending in a resume is the main way a person hopes to get noticed for a job. But a startup out of Amsterdam called TestGorilla is today announcing $70 million in funding for a very different kind of approach: It has built an assessment platform that can be used to screen for a wide range of job categories, verticals and skills, and it says its approach is more effective and more equitable than when the initial screening is done via CVs.

The funding, a Series A, is being co-led by Atomico and Balderton Capital; and it’s coming about a year after TestGorilla raised $10 million in a seed round from Notion, Partech, and CapitalT. TestGorilla is not disclosing its valuation, but in two years of operations, the company has amassed 5,300 customers — including big names like H&M, Sony, PepsiCo and Oracle — that are selecting from a library of some 220 assessments, covering both hard skills such as a particular coding language or accounting program; and soft skills like communication, attention to detail and “culture add.”

“We strongly believe that you have to look at different things when considering job [and recruiting] success,” said Wouter Durville, the CEO who co-founded the company with Otto Verhage (COO). “Does this person know about coding? Okay great, but what about other motivations? We really see this as a first step. The assessment first, the CV second,” once the group is smaller. And for an even smaller group, a job interview, he added.

The gap in the market that TestGorilla is addressing has been a tough one to tackle in HR. For decades, the recruitment market has been hooked on resumes as the first point of entry for people applying for work. But it’s a game of diminishing returns: the more popular or specialized the job, the less effective resume screening becomes for the recruiter. It’s impossible (not to mention exhausting) to read between the lines, and for people to stand out, when each CV looks virtually the same as the next; or even worse, when CVs basically look the same except one might have detail of, for example, attending a more prestigious university — letting bias creep into the process.

This is something that Durville encountered directly himself: He and his wife had moved to Barcelona, Spain from Amsterdam after starting a social enterprise, a handmade rug business, in 2012. After the move, the company started to expand and they looked to hire people. The economy being what it is, Durville and his partner suddenly found themselves fielding hundreds, and then thousands, of resumes for roles in customer support, finance and related roles.

“We had no recruiting department, and we knew we were missing out on a lot of great talent,” he said. “We thought there must be a better way to do this. And that’s how the idea was born.”

The company first started with building tests of its own, and gradually improved its tooling and expanded its scope. The rug company is still operating today, although with TestGorilla taking off, the plan is to wind it down.

A number of companies have embarked on building out assessment tools for specific areas of expertise — for example, Turing has devised screening tests, but they are focused on technical/CS/engineering jobs — but what is interesting about TestGorilla is the company takes a more agnostic approach for testing some skills, complementing that with more specific skills assessments.

TestGorilla tackles that with a double strategy: It employs both technical and operational teams to build and run the business, but it also crowdsources experts who work with the startup to build tests in their particular areas of expertise. These experts in turn earn a cut each time their tests are used.

This is one large area where the funding will be going: The plan is to expand TestGorilla’s library by another third — 100 more tests — by the end of 2022; and to hire 100 more people. It will also be building more and deeper integrations with the other tools typically used by those who run hiring processes, including application tracking systems, recruitment platforms and job boards and more.

Apart from the fact that this provides a more practical way for companies to start to screen for people who might be better fits for roles, simply by automating the first stage of that process, it’s also, the company argues, a far more equitable approach that helps remove the potential for bias when hiring. It’s indeed a compelling idea that everyone — Stanford grad going against a self-made individual who didn’t go to a top-shelf school — has to take the same assessments to figure out not just skills but also possible culture fit, and that the outcome of who comes out better in that assessment might surprise you.

That, plus the ability for the company to provide more efficiency to hiring especially in distributed teams, are two facts that swung the deal for investors.

“Finding the right people is increasingly challenging for even the world’s best brands, and the pandemic has opened employer eyes to huge untapped pools of global talent,” says Atomico’s partner Luca Eisenstecken, in a statement. “TestGorilla is seeing incredible growth with its automated, data-driven approach to solving this problem. And they’re doing this while delivering a fairer hiring process based on skills rather than resumes, eliminating the biases that prejudice decision making.”

“Our portfolio companies hire more than 10,000 people a year and across the board, they have been looking for ways to remove bias while giving candidates the best hiring experience. It’s clear that traditional hiring practices have failed on both these fronts, and that this has only been exacerbated by COVID-19 and the rise of remote hiring,” added James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital. “We’ve already seen TestGorilla become wildly popular within our portfolio as a more effective and fair way to identify people with the right skills for the role, and we’re excited to support the team on their mission to end the era of CV-based candidate screening.”

Just as one company’s success shouldn’t cast a halo on its vertical’s brethren, one company’s layoffs don’t quite mean that its competitors are equally screwed. Instead, I think that changes within a particular startup can be used as benchmark questions for their larger market; in other words, we can use the micro to better understand the macro.

With that in mind, I want to talk about MasterClass’ decision to lay off 20% of its staff, around 120 people, across all teams. The workforce reduction, per CEO David Rogier on Twitter, was made “to adapt to the worsening macro environment and get to self-sustainability faster.” Put differently, the company — which sells subscriptions to celebrity-taught classes — is in search of operating discipline and needs to cut staff in order to get there.

The layoffs place a spotlight on the premise behind MasterClass. When I first covered the company in March 2020, I got stuck on its pitch of aspirational learning.

[MasterClass] also touches on the public’s innate curiosity about how famous people think and work. MasterClass tugs on that idea a bit by also offering classes that fundamentally do not make sense to be “digitized.” Think high-contact sports, like a tennis lesson from Serena Williams or a basketball lesson from Steph Curry. Or just general pontifications from RuPaul on self expression and Neil deGrasse Tyson on scientific thinking and communication.

Despite its flashy lineup of stars, MasterClass doesn’t sell access but instead sells a window into someone’s work diary. Celebrities are not interacting with students on a day-to-day basis, and sometimes, not at all.

Around a year later, I returned to this idea while trying to extract what MasterClass’ prominence meant for edtech. Fiveable founder Amanda DoAmaral said at the time that MasterClass raises the bar for content quality across all of edtech, while Toucan founder Taylor Nieman pointed out that MasterClass faces the same issues “as so many other consumer products that try to steal time out of people’s very busy days.”

So what is MasterClass? A high bar for edtech quality? Or a more educational Netflix?

Lawyers representing two former Tesla employees who were terminated in mid-June have filed an emergency motion asking a judge to prohibit the electric vehicle maker from forcing workers to sign releases in exchange for less severance than federal law provides.

The plaintiffs, who allege that the company did not provide the 60 days of advance notice required by federal law during a recent round of layoffs, filed a motion Tuesday asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to “restrict Tesla’s ability to continue seeking releases from employees in exchange for one week of severance.”

John Lynch and Daxton Hartsfield were let go mid-June from Tesla’s Gigafactory 2 in Sparks, Nevada, along with more than 500 other employees, according to the complaint. The lawsuit noted that Tesla’s failure to provide advance written notice has had a “devastating economic impact” on the terminated workers.

“Tesla has been encouraging the employees who are being laid off to sign severance agreements in exchange for a modest severance payment generally consisting of one- or two-weeks’ salary,” the motion said. But that’s “far less severance than the employees would be entitled to under the WARN Act.”

The motion seeks class action status on behalf of “employees who have no reason to know yet of their rights or that this case has been filed on their behalf.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in June that the company would lay off 10% of its workforce due to an economic downturn. Musk has since rolled that number back to 3%.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.

In an economic climate like this, layoffs are a necessary evil. But what most founders don’t realize is that you shouldn’t just optimize for efficiency — you must treat people with respect.

Layoffs are terrible, but they don’t have to destroy a company’s culture or reputation. If you handle them properly (like the one we ran at Carta in 2020), layoffs can improve your reputation and morale. You have to optimize for humanity, not just efficiency.

Here are 10 steps to running humane layoffs:

Update your financial model

What is your current burn multiple? What do you expect top-line revenue to look like? Make a conservative estimate and build in a buffer in case economic conditions worsen in the next six to nine months.

Figure out how much runway you need. The delta between where you are and what you need is the amount you’ll need to cut.

Narrow your focus

Now is not the time to be spinning multiple plates. Focus your company on the one or two things that matter most and eliminate all nonessential projects.

Cut all non-headcount expenses

Yes, about 80% of a company’s budget is concentrated in headcount. But before you start cutting employees, reduce your non-headcount operating expenditures as much as possible. What contracts can you kill? Where else do you have frivolous spending? Every dollar saved is a dollar that could be invested in your team.

Cut once

And tuck in your top performers. Another thing Better did wrong was multiple rounds of layoffs (three in five months, to be exact). One round of layoffs hurts; more than one round devastates a company’s morale.

Wayfair, the online home goods retailer, announced today it was laying off close to 900 employees as a way to reprioritize investment needs and meet the company’s current needs. This comes after the company announced a hiring freeze back in May. 

The layoffs represent close to 5% of the company’s global workforce and 10% of its corporate team, according to SEC filings, with 400 jobs being cut in Boston at the company’s HQ.

“We were seeing the tailwinds of the pandemic accelerate the adoption of e-commerce shopping, and I personally pushed hard to hire a strong team to support that growth,” said founder and CEO Niraj Shah in the company’s memo to employees. “This year, that growth has not materialized as we had anticipated. Our team is too large for the environment we are now in, and unfortunately, we need to adjust.”

It is unclear which teams were specifically affected by the layoffs. TechCrunch reached out to Wayfair but was referred to the company’s memo.  

Those laid off will receive a severance package based on geography and tenure. According to the company, U.S.-based employees will receive a minimum of 10 paid weeks in addition to other resources — outplacement services for example. 

The Boston-based company said it is expecting layoff costs to range between $30-$40 million, comprised mainly of employee severance. According to the SEC filing, the hit will be reflected in the company’s current quarter. 

“We are actively navigating Wayfair towards a level of profitability that will allow us to control our own destiny, while still investing aggressively in the future,” Shah said. “We’ve prioritized our work and set clear goals: to focus on the basics, drive cost efficiency and earn more customer and supplier loyalty. This macro environment doesn’t change our belief in the size of the opportunity ahead, and we are moving purposefully to seize that opportunity.”

For the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company was profitable and reflected so in its stock, but has since taken a hit. According to The Wall Street Journal, Wayfair’s stock fell by more than 17% Friday morning. 

In early August, Amazon’s SVP of human resources, Beth Galetti, penned a blog post urging the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to expedite the processing of employment-based green cards.

The plea was, of course, self-serving — Amazon topped the list of companies applying for green cards in 2019 with 1,500 applications, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. But it did serve to spotlight that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — the agency responsible for issuing green cards — is barreling toward a failure to adjudicate tens of thousands of applications before a September 30 deadline.

Green cards are highly sought after. Unlike temporary work visas (e.g., H-1Bs), they allow workers to freely switch jobs without losing their immigration status. In response to demand (and political pressure), Congress allotted 281,000 employment-based green cards in 2022, up from 262,000 in 2021. (The typical cap is 140,000.) But the pandemic — and restrictive laws under the Trump administration — threw an additional wrench in the largely manual, paper-driven process.

U.S. embassies and consular offices were temporarily closed, creating a long queue of appointments to collect fingerprints and photographs. Annual per-country caps didn’t help matters — according to the Cato Institute, about 875,000 approved petitions for green cards were waitlisted in 2021 because of the limits.

This year, the USCIS claims to have taken steps to expedite adjudication, telling Bloomberg Law in July that it shifted staff resources to prioritize processing green cards and adopted a “risk-based approach” to waive interview requirements. But it’s unclear whether this will be sufficient to prevent tens of thousands of green cards from going unused. As of July 31, the USCIS reported that it had adjudicated around 210,000 applications, leaving over 70,000 to be processed.

How tech giants are responding to the growing green card backlog by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Payroll is one area of business that’s been ripe for innovation and disruption for a while now. On the surface, it may not look like something that really requires any major changes. After all, it’s worked well enough so far: You work your hours and you get paid every fortnight or month. The machines kept ticking without a lot of complaints despite the current system not being entirely ideal for the large part of the population that lives paycheck to paycheck.

Earned wage access promises to be the shakeup that the payroll system has perhaps required for a while now. The premise is simple: EWA providers posit that the workforce should be paid on demand and a good portion of the workforce agrees with that.

To find out just how well the industry has embraced this payroll model and the startups championing it, we spoke to three investors, and they painted a picture of a fast-growing industry that’s still trying to find its footing.

Jennifer Ho, partner at Integra Partners, pointed out: “In 2021, over $1.13 billion was raised by startups offering EWA products. Due to changing lifestyles, rising costs of living and the residual impact of COVID-19, many small and medium-sized enterprises have grown dependent on EWA. Particularly in Asia, EWA has picked up steam this year.”

But there is a significant number of hurdles that EWA startups will have to surmount to earn the trust of employers and employees alike, Ho said. “It is important to remember that EWA companies are typically B2B2C businesses and face the same challenges that many B2B2C businesses face: the decision-maker and the consumer have different incentives and priorities.”

Despite a few different EWA models seeing varying success at the moment, Ho believes the model that places the cost on the employer is the one that will win.

“From a financial inclusion perspective, models where the employer — rather than the employee — bears the cost have the stronger social impact case. What we’ve found is that EWA startups typically service a mix of customers across both models, where the employer pays in some cases and the employee pays in others. Broadly speaking, an EWA startup’s goal is to prove its value as an employee welfare and retention tool. For accounts that start on an employee-pays model, employers will get a better understanding of how EWA improves employee productivity and retention over time. This will be a key driver for encouraging employers to pay for a fixed fee per disbursement, ultimately facilitating the transition of the account to an employer-pay model.”

Despite concerns that the EWA technology is replicable, Aris Xenofontos, partner at Seaya, is of the belief that EWA is a defensible business model because the moving parts are complex enough to deter corporations from coming up with their own solutions.

“The technology is evidently replicable. However, the pain of integrating with the various payroll systems and the lending/balance sheet side of the business, makes it hard for a larger company to do this in-house. We don’t see in-house development as a big competitor here.”

Read the full survey to learn which sectors earned wage access is most popular in, what investors look for in an EWA startup and the best way to pitch them.

Is earned wage access ushering in a new era of payroll management? by Karan Bhasin originally published on TechCrunch

It always feels good to get paid, so it’s no surprise that a payroll model like earned wage access (EWA), which lets employees withdraw their accrued wages at any time, has exploded in popularity.

The pandemic certainly played a big role in helping people understand the benefits of being able to treat their accrued salaries like a small bank account. While wage advances and payday loans have been around for much longer, they serve a very different purpose. With EWA, since you’re only accessing money you’ve already earned, there’s no risk of accumulating debt, and workers can better manage their finances.

The potential for this model is huge, but the industry is still very much in its early stages. Several countries don’t yet have an EWA provider, and in most others, providers are still taking their first steps.

Jennifer Ho, partner at Integra Partners, is confident that the EWA industry is going to keep growing after positive early interest. “In 2021, over $1.13 billion was raised by startups offering EWA products. Due to changing lifestyles, rising costs of living and the residual impact of COVID-19, many small and medium-sized enterprises have grown dependent on EWA,” she said.

That’s not to say there aren’t some issues. Most EWA providers are still experimenting to find out what works, and the business models vary widely, which is a symptom of an industry trying to find its footing. Two of the more prominent models involve either charging the employer a flat fee or charging employees per transaction.

Aris Xenofontos, partner at Seaya, believes an employer-paid model is the way to go for two reasons: social impact and long-term viability. “From a social impact perspective, would you want the party that needs the money the most, the employee, to pay for the services? And from a long-term viability perspective, offering the service for free to employees helps drive better adoption — often 2x-3x the adoption you get when employees pay per transaction,” he said.

“Taking into account that the purely EWA business model is not among the strongest in the fintech world, choosing the model that helps drive better adoption leads to more cross-selling opportunities, and eventually, better economics.”

To get a more in-depth look at the state of the EWA industry, how it should be classified and where the money is going, we spoke to a few active investors in the space:

• Jennifer Ho, partner, Integra Partners
• Aris Xenofontos, partner, Seaya Ventures
• Aditi Maliwal, partner, Upfront Ventures

EWA is already prevalent in the U.S. in industries such as retail and fast food, so how difficult will it be for startups to bring the technology to new sectors? Which sectors are the most ripe, and which ones offer the most resistance?

Jennifer: EWA works in any sector where wages are not paid instantly, and it works best when they can serve large pools of financially underserved employees. The less savings people have to finance their day-to-day ahead of wage disbursement, the more valuable EWA becomes.

In developed markets, this typically means sectors that have a large blue-collar workforce. However, in emerging markets like Southeast Asia, where financial literacy remains relatively low, and large segments of the middle class remain financially underserved, EWA can have a far broader impact.

Aris: We have been observing recently a penetration of EWA in two dimensions: vertically and horizontally.

From a vertical perspective, retail and fast food are indeed some of the first ones to come to mind, but other sectors are seeing growing penetration as well. Especially those where the headcount is blue collar dominated, such as manufacturing and transport.

From a horizontal perspective, we see EWA penetrating nearly every sector at the lower compensation/entry-level employees point. This is for sectors where the proportion of permanent full-time employees is high.

We believe the cost of living crisis that started in 2022 and will presumably last for some time is likely to promote this horizontal penetration.

Aditi: The best way to roll out EWA to new sectors is by distributing through payroll providers. One sector where EWA is viewed favorably is the nursing/medical industry.

Earned wage access is still a fairly new service, and we see multiple models, with some charging employers and others charging employees. Which earned wage access model is the strongest? Why?

Jennifer: From a financial inclusion perspective, models where the employer — rather than the employee — bears the cost have the stronger social impact case. What we’ve found is that EWA startups typically service a mix of customers across both models, where the employer pays in some cases and the employee pays in others.

3 investors explain why earned wage access startups are set to cash more checks by Karan Bhasin originally published on TechCrunch

Storyblocks is Handoff’s first pilot partner. (Left to right) job-share partner Jodie Reyes, Handoff founder LaToria Pierce, Storyblocks CEO TJ Leonard and job-share partner Redeit Admassie. Image Credits: Handoff

Many qualified workers are failed by the current model of work in the United States, where jobs are either part time or full time. Working 40 set hours a week is difficult for people like caregivers, but part-time jobs don’t have the same benefits or career-advancing potential. Handoff, one of the startups in TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield 200, wants to make a concept called job sharing, in which two people split the responsibilities and pay of a full-time position but get the same benefits, more widespread.

Founder and CEO LaToria Pierce started working on Handoff while she was taking part in Ideas42 Venture Studio. Pierce was asked to build from lived experience and challenges. She took inspiration from her mother, who was a single parent, and set out to make a solution that was inclusive of single moms. She spent a year talking to mothers in the workforce and employers.

“What I discovered is that there was this mismatch and the ‘why’ hit me — how come we aren’t seeing working mothers at certain organizations in certain roles? The 40 hour a week experience is a barrier for many parents and caregivers,” said Pierce. “They’ve got the skills, they’ve got the tenure and they’ve got the tenacity, but time can be an issue.”

Part of Handoff’s software for facilitating job shares. Image Credits: Handoff

Job sharing is already commonly used in many European countries, and Handoff’s mission is to scale it in the United States, too, by helping employers create a foundation to start offering job-sharing roles. Its minimum viable product is a job-sharing enablement tool that makes sure a job-sharing relationship is manageable and that work is split equally between the two people in it. When Handoff launched its first pilot program, “talent started showing up in droves,” said Pierce. So the startup set up a talent connection portal for them that fast-tracks employers to qualified, pre-vetted talent.

Job sharing can help diversity, equity and inclusion by getting more women, women of color and caregivers into the workforce, said Pierce. Handoff’s talent pool has a wide range of professional and educational backgrounds, including people with a high school degree and 10-plus years of experience, people who have MBAs, and people who have worked in the public or public sectors. 98% of the people who come through Handoff’s portal are caregivers and 75% are people of color.

Organizations are looking for people to fill business administration, executive and admin assistants, human resources and marketing roles. Pierce says those spaces are Handoff’s sweet spots because employers see high turnover and need to fill multiple positions but are struggling to hire qualified employees. It also recently kicked off a pilot program with group care homes, many of which already use a job-sharing system, to test Handoff’s software for employee coordination.

Handoff’s go-to-market plan includes working with employer partners (it is currently used by organizations like stock media service Storyblocks). It is now raising its pre-seed fund and targeting $500,000 to $1 million. The higher amount would give Handoff an extended runway of 18 months.

Handoff is creating a more equitable workforce through job sharing by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Finch, a platform that helps companies connect to various HR apps, services and systems, today announced that it raised $40 million in a Series B round co-led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures with participation from QED Investors, Altman Capital and PruVen Capital.

Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Zhang says the new cash will be put toward adding coverage for more payroll and benefits systems, expanding into new employment data verticals and growing Finch’s engineering, product and customer success teams. Zhang claims that the company was cash flow-positive before the funding round, with revenue increasing 12x since Finch’s Series A last June.

“This funding validates Finch’s leading position in the employment API ecosystem and fuels our focus on building deeper connectivity and broader coverage,” Zhang told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Finch’s mission is to democratize access to the infrastructure that underpins the employment sector, unlocking much-needed innovations and creating tremendous economic value for both employers and employees.”

Finch was co-founded by Jeremy Zhang and Ansel Parikh in 2020, initially to address the challenges lenders faced around processing Paycheck Protection Program applications. (Zhang previously worked at Amazon’s robotics R&D division, while Parikh was an investor at Kleiner Perkins.) The goal was to help businesses get the funding they needed without having to send payroll journal PDFs to lenders. But once Finch launched, Zhang and Parikh realized that there was much higher demand for connectivity in the HR software space beyond that limited use case.

To that end, Finch today enables companies like Vanta, Lendio, Middesk and OpenComp to gain access to more than 200 HR systems by taking what Zhang calls a “multi-factor” approach. Sort of like a “Plaid for HR,” Finch leverages APIs and protocols like SFTP to sync with existing apps and services while offering customers a unified API.

Image Credits: Finch

“Our direct competitor is the current status quo in the industry, which operates in three main models: spreadsheet uploads, SFTP servers and internal operations,” Zhang told me in a previous interview. “Applications require HR admins to upload employee information, enrollment and pay statements. Most of the industry has adopted transferring files through SFTP servers, which is more secure than sending employee data via email, but it requires setting up SFTP servers and lacks standardization across companies. As a result, many companies depend on an internal operations team to manually log in and pull employee reports or set deductions and contributions.”

By contrast, a company can use Finch’s APIs to build dashboards and experiences for onboarding employees, adjusting employee benefit contributions, tracking cost savings and spending and more. The HR system data Finch handles is encrypted both in transit and at rest, Zhang claims, and the platform layers on several levels of access management for added privacy.

Finch competes with Merge and Flexspring, both of which offer platforms that connect different HR systems to enable data sharing between them. Merge recently closed a $55 million Series B round, highlighting investors’ enthusiasm for the category. Larger, established vendors have begun eying it, too, with Plaid for example releasing a payroll API system for income verification called Plaid Income.

When asked about the competition, General Catalyst’s Alex Tran had this to say (via email): “As early backers of Stripe and Gusto, we have come to appreciate the importance of fintech infrastructure as well as the evolving nature and use cases around employment data. We’re excited to see Finch innovating at the intersection of two areas we care a lot about.”

Zhang averred that, from a growth perspective, there were “positive tailwinds” for Finch stemming from the large amounts of hiring activity in 2021 and 2022. It led to high demand and budgets for HR tools, he said; Finch has more than 1.5 million employees connected through its platform. But recently, Finch’s business has shifted toward use cases more essential to employers regardless of the macroeconomic conditions, like retirement benefits and insurance plan enrollment.

“We had a majority of our Series A funds still in the bank and this funding extends our runway for multiple years, giving us a path to breakeven before considering a next fundraise,” Zhang continued. “The world is moving towards more standardized, open and interconnected data systems. However, employment infrastructure remains complex, closed and fragmented. Finch’s mission is to democratize access to the infrastructure that underpins the employment sector, unlocking much-needed innovations and creating tremendous economic value for both employers and employees.”

The funding brings Finch’s total raised to more than $68 million. Zhang says that Finch will continue to hire across all areas of its business in 2023, aiming to grow the company’s workforce from 57 employees to north of 80.

Finch lands $40M to connect disparate HR systems with a single API by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

There have been more than 171,000 people in the tech industry laid off so far this year, according to data tracked by layoffs.fyi, but those looking for work are not in a “beggars can’t be choosers” mindset. According to new data from LinkedIn, people are gravitating to workplaces that align with their values, and their values include a range of factors like diversity and skills growth, not just how much money they’ll make.

The company today published its annual list of best places to work, where Amazon held on to the top spot, and Google owner Alphabet dropped from number two last year to number five this year. The interesting thing about the rankings, now in their eighth year, is that they provide a snapshot of how individuals’ priorities are changing.

Specifically, the rankings are based not just on practical assessments of — for example — what percentage of people were laid off, but also how companies scored on softer and cultural skills, which it said speak to how long a person is more likely to stay at a company.

So, along with factors like “company stability” (companies had to have less than 10% workforce layoffs in the past year to qualify), other details like growth and learning opportunities, equity in the workplace and strong company culture, it said, are “of growing importance for job seekers as they prioritize organizations that align with their own values.” (The full list of eight factors: ability to advance, skills growth, company stability, external opportunity, company affinity, gender diversity, educational background and employee presence in the country.)

LinkedIn’s conclusion: This more rounded view of workplaces has become more of the norm when it comes to where people gravitate to work, and that’s been the case even in a tight labor market where hundreds of thousands of people are getting laid off due to worsening economic conditions.

In keeping with that conclusion, LinkedIn used the data to kick off a new tool it’s offering jobseekers when constructing their job searches.

They now will have a filter to look for workplaces that have policies and priorities in areas like diversity and inclusion (DEI), career growth and learning, work-life balance, social impact and environmental sustainability. Via LinkedIn Learning, the company is also offering some free courses to help users learn how to seek out those job opportunities more effectively.

Image Credits: LinkedIn

LinkedIn itself and its owner Microsoft intentionally get left out of the rankings, but in addition to Amazon and Alphabet, just one other technology company made the top-10 list, Apple at number eight. Twitter, unsurprisingly, is not in the rankings at all, but nor are other biggies like Facebook owner Meta, Netflix and Samsung.

Tech-adjacent AT&T was number six, while tech management consultancy Thoughtworks was at number nine. Others in the top 10 included banks (ironic given what’s been happening in the banking sector in the past few months), and two companies in the healthcare space, UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente. We’re publishing the basic full list below, and you can see the more detailed rankings and descriptions here.

The bigger message here is that LinkedIn continues to tweak its platform to remain relevant in the employment game, whatever rules that game may take.

LinkedIn, with 900 million registered users, has been a major hub for people looking for work in the so-called knowledge economy for decades at this point. In the last few years, it has made a number of efforts to be responsive to the socioeconomic wave that’s washed over us.

The COVID-19 pandemic saw LinkedIn add in tools to help employers indicate which jobs could be carried out remotely without a need for relocation to offices that were unlikely to be open anyway.

Then, the start of the layoffs tsunami saw a lot of people adopt LinkedIn’s “open to work” badge to flag quickly and visually to those browsing their profiles that they were happy to entertain job offers — a big shift away from the more discreet cues LinkedIn has built over the year to help users flag themselves to recruiters.

The big question is whether or not factors like cultural values are a sign of our times, or if these parameters will remain permanent priorities among jobseekers, changing the bigger picture for how recruiters can capture the best talent — and indeed what “talent” will look like — in the future.

Best places to work 2023:

1. Amazon
2. Wells Fargo
3. JP Morgan Chase & Co.
4. Bank of America
5. Alphabet
6. AT&T
7. UnitedHealth Group
8. Apple
9. Thoughtworks
10.  Kaiser Permanente
11.  Boeing
12.  Verizon
13.  Comcast
14.  Citi
15.  Accenture
16.  IBM
17.  Lockheed Martin
18.  GE
19.  The Walt Disney Company
20.  Northrop Grumman
21.  UPS
22.  FedEx
23.  Dell Technologies
24.  Edwards Lifescience
25.  PwC
26.  Mastercard
27.  State Farm
28.  Lowe’s Companies
29.  Fidelity Investments
30.  Intel
31.  Oracle
32.  Deutsche Telekom
33.  Eli Lilly and Company
34.  EY
35.  Raytheon Technologies
36.  Capital One
37.  U.S. Bank
38.  Ford Motor Company
39.  PepsiCo
40.  Tetra Pak
41.  Bristol Myers Squibb
42.  Morgan Stanley
43.  Medtronic
44.  Delta Air Lines
45.  CFGI
46.  Siemens
47.  Vitesco Technologies
48.  Synchrony
49.  Atlassian
50.  Tata Consultancy Services

Amazon tops LinkedIn’s list of best places to work, jobseeker priorities shift to workplace culture by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch