Happy 7-Eleven Day! It’s your last chance to get your free Slurpee. And as you savor your 30-ounce Blueberry Lemonade Bliss, contemplate this inspirational quote from Brené Brown: “Daring leaders work to make sure people can be themselves and feel a sense of belonging.”
In today’s edition:
A list
PTO pressure
Let’s go Dutch
—Susanna Vogel, Sam Blum
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Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images
Since the beginning of the year, over 330 tech startups have laid off over 50,000 employees—that’s according to Layoffs.fyi, a website dedicated to tracking startup layoffs since the pandemic. In recent weeks, the pain has seeped into other industries, with real estate and crypto each reducing headcounts, and Wall Street predicted to follow suit.
To help impacted workers land on their feet, HR professionals and recruiters have begun circulating “layoff lists” across social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter. The lists contain the names and titles of impacted employees to help connect talent with ready-to-hire recruiters.
On the list. Layoff lists have been floating around for a few years (for example, in 2019, a former Uber employee spearheaded an over-400-person one), but took off in earnest during the 2020 Covid-19 layoffs. Roger Lee started Layoffs.fyi in May 2020. The tool tallies the number of layoffs by company and across startups; where applicable, Lee links publicly posted, crowdsourced Google sheets and direct submissions to Layoffs.fyi with affected employees’ names, roles, and contact information.
During a call with HR Brew, Abhinav Agrawal, CEO and co-founder of tech-based recruiting agency Rocket, recalled that his team huddled in the spring of 2020 to discuss how they could help.
They settled on creating the Parachute list: a free-to-use tool where HR leaders or individual employees submit affected employees’ names, titles, and contact information for recruiters’ use. Recruiters can toggle through the more than 14,000 names by title and company to find matches of interest.
While Parachute isn’t the first of such lists, it has some privacy safeguards built in that makes it stand out. To use Parachute, Agrawal said, recruiters have to verify their business emails. One reason for this is to prevent predatory uses of the list, such as sending laid-off employees targeted marketing for services rolling over credit card debt, said Agrawal. Affected employees can also remove themselves from the list by emailing the Rocket team.
Recruiter relief. Agrawal argued there’s a misconception that layoff lists are “leftover lists,” i.e., talent nobody wants. He said that layoffs are generally the result of market factors and do not reflect an individual employees’ work ethics or abilities. He believes these kinds of lists can be a “phenomenal” resource for finding “very high quality talent,” in part because recruiters can be confident they’re reaching out to people who actually want jobs. Keep reading here.—SV
Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.
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Johner Images/Getty Images
It’s July, and if workers aren’t vicariously reveling in summer freedom through their friends’ Instagram feeds, they might be toying with the idea of actually going on vacation themselves. US workers are notoriously tethered to email and other workplace communication tools during so-called vacation: In a March Qualtrics survey of 1,021 full-time US workers, 24% of respondents said they work at least three hours a day while on PTO, and employees had an average of 9.5 days unused PTO at the end of 2021.
In an effort to stop unused vacation days from languishing like a six-pack of White Claw abandoned on the beach, some organizations are trying new ways to get their employees to actually take their PTO. Here are a few examples of how some major companies are going about it this year.
Mandating consecutive vacation days. Goldman Sachs instituted a new vacation policy, allowing unlimited PTO for managing directors and partners beginning May 1, and requiring all employees take at least 15 total days by January 1, 2023, according to CNBC. The full scope goes beyond three weeks off, as five of those days must be taken consecutively, all in an effort to “further support time off to rest and recharge,” according to a memo reviewed by CNBC.
Shutting it all down for a week. Burnout can be a scourge, so why not just shut off the (figurative) lights for a week and recharge? That’s what the digital media company Medium did over the Fourth of July week, Lauren Newton, the company’s head of people, announced on LinkedIn. (It was not an entire company shutdown, per se, as a few employees stayed on, “supporting our platform and users while most of us are out,” Newton wrote.)
The plan was born after the company added four new holidays to its company calendar and decided to combine them, then “tacked them onto the July 4th holiday to give ourselves a full week off, instead,” she explained.
What about making the week off a paid benefit? Keep reading here.—SB
Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SammBlum on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Sam for his number on Signal.
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Jorg Greuel/Getty Images
Elected officials in the Netherlands are poised to give employees more leverage if they want to work remotely, which we can only assume is part of an initiative to eliminate bicycle traffic jams and generally give everyone more time to tend to their tulips. (Don’t fact check us: We’re American, and this is what we imagine it’s like to live in the Netherlands.)
What happened: Last week, the lower house of the Dutch parliament said employers had to consider workers’ requests to work remotely, if the nature of their jobs enables them to do so. Should the legislation pass the Dutch Senate and become law, employers would be required to give consideration to employees’ remote work requests, and if they deny them, they would have to give reasons for doing so.
Why? A small number of Dutch workers were working remotely since long before the pandemic; Eurostat reported that 14% of the population worked remotely in 2018.
Steven van Weyenberg, a member of the D66 party and coauthor of the bill, believes that workers are more productive at home without the pains of commuting. Plus, they can get tasks done around the house.
“Sometimes you can concentrate extra well at home and…then also open the door for the plumber,” van Weyenberg said.
Could it happen to US? Should Congress want to get its approval rating up, this one seems to have broad appeal. A recent poll from McKinsey found that when Americans have the chance to work flexibly, 87% take it.—SV
Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.
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Today’s top HR reads.
Stat: 32% of HR and recruitment professionals recently surveyed by recruitment platform iCIMS said that entry-level applicants have “too high” salary expectations. (iCIMS)
Quote: “Life is changing. And we’re working more and more at home, more and more from our computer screen, which in the future—I mean, there are several ways this could go. A lot of people think fashion might just die because we’re just at home. You can be working in your underwear and a t-shirt. Who cares? Who’s going to see you?”—fashion designer Tom Ford on how technology would impact workplace fashion, in 1999 (NPR)
Read: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg told employees during a Q&A that “having more aggressive goals” for employees might weed out “people at the company who shouldn’t be here.” (CNN)
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Twitter laid off a third of its recruiters.
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US employers face increasing wait times for sponsored green cards for immigrant workers, in some cases waiting over three years for approval from the Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security.
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TikTok launched a temporary program enabling job-seekers to apply for jobs at companies including Target and Chipotle using the hashtag #TikTokResumes on their videos.
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Unemployment claims in the US reached a six-month high last week, but the labor market remains competitive.
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Catch up on the top HR Brew stories from the recent past:
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