More than one-quarter of the US labor force is now entitled to see expected salary ranges when they apply to jobs, thanks to pay transparency laws that have taken effect across eight states and several jurisdictions.

It’s too early to know whether these new laws will have the intended effect of reducing pay inequities, experts told HR Brew. But it’s already changing the way HR pros decide and talk about compensation.

Goals of pay transparency. While federal law prohibits compensation discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or disability, pay gaps in the US persist.

Women earn around 80 cents for every dollar earned by men on average in the US—a gap that has remained fairly consistent over the last two decades. Additionally, white and Asian American workers earn more, on average, than their Black, Hispanic, and Native American counterparts, per BLS data.

Over the last decade or so, legislators have sought to address these disparities with laws banning employers from asking about salary history, as well as policies requiring companies to report pay data broken down by role, sex, and race/ethnicity.

Pay transparency laws are part of a second wave of legislation that specifically focuses on achieving equity, Helena Almeida, vice president-counsel at ADP, told HR Brew. Policymakers advocating for these laws—which are now in effect in California, New York City, Colorado, and Washington State—posit that if job candidates know appropriate salary ranges, they’re in a better position to negotiate, making it harder for employers to perpetuate disparities, Almeida said.

Impact on employers and HR departments. State and local pay transparency laws are having a nationwide impact, given they’re being passed “at a time where we’re also seeing…a significant uptick in workers going remote,” Almeida said.

Keep reading here.—CV

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When it comes to family planning, the majority of people (63%) say that financial hurdles are their biggest obstacle, according to an April 2023 report from fertility service provider Carrot. And as companies compete in the global race to attract talent, Amazon is expanding its employees’ access to virtual family planning and women’s healthcare professionals.

Where in the world? As of this month, Amazon employees across parts of Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa have access to Maven Clinic, a virtual women’s health clinic, according to a recent press release. These benefits were previously only available to the ecommerce giant’s employees in the US and Canada.

Through the clinic, they can access healthcare professionals, including fertility doctors, gynecologists, and mental health providers, in 35 languages. Employees can also get free support to help build their families, including guidance on family-planning options near them.

Satellite view. Family planning is a near-universal experience, and employers should expand benefits, Christian Hicks, SVP of employer growth at Maven Clinic, told HR Brew.

Keep reading here.—KP

When Tigran Sloyan was at MIT, it was an embarrassment of riches when it came to recruiters. “Every single tech company [and] non-tech-company showed up two times a year, right to our doorstep,” Sloyan told IT Brew. While he acknowledges that he has math and programming skills, he understands that having MIT on his résumé fast-tracked him to jobs at Google and Oracle.

That’s why Sloyan created CodeSignal, a tool that helps companies identify the right person with the right skills, no matter what their résumé looks like. Today, CodeSignal announced Cosmo, a new chatbot that uses AI to help companies find the right candidate for their technical jobs, partly by determining if the applicant has used generative AI to cheat on their coding tests.

Why CodeSignal? “At the high-level view, we think of ourselves as a skills platform,” said Sloyan. “Skills are going to become more and more central to everything we do. Technology has always created [the need for] new skills and displaced existing ones. We used to ride horses and then all of a sudden, cars came along, and then we didn’t need to learn how to ride horses.”

Companies like Meta, Instacart, and Zoom use CodeSignal with the intention of making the process of hiring technical employees more efficient, effective, and fair, assessing candidates’ coding skills through a structured and standardized process. But skills needed for technical jobs are constantly evolving.

Keep reading on IT Brew.—MM

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