Last Week in Talent - Monday, April 24

April 24, 2017 at 6:00 AM by William Clarke

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Happy Monday, friends. This is the third edition of Last Week in Talent, our weekly roundup of headlines, data points and for the talent, recruiting technology space. But enough about me and onto the headlines.

New Zealand found out that, in an uncertain world, isolation is a pretty effective recruiting perk for tech talent (also nerds reallllly love Lord of the Rings), Facebook’s new Slack-killer chat app Workplace launched a bunch of new features and announced they will have a free version, the New York Times explained how the retail industry employment apocalypse is upon us, Recode explains the state of the H1B1 visa program in five charts, students and alums of Morehouse are tackling tech diversity, and, according to a new Pew Survey,  it turns out millennials aren’t quite the job hoppers we (as a society) said they were.

And, on the ever popular will we or won’t we create Skynet beat, Backchannel looks at how computers already have knowledge we never will (gulp) but Elon Musk wants to connect our brains to AI (which, at the very least, should make job interviews far easier). 

As always, you’ll find capsules below the fold. Have a great week and thanks for reading!

Recruiting Technology News

As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw (New York Times): “A municipal program to fly in 100 developers next month — wine them, dine them and offer them jobs — was expected to draw 2,500 applications. But the recruitment effort, called LookSee Wellington, was besieged with more than 48,000 entries, including workers at Google, Amazon, Facebook, M.I.T. and NASA. At one point so many people checked out the program that the website failed.”

Workplace by Facebook Continues to Mature (Techcrunch): “Today’s updates are about bringing that same type of integration, including file sharing, bots and compliance and governance tools, into the Workplace by Facebook experience. This kind of blending has been on the drawing board from the beginning, according to Julien Codorniou, vice president of Workplace. “Being the communication layer and discovery platform for other services has always been part of the plan,” he told TechCrunch. “Workplace wants to be the app that connects everyone,” he added.”

Is American Retail at a Historic Tipping Point (New York Times): “More workers in general merchandise stores have been laid off since October, about 89,000 Americans. That is more than all of the people employed in the United States coal industry.”

The State of the HB1 Program, in Five Charts (Recode): “Computer-related jobs were responsible for 67 percent of all H-1B approvals in 2015, the latest year for which the USCIS has characteristics data. Indeed, these tech jobs have driven the entire growth of the H-1B program.”

Black Atlanta Tech Students Are Trying to Improve DIversity in Tech, Here’s How (Atlanta Journal Constitution): “The concept for a tech meet up where people of color can network and celebrate their cultural similarities was formed by four men with AUC connections. Morehouse alumni Ras Asan and Derrius Quarles co-founded Breaux Capital as a “creative agency and social justice startup incubator” that not only utilizes financial capital, but cultural and intellectual capital, too.”

Millennials Aren’t Job Hopping Any Fast Than Generation-X Did (Pew): “In January 2016, 63.4% of employed Millennials, the generation born between 1981 and 1998, reported that they had worked for their current employer at least 13 months. In February 2000, somewhat fewer 18- to 35-year-olds (59.9%) – most of whom are today’s Gen Xers – reported similar job tenure. Looking at young workers with longer tenures, 22% of Millennial workers had been with their employer for at least five years as of 2016, similar to the share of Gen X workers (21.8%) in 2000.”

Our Machines Now Have Knowledge We Never Did (BackChannel): ”Clearly our computers have surpassed us in their power to discriminate, find patterns, and draw conclusions. That’s one reason we use them. Rather than reducing phenomena to fit a relatively simple model, we can now let our computers make models as big as they need to.”  

Elon Musk’s Neuralink Wants to turn Cloud-based AI into an Extension of our Brains (Techcrunch): “Neuralink’s tech would also be able to help humans keep pace with the rapid advances in AI, and would achieve this by basically integrating AI with human consciousness. Neuralink’s tech would enable human use of AI as just an additional faculty – like our sense of selves or other higher in-brain thought faculties.”

 bersin by deloitte webinar

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