I've started listening to podcasts. Mostly dorky entrepreneurial ones like “How I Built This,” which I love. I’m mesmerized by how fast the relationship between employer and employee is changing. What’s a company when you’ve outsourced your talent, logistics and marketing to platforms and third party technologies.
Some of my friends thrive in this space. They love its skies the limit approach. But as a person in the talent field, I see some of the not-so-great parts. Safety nets such as medical benefits are disappearing along with the cubicles and watercoolers. These changes are here to stay. By 2027, it is estimated that over 50% of the U.S. working population will be freelancers and contractors.
WAGER will be a subject matter expert for the Women@Work Hackathon on October 11-12th with BuzzFeed and Flatiron School. The hackathon will focus on finding tech solutions for persistent workplace concerns that are only going to get murkier. In a first for WAGER, we will spend the day with coders and thinkers as a subject matter expert and help the various teams search for a tech solution to topics such as the wage gap and diversity in the workplace. We interviewed Margaret Smiley, the brainchild of this hackathon and asked how she got it started. She doesn’t believe these challenges are going away anytime soon and she is determined to help us all fix it. If you have the time and interest, sign up to participate here.