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For organizations looking to hire diverse talent, there are different ways to go about appealing to that talent and eventually bringing them on as employees.

For one startup in Atlanta, Stratos focuses on a networking and hiring platform for both Black and Latinx candidates looking for new positions in technology and other fields.

Jonathan Cornelius is the founder of Stratos and a recent graduate of Georgia State University who launched the organization to help a diverse talent network, share authentic questions and advice, and allow users to connect with interest-specific areas with the goal of growing a digital community.

Having a different approach than traditional job search platforms is important according to Cornelius. “A lot of our competitors lack scale factor. But they don’t ask the question, what happens after someone gets the job?”

Stratos caters its focus on both the employer and employee aspects during the hiring process. There is an opportunity for other companies that are committed to diversifying their hiring process from a talent standpoint can access Stratos’ database.

With over 20 startups that have already worked with Stratos, a lot of these roles are focused on technology which is good news for technology recruiting firms in the Atlanta-area.

“The number one thing that we prioritize is giving Black and Latinx professionals a place to not only network and find community, but also to just really see that representation matters,” Cornelius said. 

Forbes recently posted an article on how technology companies can improve their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the tech industry.

According to a recent Wiley report, approximately 68% of business leaders state there is a lack of diversity within the tech workforce.

This included 68% of employees in the 18 to 28 age category who felt uncomfortable in a job due to ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic background as different examples.

The are many arguable benefits to working remotely from saving gas to being at home with family among other pull factors.

One organization that is out of New England had been planning for the transition to remote work before the Coronavirus crippled the world.

Interactions LLC based in Boston had a plan in place before the pandemic started and was planning on doubling their office space in conjunction with moving their headquarters which would have cost more than $5 million.

The Coronavirus throwing a wrench in many organizational plans and structures including how human resources departments would handle working in the office and implementing the transition to fully remote work for sections, departments, and entire organizations.

“Like many other companies, we faced the COVID reality of being remote,” said Mary Clermont, Interactions’ chief people officer. “The first question we asked was, how is this working, and how are people doing?”

When it comes to how much employees can save by working remotely, Global Workplace Analytics found that employees that work remotely in either a part-time or full-time capacity can end up saving between $2,000 and $7,000 annually when work-related and transportation costs are taken into consideration.

With the money that is saved for employees, time is also saved in the sense that employees working fully remotely can save between two to three weeks when it comes to extricating the time it took to commute to the office.

Interactions LLC is different from other organizations in the sense that prior to the pandemic, approximately 30 percent of its workforce was already working remotely according to Clermont.

Working remotely is what candidates look for in the job market today and value the opportunity to potentially save on different costs and be productive at the same time.

Earlier this year, Yelp’s CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppleman stated that his organization intended to “embrace a fully remote workplace” and focus on shutting down underutilized offices in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C.

For certain patients that are eligible, there is an opportunity for hospices in using technology to help retain staff amidst the uncertainty of shortages across the workforce.

Hospices have been relying on artificial intelligence, machine learning, as well as predictive analytics which are of added value to eligible patients that could be getting the necessary help as they combat their disease.

To show how challenging the environment is, labor shortages have a limited clinical capacity for hospice and health which leads to a decline in the patient census to include how long they stay. Rejection rates pertaining to referrals peaked in 2021 the spilled into 2022 according to data derived from CarePort which is a WellSky organization.

“The lack of increase in payment to keep pace with overall inflation and competitive marketplace dynamics is going to, in certain markets — if not across many markets — continue to constrain the capacity of home health providers to take on all of the referrals that are being sent their way,” WellSky’s Chief Clinical Officer Timothy Ashe said.

When it comes to hospices leveraging technology, Silverado Hospice intends on using an AI tracking system when it comes to hiring new talent in the future.

The reason being is to identify potential candidates early on in their careers as the labor market continues to be competitive according to Silverado’s vice president of hospice operations, April Wilson.

Silverado hopes this new applicant tracking system will be effective and efficient in the applicant hiring process and increase staffing.

“Recruitment and retention really come down to the ways we offer value to staff. As a company we are embracing technology across the board – not just in human resources – and the new capabilities it can bring. We feel it is important to use resources that enable automation and predictive analytics,” Wilson said.

Silverado hospice has been around for over 25 years and was founded in 1996.

When people think about Calendly, they either think of an efficient calendar or scheduling platform to help different parties meet up without the burden of copious email traffic.

Calendly has recently acquired a San Francisco-based company known for scheduling interviews known as Prelude according to an Atlanta Inno article.

Calendly, which is a cloud-based scheduling platform has helped people and organizations alike show available times for scheduling meetings that eliminate the need to send emails back and forth to find a suitable time.

The benefit to Calendly for acquiring Prelude will enhance Calendly’s customer’s ability to have an automated way to schedule job interviews with prospective candidates. The organization has more than 10 million users in 116 countries that rely on the platform according to a recent news release.

“This acquisition is a testament to how Calendly’s profitable business model affords us the ability to pursue initiatives that will meet the growing demand of our customers,” said Tope Awotona, founder and CEO of Calendly.

Awotana went on to state the importance of Calendly continuing to simplify the scheduling process with a pragmatic goal of increasing customer retention and acquiring more candidates as part of the press release.

Prelude allows recruiting teams to adequately tackle recruiting challenges by bridging the gap between simplifying the scheduling process between candidates and employers so the best decision can be made the first time.

“This acquisition presents a tremendous market opportunity with the number of interactions and experiences modern companies have with their potential hires,“ says Will Laufer, founder, and CEO of Prelude. 

Calendly was founded back in 2013 and Prelude was founded in 2017.

The inspiration behind a mucker date back to Thomas Edison and his vision of bringing hackers and entrepreneurs together on strengthening products that affected industries or brought new markets to fruition.

Mucker Lab is a top-rated accelerator that is run by Mucker Capital according to Brittain Skinner from Mucker Capital.

Mucker focuses its efforts on investing in high-growth startups outside of Silicon Valley that include offices in Los Angeles, Austin, Toronto, and Taiwan from the organizational website.

Mucker Lab prides itself on being a different kind of accelerator with a focus on not having demo days or three-month boot camps and instead taking a company-building approach for each organization.

Mucker was founded in 2011 and there were very few programs at the time around the Los Angeles area to be a foundation for tech entrepreneurs to refine their products and increase seed funding with a pragmatic goal of strengthening and growing their businesses.

The founding partners of Mucker Lab William Hsu and Erik Rannala acted early on the organization when Los Angeles was not as developed as it is today.

“We believed that L.A. lacked at the time someone who was willing to go and take the founding risk with the entrepreneurs,” Hsu said.

Mucker Lab is an equity-based accelerator program that looks to invest between $100-200k with follow-on capital available over the life of the investment.

To apply for Mucker Lab, the next set of applications is due on Tuesday, November 15th.

With labor markets in Atlanta and beyond being tough, a startup in Atlanta, Grayscale Labs Inc. may have found a breakthrough method in order to boost recruiting.

Using a more innovative and swift method, Grayscale focuses on leveraging technology to help recruiters go through candidates in high volumes that could be a good fit for a company.

Grayscale was founded back in 2018 by Ty Abernathy and Hubert Liu, who came up with devising and sending automated texts to help companies screen candidates. According to an Atlanta Business Chronicle article, over 200 customers in the organization include Amazon, Peloton, and Wayfair.

The recent funding of $7.5 million will be used towards doubling the 32-person staff in the next 18 months with a focus on hiring in sales, engineers, marketing, and customer support.

A partner at Atlanta Ventures, Jon Birdsong said that Grayscale has a massive market opportunity.

Grayscale’s vision is to simplify the recruiting process, particularly from a technological perspective so that organizations can communicate more efficiently with candidates and vice versa.

In 2021, Grayscale raised $3.3 million by Atlanta Ventures to double its team.

Why this is important and can help other organizations adopt a similar method for hiring is that one of Grayscale’s specialties is geared towards business-to-business software that could simplify the recruiting process down the road.

Abernathy wants it to be known that Grayscale is assisting both candidates and organizations alike finding the best fit for different roles.

“We make it easy to engage candidates via SMS,” Abernethy said. “The power of Grayscale is being able to automate the touchpoints of the candidate journey.”

More recently in the third quarter of this year, Georgia startups did experience a 28% decrease from venture funding in the third quarter that sparked organizations to lay off more employees.

“I think we’ve got a cold winter ahead of us from a venture funding point of view,” said David Cummings, founder of Atlanta Tech Village and CEO of Atlanta Ventures said in an Atlanta Inno article.

Many organizations have opted to allow employees to work remotely with a good portion of organizations adapting to the new normal following the pandemic.

If organizations do not allow for remote work all the time, a hybrid option is another option that gives employees the chance to telework from home two days out of the week and shows up in person to the office for example.

A survey from MSH, a global consulting firm polled 1,023 people in September 2022 about the differences between different generations about how remote work and higher pay correlated.

The pandemic affected employees and their day-to-day routines and what made people happy about their jobs MSH founder and chief executive officer, Oz Rashid said in an SHRM article.

There have been some challenges with people who transitioned into working remotely such as feelings of isolation at home and from not being around other workers in their organizations.

A shared sentiment among 90% of executives that were surveyed said that the organizational culture and connection could use improvement for their remote workers and approximately 70% of their workers feel there is a lack of socialization when working remotely according to SHRM.

One employee, Tim Hirzel who worked from home in Quincy, Mass., during the pandemic acclimated to the new normal and was excited about going back to work in an office in a recent New York Times article.

“The feeling of being in a room with three or four people and a whiteboard, it’s amazing,” he said. “You can see people’s body language; you can hash it out.”

Even before the pandemic happened, there were some organizational trends that both remote and hybrid work options were increasing. From January 2019 to December 2019, approximately 12% of workers in the United Kingdom worked from home one day in the previous week and around 5% worked from home most of the time according to the UK Parliament.

With uncertainty in the tech sector about jobs and layoffs, there is hope according to a recent report for tech companies looking to bring on new talent in Atlanta.

According to a recent Dice Tech Job Report, those looking for opportunities in the tech market may want to keep Atlanta in mind with 12,050 job postings spanning from January 2021 to June 2022.

The Dice report considered calculated 3 million tech jobs that were posted from January to June and how they compared to this time last year.

Approximately 83 percent of companies are anticipating and concerned with a possible recession in 2023 according to the 2023 State of IT Report. There is a possibility that some companies may opt to freeze hiring or implement some structural changes within organizations.

Reducing non-essential spending seems to be what most organizations are considering implementing to prepare for a recession next year.

Atlanta remains a popular pick among applicants ranking third behind New York City and Chicago. The city ranked higher than other tech powerhouses across the country such as Charlotte, North Carolina, in 10th, Tampa, Florida, 16th, Miami, 20th, and Raleigh, 23rd.

While the job availability is there, Atlanta did not rank in the top 25 portions of markets for a year-over-year job growth category. The top markets were Orlando, Florida with a growth of 111%, Miami at 104%, and Detroit at 90%. For postings in Atlanta, those grew by 17% from the Dice report in the first portion of 2022 from the previous year.

When looking at other states, Georgia was ranked seventh in overall tech job openings and grew 39% when compared to the first half of 2021. States that were at the top for openings were California, Texas, and Florida.