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Recruiting is becoming more challenging every day. Not only do we have to find the best talent, we’re now starting to source the best freelancer tech talent, too. More than 53 million workers in the United States now freelance, according to a Freelancers Union and Elance-oDesk survey. Given the growing number of contingent workers, HR and recruiting must be prepared to inch out the competition to secure a different type of tech workforce in the evolving “gig economy.”
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​In this webinar, you’ll gain insights on:

• How to tell if adopting a freelance mentality is right for your strategic business goals (and legal)
• How to beat out the competition and attract top freelance tech talent
• The legal risks you must prepare for when employing a freelance workforce
• And more!

Thanks to Recruiting Daily & RecruitingWebinars.com!

Originally Published 1/15/16 @ ERE - SourceCon

Life is surprising. One minute, I was a jet setting legal consultant with a vast network of friends all over the world and zero concerns about meeting new people; eighteen months later, I’m a full-time single mom – and just a couple weeks ago, I surprised myself again when I took the plunge and downloaded my first online dating app. I’m not really even interested in dating right now, but Mark Zuckerberg’s team was kind enough to notice I’ve been single for over a year and suggested I might like to try it. It wasn’t Tinder, so I resolved to at least take a look.

​This won’t be my typical legal post........

In a landmark decision on Monday, the Colorado Supreme Court decided that an employer is justified in firing an employee for prescribed, medical marijuana use. The employee, Brandon Coats is a quadriplegic who used marijuana to control leg spasms.

Every year, as millions of college graduates scramble to score jobs and start working their way out of the six figures of debt they incurred earning that newly printed diploma, millions more will take their first tentative steps into the professional workforce in what’s increasingly becoming a rite of passage for the right to open the door to the right jobs: the internship.

With summer just around the corner, many workforces are already beginning to see the seasonal swell that comes with the inevitable intern influx.

For many employers, however, the initiation of internship initiatives has a somewhat more sinister side, as some of the world’s biggest brands gamble millions of dollars on unpaid internships, a practice that represents a significant compliance issue that many organizations wantonly ignore, despite the obvious risks involved in this endemic practice.

But be warned: if your company maintains an unpaid internship program, you’re playing with fire. And this year, more than ever, you’re likely to get burned.

The crackdown on unpaid or underpaid internships has significantly escalated over the past few summers – and even organizations with the most sophisticated HR functions have found themselves caught in the non-compliance net.

When you’re a company with the size and scale of LinkedIn, you’ve basically got a big target on your back – and a long list of people out to get you. Or so it would seem from the flurry of lawsuits, most recently for violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”), 15 U.S.C. § 1681,et seq. (see original article for full copy of the FCRA).

The issue at hand this time centers on LinkedIn’s “Search for References” functionality, a feature offered to all premium account holders and, it appears, to job applicants after they have directly applied for any position posted via LinkedIn’s “job postings” product.

In this potentially precedent setting class action lawsuit, filed October 9, 2014 in the Northern District of California, alleges that LinkedIn sold their reference functionality to prospective employers by marketing its ability to “obtain reports containing “Trusted References” for all job applicants who are members of LinkedIn.”

Since LinkedIn first filed its complaint against HiringSolved back in January, the case and its developments have been highly publicized – and closely watched – throughout the HR technology and recruiting industries.

In its initial action, LinkedIn filed a lawsuit against unnamed defendants for, among other alleged violations, maliciously creating fake profiles and using Amazon Web Services as a smokescreen to hide the still anonymous defendant’s illicit pilfering of “LinkedIn data.”

It’s no secret that most recruiters have a love-hate relationship with LinkedIn. But whether they’re frustrated with price point, data privacy or overall efficacy, they now can add another reason to shake their fists at the company.  For over two years after their acquisition of Rapportive – a GMail plug in that aggregates contact information and social profiles in a slick sidebar seamlessly integrated with GMail users’ inboxes – the Mountain View based “professional network” made minimal changes to the product’s features or functionality.

But yesterday, everything changed – and LinkedIn sent a clear signal in their announcement that this incredibly effective tool was about to get a lot less useful.

Last week and early this week the world was abuzz with news of various controversies regarding LinkedIn. The hacker lawsuit and conflicting messages about the future of group messaging functionality rocked the blog rolls. When it was finally clarified that free group messaging functionality had only been removed from recruiter accounts, I heard an array of reactions. This is one move that seems to lend itself clearly to the idea that, contrary to popular belief, the company can sometimes see the forest through the trees.

Word of LinkedIn’s recent lawsuit against unknown defendants is quickly spreading across the internet – and it’s not just about finding out who is scraping the site. There seems to be a clear message embedded in the 17-page complaint, filed on Monday by the company in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Any activity on this ‘professional network’ which negatively impacts its product offering (read: revenue streams) will be pursued – and prosecuted., an unusually aggressive approach to litigation designed to prove that when it comes to misappropriating LinkedIn’s intellectual property, “you can run, but you can’t hide.”

After attending a number of Recruiting and HR conferences this fall, I have noticed a few common themes. In particular, in both Europe and the U.S. the major focus has been on 1) “Big Data”; and 2) recruiters as marketing and sales people.These ideas are widely accepted – until I start to talk to recruiters about data privacy.