Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial insight, gathered from around the web:
Part-timers choose to stay home
Economists say much of the labor shortage may be coming from part-time workers who have checked out, said Rick Newman in Yahoo Finance. Researchers at the Chicago Federal Reserve and the University of Texas mined data from an annual Fed survey of consumers to compare "the number of hours different groups said they want to work each week, before and after COVID struck." They found "no change among full-time workers," suggesting the pandemic "didn't affect their propensity to work." But part-time workers — many of whom "wouldn't mind the additional income but aren't necessarily dependent on it" — reported the biggest change, saying on average "they wanted to work 3.2 hours less per week in the post-COVID time frame" and needed higher pay to stay in the workforce.
Software that judges your résumé
New tools help job seekers dodge the software gatekeepers of the hiring process, said Arielle Pardes in Wired. Many large companies today favor algorithms in hiring that can "filter out as many as 75 percent of applicants who don't meet the job criteria." In response, a cottage industry of companies has sprung up to help candidates essentially "hack their way to the top of the résumé ranking." For $50 a month, Jobscan "offers access to software that mimics an applicant tracking system," suggesting specific skills to add and boosting candidates' chances "by showing them what recruiters are looking at." Other tools, like ResyMatch and Résunate, help to match applicants' skills with a job description "and suggest how often they should mention specific keywords."
NFT seller pranks Sotheby's
A $30 million sale of digital assets at Sotheby's was called off last week by the consignor, who then "posted a meme on Twitter mocking the auction house," said Zachary Small in The New York Times. "The evening began with people drinking Champagne" inside a packed Sotheby's salesroom as they awaited the auctioning of 104 rare, pixelated characters known as "CryptoPunks." An anonymous collector who goes by 0x650d online was the consignor of the Sotheby's lot, which was heralded by the auction house as being "synonymous with the digital art movement." After the deal fell apart, 0x650d wrote on Twitter about "taking punks mainstream by rugging Sotheby's," slang for taking an "investor's funds and running away from the project."
