Skills-based hiring just got its big break on the silver screen.

Last month, Netflix debuted Untapped: Closing America's Opportunity Gap, a documentary about six young adults vying to land internships at large employers in NYC. The film, produced by Workday and LeBron James’s and Maverick Carter’s SpringHill Company, captured a snapshot of the work of Year Up United, an NYC-based nonprofit that helps more than 285 employers, including Amazon, JPMorgan, and Bank of America, recruit the young professionals who complete its year-long professional development program.

Untapped highlighted a revelation that some companies have had in shifting to skills-based hiring: College degrees are not the only mark of top workers, and companies that continue to rely on them are missing out on a huge swath of talent.

“People are willing to work for it. But it’s shocking the degree to which people are stuck,” Byron Auguste, CEO and cofounder of Opportunity@Work, told HR Brew at a screening of the documentary hosted by Workday in September. “The wonderful thing about Year Up is it creates a setting where it can coach you and everything into what you need to do, and then actually get you there because they’ve got all these employers with them. To me, that’s the emotional part of the film.”

Keep reading here.—PM

Everyone wants to be rewarded for a job well done. But employers that don’t take an authentic approach to recognition could risk upsetting employees. Lucky for them, there are a couple easy ways to avoid a cringe-worthy show of employee appreciation, one expert told HR Brew.

What’s happening? After Amazon’s latest Prime Day event, which ran from October 8–9 and broke sales records for the company, employees at one fulfillment center were thanked with goodie bags containing a few pieces of candy, according to a viral post on X. This is not the first time Amazon has sought to show appreciation for its warehouse workers in this manner. Several posts on Reddit by users who say they work for the ecommerce giant describe previous occasions when they were given similar tokens, including stickers, hard candies, and pens, as a form of recognition. One called it, “The cringiest stuff I’ve ever seen.”

But Amazon isn’t the only company that’s come under fire for its take on employee appreciation. Earlier this year, Sephora thanked its retail employees for their role in the company reaching $10 million in revenue with a single cookie each, HR Brew reported. Walmart has also been criticized by some who believe that its employee appreciation efforts fall short.

Avoid their mistakes! Meisha-ann Martin, VP of people research at Workhuman, told HR Brew that employers have a responsibility to appropriately recognize employees, because unhappy, underappreciated employees can cost the bottom line.

Keep reading here.—KP

On Tuesday, Nov. 5, Americans cast their ballots for change, and former President Donald Trump is set to return to the highest office in the land in January. Once again, the country, business community, and HR function are bracing for a regulatory U-turn with a new focus on once-abandoned priorities.

But no matter how ambitious the president-elect’s first 100-day agenda, the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) chief of staff and head of government affairs, Emily Dickens, noted that the regulatory landscape won’t change overnight.

Nevertheless, here’s a look at some of the people policy-related changes HR professionals might prepare for in the next few months ahead of another Trump administration.

Keep reading here.—AD