Google is launching Kormo, its product for entry level job seekers, this week in India. LinkedIn announced a new skills assessment platform for workers; separately, the 9^th US Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a software firm to continue scraping public data from LinkedIn. Marketing staffing platform MarketerHire announced a funding round. In the area of automation, Waymo, a division of Google, reported its autonomous vehicle passenger service gave 6,266 people rides in July.

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Google plans to launch Kormo for entry level job searchers in India on Friday, The Economic Times reported. The app launched in Bangladesh last year, and it expanded in March this year to Indonesia.

“Since we launched Kormo in Bangladesh in 2018 and in Indonesia this year, we’ve connected over 50,000 job seekers to jobs from hundreds of employers who use Kormo for their hiring needs, specifically entry level jobs,” Bickey Russell, project lead, Next Billion Users, a Google program, told The Economic Times.

Kormo was incubated inside Google’s Area 120 workshop for experimental projects.

“Kormo lets anyone build a digital CV quickly, and for free,” according to Google. “The digital CV updates dynamically as job seekers find work or enroll in trainings through the Kormo app. Kormo will also display open job listings in the city — the job opportunities listed will reflect the job seeker’s growing profiles and skills.”

In the US, Google had announced last month that it planned to close its Google Hire applicant tracking system and recruiting software offering on Sept. 1, 2020.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn introduced a new skills assessment platform to allow workers to validate their skills. The company announced the platform, LinkedIn Skill Assessments, in a blog post on Tuesday.

Once people complete an assessment, they will get a badge to display on their profile in LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Jobs if they pass the assessment in the 70^th percentile or above. If they don’t pass, they can keep the results private.

Assessments will include a range of skills from coding languages like C++ to design software such as Adobe Photoshop to business tools like Microsoft Excel.

Separately, Reuters reported the 9^th US Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a company called hiQ Labs Inc. to continue scraping data from LinkedIn, Reuters reported hiQ makes software to help employers determine which employees will quit or stay. The court’s decision upheld a lower court’s injunction against LinkedIn to continue allowing hiQ access to publicly available data from member profiles.

However, in their ruling, the judges wrote that the decision on scraping does not resolve the companies’ legal dispute.

MarketerHire

MarekterHire announced a $1.075 million seed funding round today. The San Francisco-based firm matches marketing professionals with businesses. It launched last October. Most of the marketers provided by the company work on a remote basis.

The average freelancer earns $5,000 per month per part-time project and it takes MarketerHire an average of 48 hours to match a business with a professional, according to the company.

The seed funding round will  be used to ramp up hiring.

Waymo

Robots and automation are now coming under the purview of some contingent workforce programs. In an example of automation, Waymo, the autonomous vehicle division of Google, reported its autonomous vehicle passenger services transported 6,266 people on 4,678 trips between July 2 and July 31.

The numbers were reported in a filing with the California Public Utilities Commission on Sept. 3.

Rides took place in the Silicon Valley area of California

Right now, the only people who can hail rides are employees, contractors and agents of Waymo and Alphabet (Google’s parent company). However, they can include guest passengers on the rides.