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Uber changes driver classification following a legal defeat in the U.K., Facebook says it will crack down on rule-breaking Groups and Snap makes an e-commerce acquisition. This is your Daily Crunch for March 17, 2021.

The big story: Uber to classify UK drivers as workers

Following a Supreme Court ruling, Uber said it will classify all drivers in the United Kingdom as workers — a category between self-employed and employed that entitles those designated to a minimum wage and holiday pay.

That doesn’t mean the dispute is fully resolved, however. Uber said that it will calculate working time starting when drivers accept a trip, excluding the time after they’ve signed into the app and are waiting for a ride. A statement by the App Drivers and Couriers Union described the company’s new approach as “a day late and a dollar short, literally.”

The tech giants

In expanded crackdown, Facebook increases penalties for rule-breaking groups and their members — The changes follow what has been a steady, but slow and sometimes ineffective crackdown on Facebook Groups that produce and share harmful, polarizing or even dangerous content.

Snap acquires Fit Analytics, a fitting technology startup, to double down on fashion and e-commerce — Fit Analytics has built technology to help shoppers find the right-sized apparel and footwear from online retailers.

Apple Maps updated with COVID-19 vaccination locations in the US — To access this information through a voice command, users can ask Siri something like “where can I get a COVID vaccination?” which will direct them to Maps.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Incredibuild gets $140M to speed up games and other software development with distributed processing tech — Incredibuild is a private tech company, but it has been around since 2000, and it counts Epic, Microsoft and Nintendo as clients.

SoftBank-backed Indian insurance platform Policybazaar raises $75M — Policybazaar is among a handful of startups that is attempting to upend India’s insurance market, which is largely commanded by state and bank-backed insurers.

The Robinhood competitor landscape intensifies as Invstr raises $20M — Via social gamification, Invstr has set out to make the financial educational process fun.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Dear Sophie: What type of visa should we get to fundraise in Silicon Valley? — The latest edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

How to recruit data scientists without paying top dollar — When it comes to building a data science team, many companies fail at the first step: creating a job posting.

Olo prices IPO sharply above its target, valuing company as high as $4.6B — We’re checking in on the price investors paid for a block of Olo shares before it began trading.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

The Voter Formation Project puts an experimental spin on reaching Black and brown first-time voters — This new group is a 501(c)3 laser-focused on reaching Black and brown first-time voters using every trick in the digital toolbox.

On Friday the EU will put startup-friendly legislation to member states — will they sign up? — The EU Startup Nations Standard aims to make the European Union the most attractive place to create a startup.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

When it comes to building a data science team, many companies fail at the first step — creating a job posting. These mistakes have been amplified in the age of COVID-19.

The increasing demand for AI and data science experts, driven in part by the pandemic’s economic impact, is showing no sign of abating. Many employers are failing to identify viable job candidates, much less interviewing or hiring them.

What’s the biggest obstacle holding them back? In our experience, it is often a poorly drafted job posting. And with the pandemic completely stopping all in-person recruiting events, hiring success hinges on an effective job rec. Previously tolerable mistakes are now fatal.

At The Data Incubator, a data science training and placement firm, we’ve helped hundreds of companies successfully hire data science teams. Honestly, it pains me to see amazing companies undersell themselves in this area.

Companies inevitably gravitate toward the same generic buzzwords, promoting themselves as “cutting edge,” “creative,” “collaborative,” “data driven,” “passionate” or “insightful” (just peruse Indeed for examples of these lackluster postings). Or they delve into industry jargon, which may be lost on candidates who are not familiar with the industry.

To streamline the writing process, we recommend that clients break down their competitive advantage into three buckets: compensation, mission and tech. Only by understanding where their strength lies can they successfully market their job openings.

Compensation

Compensation is an important component of making a position competitive. Managers certainly need to fight to ensure their remuneration range is appropriate for their data science roles. However, budget constraints are difficult to overcome, especially given the ability of tech and finance to pay top dollar for these sought-after skills. How to combat this when you don’t have the same budget? Consider listing compensation in job ads.

If you’re one of (the majority of) employers who cannot afford to compete on salary, this will help job seekers understand what to expect. Neither you, nor a potential candidate, wants to spend hours interviewing just to discover that it would have never worked out because of compensation. Save yourself the time and frustration by listing remuneration upfront.

What if you are one of the few employers able to pay major-league salaries? Congratulations, but don’t throw away your hard-won budget! Companies develop reputations for compensation. Unless you are one of the select firms with a reputation for paying top dollar, you will need to signal that to top talent. Otherwise, strong candidates may assume the remuneration is low and not apply, defeating the purpose of paying a high salary in the first place.

Obviously, listing salaries is controversial and there are plenty of reasons why employers are weary of listing salary ranges. However, a recent survey by SHRM found that 70% of professionals want to hear about salary upfront and Glassdoor.com reports that salary is the No. 1 consideration for 67% of job seekers. With all these benefits, employers should seriously consider being more upfront and transparent about what they are able to pay, if only to save themselves time and frustration.

Mission

In the COVID-19 workplace, employees are finding themselves increasingly isolated. With work from home poised to stay even after the virus has dissipated, the risk of isolation will continue. Companies need to double down on articulating their mission and galvanizing employees around that. This doesn’t just start with employment but the very first step of the hiring process: the job posting. Emphasizing mission in the job posting will attract employees.

BMW plans to have 25 electrified cars in its lineup by 2025 and it’s taking a few more steps in this direction this year with the launch of the all-electric iX SUV and the i4 sedan. Today, for the first time, the German automaker shared a few more details of what we can expect from the i4, its first fully-electric sedan, in addition to sharing the first exterior shots of the new model.

At the top end, the i4 will have a power output of 390kW / 530HP. Going from zero to 100km/h will take four seconds.

BMW promises up to a 300 miles range, according to its own preliminary tests based on the EPA’s test procedures. Enough to go from L.A. to Las Vegas. That’s the same range as the iX will be able to cover on a single charge and a slight increase in horsepower compared to BMW’s new SUV. And while that range is less than what Tesla and some other competitors can offer, it’s still more than what’s possible with comparable all-electric Porsche and Audi models like the eTaycan and e-tron GT, which are in the lower 200s.

Image Credits: BMW

“With its sporty looks, best in class driving dynamics and zero local emissions, the BMW i4 is a true BMW. It makes the heart of the BMW brand now beat fully electric,” said Pieter Nota, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG responsible for Customer, Brands, Sales.

For now, we don’t have any pricing details or additional specs for the i4. It will become available later this year, so we’ll likely see more details in the summer.

“The iX is purpose-built, it’s spectacular and it’s a completely new BMW X product,” Frank Weber, BMW’s head of development, said at a press event earlier this week. “But what people are longing for is to see that we have a sport sedan that is fully electric. […] And the i4 has everything it takes to have a real sporty sedan from BMW that is fully electric.”

And indeed, unlike the somewhat quirky i3, BMW’s first all-electric car, the i4 is a standard, four-door sedan (with real passenger doors, unlike the i3) — something that buyers in the market for a sporty yet roomy electric car from BMW in the spirit of the existing 4-series will likely appreciate.

Earlier this week, BMW also announced version 8 of its iDrive operating system, which will feature a new dashboard layout and visual design, with two curved screens. It will make its debut in the i4 and iX.

Amazon is apparently pleased with how its Amazon Care pilot in Seattle has gone, since it announced this morning that it will be expanding the offering across the U.S. this summer, and opening it up to companies of all sizes, in addition to its own employees. The Amazon Care model combines on-demand and in-person care, and is meant as a solution from the search giant to address shortfalls in current offering for employer-sponsored healthcare offerings.

In a blog post announcing the expansion, Amazon touted the speed of access to care made possible for its employees and their families via the remote, chat and video-based features of Amazon Care. These are facilitated via a dedicated Amazon Care app, which provides direct, live chats via a nurse or doctor. Issues that then require in-person care is then handled via a house call, so a medical professional is actually sent to your home to take care of things like administering blood tests or doing a chest exam, and prescriptions are delivered to your door as well.

The expansion is being handled differently across both in-person and remote variants of care; remote services will be available starting this summer to both Amazon’s own employees, as well as other companies who sign on as customers, starting this summer. The in-person side will be rolling out more slowly, starting with availability in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and “other cities in the coming months” according to the company.

As of today, Amazon Care is expanding in its home state of Washington to begin serving other companies. The idea is that others will sing on to make Amazon Care part of its overall benefits package for employees. Amazon is touting the speed advantages of testing services, including results delivery, for things including COVID-19 as a major strength of the service.

The Amazon Care model has a surprisingly Amazon twist, too – when using the in-person care option, the app will provide an updating ETA for when to expect your physician or medical technician, which is eerily similar to how its primary app treats package delivery.

While the Amazon Care pilot in Washington only launched a year-and-a-half ago, the company has had its collective mind set on upending the corporate healthcare industry for some time now. It announced a partnership with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan back at the very beginning of 2018 to form a joint venture specifically to address the gaps they saw in the private corporate healthcare provider market.

That deep pocketed all-star team ended up officially disbanding at the outset of this year, after having done a whole lot of not very much in the three years in between. One of the stated reasons that Amazon and its partners gave for unpartnering was that each had made a lot of progress on its own in addressing the problems it had faced anyway. While Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan’s work in that regard might be less obvious, Amazon was clearly referring to Amazon Care.

It’s not unusual for large tech companies with lots of cash on the balance sheet and a need to attract and retain top-flight talent to spin up their own healthcare benefits for their workforces. Apple and Google both have their own on-campus wellness centers staffed by medical professionals, for instance. But Amazon’s ambitious have clearly exceeded those of its peers, and it looks intent on making a business line out of the work it did to improve its own employee care services — a strategy that isn’t too dissimilar from what happened with AWS, by the way.

Diem, a London, UK-based fintech start-up has raised a seed round of $5.5 million led by Fasanara Capital, and Angel investor Chris Adelsbach, founder of Outrun Ventures. Additional investors include Andrea Molteni (early investor in Farfetch), Ben Demiri (co-chairman at fashion tech PlatformE) and Nicholas Kirkwood (founder of the eponymous brand). 

Diem is a debit card with an app affording instant cash access, traditional banking service benefits (debit card, domestic and international bank transfers), but also allowing consumers to dispose of goods for eventual resale. The idea here is that this feeds into the so-called circular economy, making Diem attractive from an environmental point of view. Some estimates put the amount of worth of goods disposed of in the last 15 years at $6.9Tn.

Here’s how it works: You have an old time of clothing, phone, book or bag, for instance. You load the item it into the app. The app makes you an offer for what the item is worth. If you accept, cash is loaded into your account and there’s a facility to spend in the item, which is then resold. The incentive, therefore, is not to throw away the object and add to landfill, because you have now turned it into cash. Think “neo bank meets people who sell your stuff on eBay”

Geri Cupi said in a statement: “Diem’s mission is to empower consumers to value, unlock, and enjoy wealth they never knew they had. All of this while fuelling the circular economy and supporting the commitment to sustainability as our key value proposition. DIEM makes it possible for capitalism and sustainability to co-exist.”

Lead Investor and CEO at Fasanara Capital, Francesco Filia, said: “Fasanara is excited to announce our partnership with DIEM and Geri Cupi… [it’s] a new generation fintech powered by principles of circular economy and look forward to support its growth.”