How TikTok helped this Gen Zer find work

Hey there! Hannah here. 👋 This Friday, I’m super excited to be hosting a free, 30-minute webinar: Find Your Market Rate! We’ll cover:

✔️ Exactly how to learn your market rate

✔️ My top tips to maximize your earning potential

✔️ …and tons more!

Register for free here! Can’t wait to see you on Friday the 16th at 12 PM EST! 

 1   TikTok helps Gen Zer find work 🤳

She has two college degrees, speaks three languages—and couldn’t find a minimum-wage job. After going door-to-door job hunting with her résumé in hand (with no luck), Lohanny Santos reached her breaking point. “This is not what I expected,” she tearfully admitted on TikTok. 

That video went viral. And with an army of almost 100,000 new followers, she was flooded with thousands of comments offering her support, career advice, and jobs.

But it was her next video that saved her: Santos shared that a potential coffee shop mandated an unpaid 18-hour training—and her followers quickly warned against it: “Don’t work for free. They must pay you for your time and experience when you are on the clock” said one comment.

This is the power of transparency. Lohanny’s story isn’t an outlier—in fact, it looks a lot like my own. In 2021, I found out I was being underpaid as a senior data analyst by $20K - $25k thanks to publicly available information about my industry’s market rate. If it wasn’t for transparency, my employer would’ve kept underpaying me—fortunately, I quit and found a new job that offered $115K. 

Whether you share on social media or just start a conversation with peers, opening up about salary and the job search just might change your life.

 2   Lyft implements minimum pay standard for drivers 🙌

Lyft is steering the ride-share industry in the right direction. Drivers are now guaranteed to earn at least 70% of rider payments, after external fees—a new pay standard unheard of in the ride-sharing industry. 

• Zoom Out: After taxes, tolls, and commercial insurance, it’s not uncommon for drivers to earn less than 70% of what riders paid.  Lyft’s promise? If drivers earnings  ever amount to less than 70% of rider payments by the end of the week, Lyft will cover the difference. 

Lyft’s been on a transparency wave. The company also released a deep dive on drivers’ earnings, revealing that the bottom 20th percentile of Lyft drivers earn $17.46 per hour, while the top 80th percentile driver averaged $33.09. This transparency isn’t just good for Lyft drivers—it sets a new benchmark for transparency across the entire gig economy. 

 3   Sephora hits $10 billion and rewards employees with…cookies? 🫥

The 21st century version of “Let them eat cake.” Sephora sent out cookies to “reward” employees after hitting $10 billion in revenue in North America in 2023, reported Business Insider. 

Sephora employees were peeved. “They are always coaching us to meet our goals and expectations, and…everyone goes above and beyond for the company and all they give us is a stale cookie,” one anonymous employee told BI. 

Sephora’s response? “Success like this that allows us to offer highly competitive benefits and pay, performance bonuses, education, brand perks, and substantial product discounts to our employees.” (Side note: Are cookies now considered highly competitive benefits? Asking for a friend.) 

• Take Action: If you’re a Sephora employee and want to unionize, this thread covers everything you need to know. Because as one Redditer put it, “Cookies don’t pay the bills. A union contract with enforceable wage increases does.”

Big W for Canadians. Ottawa just launched EquiVision, a salary transparency website that shines a light on the pay disparities faced by women, Indigenous peoples, individuals with disabilities, and visible minorities. Canada is the first country in the world to make this information publicly available. 🙌 

With our Canadian neighbors in mind, we’re throwing it back to our video in Toronto, Canada! Here are just a few people you’ll hear from…

• A senior account executive earning $83,000 a year. 

• A staff scientist with a $105K salary to identify genetic variants. 

• A social media assistant for a menstrual cup company making $15.50 an hour. 

• Ever wonder how much people spend on a Super Bowl ticket? I flew to Vegas to get the (shocking) answers.

• Even after a raise, Tesla workers are making less than unionized Ford and GM workers.

• From software engineers to data scientists, here’s how much TikTok pays its staff. 

• Indeed’s top ten jobs and their salaries (number twos average salary is $192K). 👀

• News we love to see: Virginia is one step closer to enacting pay transparency!

Thanks for being here! Before we part ways, did you hear that Australia introduced “Right to Disconnect” legislation? This law would fine employers that penalized employees for not answering work-related messages outside of working hours.