Apple’s contract with some states reveals that hiring, marketing, and management costs could fall on taxpayers.

It’s reportedly on a health tech hiring spree amid data practice controversies—but we think Big Tech’s difficulty in disrupting healthcare and waning consumer trust could hamper its healthcare impact.

Twitter and other tech giants face corporate culture rifts: Reports of employee dissatisfaction at Twitter follow similar news from other major players, all during a tightening market for knowledge workers.

Tight talent market: Georgakopoulos discussed how JPMorgan is facing a tough market for hiring tech talent in parts of the US. The executive added that a solution is to recruit in more markets—across Europe, Salt Lake City, and Buenos Aires are examples he cited.

How we got here: CVS is the largest retail pharmacy in the US, and is unique in that it has inroads in nearly all corners of healthcare—hiring doctors is one of the final pieces of the puzzle to create a fully intra-functional ecosystem of CVS-run healthcare services.

As a result, issuers are looking to capitalize on these assets: Major financial institutions—like JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Capital One—increased crypto talent hiring by 40% in the first half of 2021 compared with the same period last year, per LinkedIn data.

But Walmart Health has been hiring, too: Walmart Health has been on an exec-hiring spree for the past few months—which means it’ll likely have the muscle to make headway in its clinic expansion plans. Last month, Walmart Health hired a new senior vice president and CFO, Brian Setzer, previously at Highmark Health.

Its French expansion, first reported by Les Echos, is slated for 2022 and already includes a hiring push. The neobank made its initial BaaS entry in 2018 in its home market—and clients now include financial services companies like Raisin, MoneyBox, and CurrencyCloud.

It’s an important step forward in Netflix’s gaming push, which kicked into high gear with the hiring of former Electronic Arts executive Mike Verdu to head the company’s game development segment in July. Why it could succeed: Night School Studio meshes well with Netflix’s prior gaming experiments, as it tends to lean toward storyline-based gameplay as opposed to games that rely on technical skill.

That includes hiring former Facebook executive Konstantinos Papamiltiadis as its new vice president of platform partnerships, as well as updating its Scan tool and acquiring AR startup Vertebrae.

And it's reportedly working on hiring 40,000 new US medical employees, which could dip its profitability by $2 billion in Q3 2021, according to a recent Seeking Alpha report. Since Amazon is heavily investing in its virtual care business, it would make sense for it to deploy the Amazon Connect tech to engage its own consumers with appointment calls and reminders.

Since the pandemic, tech companies have been much more open to hiring people outside their geographic limitations. Puerto Rico, for example, is the third-largest source of Hispanic engineers in the United States. So the region needs to plug itself into the remote workforce explosion happening today.

How we got here: Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all told employees they should expect to see pay cuts for remote work, but other firms, like Reddit and Zillo, have committed to paying workers equally regardless of location, citing potential advances in hiring and staff diversity.

Putting a freeze on hiring is the top action finance executives worldwide are taking to reduce costs amid the pandemic, according to May 2020 data from Gartner.

Why it’s worth watching: These hiring wheels have been turning since before Jeff Bezos’ departure as CEO, but it will still be interesting to see the direction in which new CEO Andy Jassy takes the company later down the line. Creator-focused initiatives are unlikely to make the list of Jassy’s priorities for now, but they do factor heavily into three quickly growing parts of Amazon’s business:.

Other commonly cited steps that advertisers could take included: training and hiring people with addressable TV skills, encouraging agencies to communicate what best-in-class addressable campaigns look like, and shifting to measurements focused on business outcomes. Linear Programmatic TV. In April, we lowered our outlook for linear programmatic TV ad spending.

The neobank plans to use the fresh infusion of cash to grow its product offerings and expand its team—with a particular focus on hiring talent from the immigrant communities Majority serves, Majority CEO Magnus Larsson said, per TechCrunch.

The dilemma: Growing preferences for remote work and hiring surges during the pandemic have left Big Tech companies in a tricky position. Tech giants have already collectively spent billions in recent years on lavish new campuses to accommodate a rapidly growing workforce.

Big names in pharma have recently inked partnerships with AI drug discovery startups to boost R&D—likely due to difficulties hiring the talent needed to spearhead AI projects.