Harassment is clearly an issue everywhere. Hootsworth, founded by harassment legal expert Janine Yancey, is launching today to provide a resource and tool for employees and employers to address harassment and other workplace issues.
“For a long time now I’ve seen that the current structure is not designed to get great results on either side for employees or employers,” Janine Yancey told TechCrunch.
With Hootsworth, anyone can ask questions to human resource experts and employment lawyers. Within 24 hours, you can expect to get a personalized response from a neutral third party. In order to broadly provide this information to the masses, Hootsworth will anonymize your question and then post the answer for all to see. At launch, Hootsworth has more than 1,000 searchable questions and answers people can browse.
“The design and purpose is to provide people real guidance that is actionable in real time,” Yancey said. “Often times we’re suggesting language to use or emails to write because, as domain experts, we know what you need to do to get the results you need to get.”
Hootsworth is totally free to use, in part thanks to it being under the umbrella of Emtrain, a platform that sells compliance and learning platforms to employers like Pinterest, Netflix and BuzzFeed. In 2016, Emtrain launched an unconscious bias course in partnership with Paradigm, a diversity consulting company.
“We’re excited to bring a solution and the service to the marketplace that is really needed right now,” Yancey said. “We want to change the way people get information. Right now, a lot of times people kind of close their eyes and guess or feel stifled because they don’t feel comfortable going to HR.”
