The hottest job in tech right now isn't an AI researcher or a prompt engineer. It's a Forward Deployed Engineer.

A FDE is an engineer who deploys directly to a customer site, embeds with their team and builds custom solutions for that specific business instead of shipping a generic product back from HQ.

Postings for the role are up roughly 800% over the past year. Palantir pioneered it, and OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Salesforce and Adobe are now all hiring for it aggressively. And on Monday, Anthropic and OpenAI both announced enterprise services ventures explicitly built around the model, valued at $1.5 billion and $10 billion respectively.

It's a quiet rejection of one-size-fits-all enterprise software. The engineer doesn't sit in HQ. They embed with the customer, learn the workflows and productize what works back into the platform over time.

And it's coming for hiring.

TA leaders are vibe coding their own tools. Recruiting teams are spinning up internal operating systems on top of Claude or ChatGPT. Buyers are asking vendors a question they didn't ask two years ago: why couldn't we just build this ourselves?

It's a fair question. For a lot of TA tech, you probably could. The basics aren't the moat anymore.

What's still hard is the embedded work. Knowing what content actually re-engages a nurse versus an SDR. Knowing which database segments are real humans versus the bot applications of 2026. Knowing how to turn a stale ATS into something that performs like a media channel.

The other thing that's still hard is having a real point of view. The best vendors I'm talking to right now aren't just shipping product. They're telling customers what's worth doing and what isn't, even when the customer wants to spend money on the wrong thing. Strategy and insight, not just execution.

That work doesn't happen from HQ. It happens alongside the customer.

The pattern shows up clearest when companies activate their own data and audiences.

I had this exact conversation with a new customer last month, a large healthcare staffing company and our first design partner for CRM reactivation. Their leadership and ours had a spirited debate during one of our first calls: they have engineering, they have data and they have a CRM transition already in motion. Why bring in a vendor at all?

We worked through it together, and the answer we landed on is the reason we're now building this product the way we are.

A vendor selling a sourcing tool with their own database can ship it and walk away. A vendor helping you reactivate your CRM, your past applicants, silver medalists, alumni, that's not a product transaction. That's a partnership. The asset belongs to the customer, and the expertise has to come to where it lives.

That's why this work is sticky. We're bringing the product, the IP, the content engine and the reactivation playbook to data the customer already owns. That earns a different kind of relationship than a tool license.

If you're a vendor in this space, the FDE model isn't optional anymore. It's the operating principle.

That's the bet we're making at CollabWORK. Our CRM reactivation product is platform-agnostic by design. Whether your data lives in HubSpot, Salesforce, your CRM, your ATS or you want us to host it on Beehiiv, we build it to fit where your team already works.

If you're rethinking how your stack should work in 2026, hit reply and tell me what you're trying to build and what's getting in the way. I'll share what we're learning as we go.

More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• LinkedIn is quietly killing video reach, and the data proves it. LinkedIn video views dropped 36% year-over-year while the platform kept telling creators to make more video. Video and employee-generated content are still a great strategy, but it’s important to diversify. The same piece flags company page reach down 60 to 66%. Another reminder you can't rely on rented platforms: own your data.

• Amazon launches Connect Talent for high-volume recruiting. AWS just moved into HCM with an agentic-first product built for high-volume hiring. Still a lot to be seen here, but it's a big move and worth tracking.

• I've spent years debunking the hidden job market, but now I think it's going to be the standard. Bonnie Dilber is a CollabWORK partner and someone whose POV I really respect. She's been a longtime skeptic of the hidden job market and is now saying it's about to be the standard. Worth reading her full take on why.

• Would you buy your current company's merch with your own paycheck? I posted on TikTok and LinkedIn about paying $35 for a Yahoo sweatshirt at my first job. I asked my network if people would still do that today after years of layoffs and quiet cuts, and the debate that followed particularly on TikTok was very interesting and divided. Employee loyalty to companies isn’t assumed anymore; it needs to be earned.

CollabWORK is hiring visibility infrastructure. We help employers get found, distributed, and re-engaged across the channels that now define how candidates actually discover jobs: AI search, professional communities and their own talent networks.

Three products, one thesis.

• Employer AI Discoverability monitors how you show up across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other LLMs, and optimizes your job descriptions and XML feeds so you can actually be surfaced by the models candidates are searching.

• Community Distribution places roles inside 500+ vetted newsletters and communities including Morning Brew and 6AM City, reaching over 14 million professionals.

• Talent Community Activation turns the dormant ATS and CRM data you've already paid for into a living pipeline.

The companies winning at hiring right now aren't the ones with the biggest job boards budget. They're the ones showing up where great candidates actually are.

Find time to learn more. You can also find us on LinkedIn and X.

Hi everyone,

A new paper out of the University of Maryland, Ohio State, and the National University of Singapore has been on my mind for the past few days

Researchers tested whether LLMs prefer resumes written by themselves. Same candidate, same experience, same qualifications, just rewritten by a different model. Across major commercial and open-source LLMs, the bias against human-written resumes ran 67% to 82%.

Then they simulated hiring pipelines across 24 occupations. Candidates whose resume was rewritten by the same model the employer used to screen were 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted. The gap was widest in business roles like sales, finance and accounting.

The candidate-side take has already gone viral: if you're not using AI to write your resume, you're losing to people who are. But the harder conversation is on the employer side.

Most recruitment and TA leaders think of AI screening as a productivity layer. What this paper shows is that the model you pick for screening is also a hidden filter, and the filter quietly favors candidates who happen to use the same tool. Candidates who write their own materials, or use a different LLM, or can't afford a paid one, get downgraded.

This is a new flavor of bias and existing audits don't catch it. NYC, Illinois and Colorado are looking for demographic disparities. Self-preference bias hides in the gap between two AI systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

The fix is simpler than you'd expect. When the researchers told the AI to ignore who wrote the resume and just judge the content, the bias dropped by 17% to 63%. When they had multiple AI models vote on the resume instead of relying on one, it dropped by more than half. These aren't expensive interventions. They're small instructions most teams haven't thought to give.

I posted over the weekend about the new trend of employees vibe-coding their own AI tools at work, especially with the popularity of Claude Code. Recruiters are bragging on LinkedIn that they are building their own operating systems, including scoring candidates without any guardrails.

Building these tools is incredibly powerful, but the conversation about compliance is missing. Who is accountable when one of these tools makes a decision that impacts someone's livelihood? Is there human oversight. Does it actually meet the laws that already exist?

Self-preference bias is the same story from a different angle.

For the last few months, I’ve been writing about how employers need to be legible to AI, showing up in ChatGPT when candidates ask who’s hiring and in Perplexity summaries of the best companies in their space. That was about human search inside LLMs, and it still matters.

But this paper makes the dual-optimization problem real. We're now writing for the candidate, the model the candidate uses to interpret us, and the agent the candidate is going to send out to apply on their behalf.

Careers pages, JDs, EVP content. All of it has to read to a human, an LLM and an agent at the same time.

The risk is collapsing into AI slop while trying to be legible. The same way candidates lose their voice when GPT-4o rewrites their resume, employers flatten their brand when every careers page starts sounding like the average of every other careers page.

The companies that figure this out will not be the ones writing best for AI. They will be the ones who stay readable to AI without losing the human signal underneath. Employers need to show real employee voices, specific stories, and a clear reason why their ideal candidates should want to work there. The things that do not compress neatly into what an LLM prefers are exactly what stand out.

If you're working through this inside your org, reply to this email. More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• Understanding Candidate Fraud: Beyond the Hype — Matt Charney with useful pushback on the fraud panic. Charney argues vendors and analysts are inflating a niche problem into a category. The Gartner "1 in 4 candidate profiles will be fake by 2028" stat gets a hard look. Worth reading even if you don't fully agree.

• The Fan-Out Effect — Long form is losing in AI search. Pages over 5,000 words get cited by ChatGPT less than pages under 500. Data shows the sweet spot is under 2,000. Important for anyone redoing their career site and rewriting job descriptions (we’ve launched a product to do this; reply if you want to see further).

• The Brands That Act Like Publishers Are Going to Win AI Search — As I’ve said before, 85% of brand mentions in AI answers come from third-party pages, not your own domain. The employers winning visibility aren't the ones with the best careers page, they're the ones generating earned mentions and original content. This is also why CRM activation matters more now than it used to. Every issue you send your pipeline is a piece of content that can get cited, forwarded, screenshotted. Reactivation isn't just a sourcing strategy. It's a publishing one.

CollabWORK is hiring visibility infrastructure. We help employers get found, distributed, and re-engaged across the channels that now define how candidates actually discover jobs: AI search, professional communities, and their own talent networks.

Three products, one thesis.

• Employer AI Discoverability monitors how you show up across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other LLMs, and optimizes your job descriptions and XML feeds so you can actually be surfaced by the models candidates are searching.

• Community Distribution places roles inside 500+ vetted newsletters and communities including Morning Brew and 6AM City, reaching over 14 million professionals.

• Talent Community Activation turns the dormant ATS and CRM data you've already paid for into a living pipeline.

The companies winning at hiring right now aren't the ones with the biggest job boards budget. They're the ones showing up where great candidates actually are.

Find time to learn more. You can also find us on LinkedIn and X.

Hi everyone,

Earlier this month, OpenAI bought a podcast.

TBPN is a daily tech livestream with around 74,000 YouTube subscribers and a cult following of founders and investors, and the Financial Times reported the deal at "low hundreds of millions." HubSpot spent the last few years doing the same thing with newsletters, picking up The Hustle and then My First Million and then Starter Story.

The thesis across both deals is basically the same: software is getting cheaper to build, attention isn't, and if you want to own a pocket of attention at scale the fastest path is to buy the audience someone else already built.

That logic is true for every industry, except for recruiting.

According to Gem's 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks report, 46% of sourced hires now come from candidates already in a company's CRM or ATS, up from 26% in 2021. In the same window, recruiters are managing 93% more applications than they were in 2021 with teams that are 14% smaller.

Companies spend enormous budgets acquiring applicants, and then ignore the pool where that capital is already deployed.

The most productive source of hires is already in your database. The most expensive source of noise is still coming through the front door. And the teams doing the work keep shrinking.

That's the cost structure finally breaking, and it's why "reactivate your CRM" continues to be a theme on LinkedIn and in community forums.

I got good pushback from an advisor this week: TA has been talking about CRM reactivation and talent communities for at least fifteen years. People have built products around it, spent billions on databases, written keynotes about it, and somehow it never sticks. Why would now be any different?

It didn’t fail because the idea was wrong. It failed because the content was too expensive to produce.

A real voice, a real cadence, content that feels like a nurse or an engineer or a physician wrote it for people like them, segmented enough to be relevant. That used to require a content team, which most TA functions don't have and will never get approved to hire.

AI changes that math. The thing that was historically the most expensive part of the system is now the cheapest.

Over the past two years, I have attended 10+ media and content conferences. The number 1 topic at all of them? How to acquire subscribers and users. They mastered the storytelling, but now need to grow their audience.

In recruiting, that audience — who you have paid for, who opted in, who took the time to submit their resumes and write cover letters — exists. These are not people you have to convince to trust you: they already have.

The playbook already exists too. Media companies have been running it for twenty years.

A voice, a cadence, content that a nurse or an engineer or a physician wants to open on a Tuesday morning whether or not they're looking, and jobs embedded inside a stream of editorial they already signed up for. That's the infrastructure piece most TA teams don't have and haven't been asked to build, and it looks like media because it is media.

Every health system can build a Nurse Ascent. Every staffing firm can own its niche audience. Most just haven’t figured that out yet.

You don’t have $100M to buy TBPN. But you don’t need to, because you already have the audience.

We're piloting AI-generated talent communities for employers and staffing agencies with large existing databases, built on top of the ATS or CRM the team already uses so there's nothing new to adopt. Real editorial cadence, real segmentation, and jobs embedded inside content people actually want to read. Our first partner goes live in May.

We’re only onboarding a small number of partners for this first cohort.

If you’re sitting on a database you know is underused and want to see what a modern reactivation program actually looks like on your data, hit reply. More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• CXR Recruiting Awards: AI Edition 2026 — If you or someone on your team is using AI to save recruiter time, reduce bias, or improve candidate experience, apply to CareerXroads practitioner-first recruiting awards. Deadline is this Friday, April 24.

• Zapier's TA team just replaced an $18,000 SaaS tool — Zapier's Chief People Officer shared how his TA team rebuilt their reference-checking workflow internally, using Zapier itself instead of renewing a third-party vendor. The interesting part isn't the cost savings: it's the shift in how TA teams now think about build versus buy. When your own team can stand up something workable in a week, the vendor math changes.

• Every company now sounds like ChatGPT and that's the biggest brand opportunity in a decade — The strongest piece I've read on what the author calls the Great Flattening, which is the observation that as more corporate communications get routed through the same few language models, every company starts sounding like the average of every other company. If your careers page, your LinkedIn copy, and your EVP are all getting smoothed by the same tools (aka Employer Blanding), the companies that still sound like themselves are the ones candidates and LLMs will actually remember

• Meet Big Slop, the AI threat that actually arrived — Jack Brewster, who covered AI misinformation at NewsGuard and the WSJ, makes the case that the real threat from generative AI wasn't political disinformation but the venture-backed industrialization of fake influencers, fake engagement, and synthetic commercial content. Timely if you're thinking about candidate fraud or fake applicant volume flooding the channels your brand depends on.

CollabWORK is hiring visibility infrastructure. We help employers get found, distributed, and re-engaged across the channels that now define how candidates actually discover jobs: AI search, professional communities, and their own talent networks.

Three products, one thesis.

• Employer AI Discoverability monitors how you show up across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other LLMs, and optimizes your job descriptions and XML feeds so you can actually be surfaced by the models candidates are searching.

• Community Distribution places roles inside 500+ vetted newsletters and communities including Morning Brew and 6AM City, reaching over 14 million professionals.

• Talent Community Activation turns the dormant ATS and CRM data you've already paid for into a living pipeline.

The companies winning at hiring right now aren't the ones with the biggest job boards budget. They're the ones showing up where great candidates actually are.

Find time to learn more. You can also find us on LinkedIn and X.

Hi everyone,

Hope everyone had a great Passover and Easter week for those who celebrate. We've been heads down here launching new customers on our products, helping employers get found, distributed and re-engaged across AI, communities and their own talent networks.

But I wanted to flag three stories I'm tracking this week that I think every TA and employer branding leader needs to pay attention to.

If you've been following the CareerXroads community calls on Indeed's product and policy changes, you already know this isn't new. Chris Hoyt and the team have been facilitating great practitioner conversations on this for months, covering everything from single-source feed migrations to disposition sync to data governance concerns as Indeed pushes toward deeper ATS integrations.

Last week, CXR hosted a call with Indeed's Maggie Hulce and John Fox with over 100 TA leaders on the line. The short version: Indeed is shifting toward AI-enabled screening and sourcing, moving into what feels more like a subscription software model than a traditional job board. Disposition sync has been separated from Indeed Apply activation for Workday, SAP, and Oracle. Over 600 extensions were offered on the April 1 deadline. And the new products are focused on quality and fit over volume.

There's a lot of nuance in the details, and if Indeed is your largest source of candidates, the full recap is worth reading. But the line that keeps sticking with me is how Chris closed: "Whatever your Indeed situation looks like, diversifying your job distribution sources remains sound strategy."

It's not anti-Indeed. It's just practical. When any single platform is changing the rules of how you access candidates, how your data flows, and what integrations are required, the smart move is to make sure it's not your only channel.

I had a conversation this week with a leader at one of the largest healthcare staffing companies in the country. We were talking about building a content-first engagement channel for their existing candidate database, and he asked something I didn't expect.

He asked whether the community they want to build should live under a different brand entirely. His reasoning was that the staffing industry is known for dialing and emailing and texting candidates with transactional job blasts, and even if the company brand is strong, the industry's reputation for volume-based outreach might undermine anything that's supposed to feel like genuine engagement.

It's a question more TA leaders should be asking: if every touchpoint a candidate has with your organization is transactional, can you credibly shift to relationship-based engagement? Or do you need to earn that trust through a different channel first?

What I keep hearing from candidates right now is that they're applying into a void. They don't feel kept in the loop. The companies that figure out how to maintain an always-on and content-first presence with their talent networks will have a structural advantage, not just because they'll fill roles faster, but because people will actually open the email.

Semafor reported that LinkedIn discussed acquiring beehiiv late last year (beehiiv is the newsletter platform this newsletter runs on). Last week, OpenAI acquired TBPN for a reported low hundreds of millions. Earlier this year, HubSpot bought Starter Story.

Tyler Denk, beehiiv's CEO, didn’t comment on the Semafor report, but he wrote about the OpenAI deal and I thought his framing nailed what's happening here. OpenAI didn't buy TBPN because they couldn't start their own show. They bought it because the hosts had already built trust that OpenAI couldn't manufacture.

The cost of content is basically zero now. What's scarce is trust and distribution, and these tech companies are concluding that narrative is the moat. That's why you're seeing acquisitions in the hundreds of millions for media properties that would have been worth a fraction of that five years ago.

For hiring the parallel is direct. The employers who own an engaged audience of candidates through newsletters, communities and content have something that can't be replicated by spending more on job boards. The biggest platforms in tech are validating that thesis with their wallets.

The platforms are changing. The practitioners closest to the problem are questioning whether their current infrastructure can support what comes next. And the biggest companies in tech are betting that owned media and audience relationships are worth real money.

I'd love to hear what you're seeing. If you're a TA or employer brand leader thinking about any of this, hit reply and tell me what you're doing at the intersection of platform changes and owned distribution and AI visibility. What's working? What are you stuck on? I read every response and I'm curious where people's heads are at right now.

As always, more next week. Cheers to a productive Q2.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• Stop Chasing Reddit and Wikipedia: What Actually Drives AI Recommendations — Search Engine Land analyzed 30 million sources across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews. The big takeaway for me: 80% of Reddit threads cited by AI have fewer than 20 upvotes and the average age of a cited post is around 900 days. That's two and a half years old! Reddit should absolutely be part of your AI visibility strategy, but this is not a quick win. It's a long game of authentic participation, not a campaign you launch in Q2 and measure in Q3.

• Have You Seen the Perplexity Ads? — I saw these ads too and saved them to dig into later. Tom Chevalier did the work for us. He clicked through a beautifully designed Perplexity ad targeting hiring use cases, bought Pro, burned 900 credits on a seeded prompt, and got a 19-page PDF whose top recommendation was to relocate and hire in LatAm. If you're evaluating AI hiring tools right now, run the workflow before buying the pitch.

• Not Every Brand Needs a Substack. Here's What They Actually Need. — Maura Brannigan at JBC on why most brands aren't built to sustain the editorial investment a newsletter requires and the ones that try produce exactly what readers ignore. The infrastructure gap she's describing is real. But what's changed is that AI content generation trained on your EVP and candidate data can now do the heavy lifting that used to require a full editorial team. The opportunity isn't to launch a Substack: it's to build a content-first talent channel using the voice and brand you already have.

Hi everyone,

This year I made a deliberate call to skip UNLEASH and Transform and head to Chicago instead this week.

Not for an HR conference. For two that had nothing to do with recruiting: ONA, the Online News Association, and AONL, the American Association of Nurse Leaders. Both happened to be in the same city the same week, so I did both.

I came back with more useful signal on the future of talent acquisition than I usually bring home from the shows I'm supposed to be at. Below are some headlines and learnings.

A central tension at ONA: legacy news organizations are authoritative. They do the reporting, they get the facts right, they have editors and lawyers and standards. And audiences, especially younger ones, increasingly don't trust them.

These consumers trust people: individual creators who have a point of view, speak like humans, and actually engage with their communities. Next Gen News 2 found young audiences don't avoid news. They avoid institutions. When they want to go deeper on a story, they leave the homepage and go find a person explaining it on YouTube or Reddit or in a newsletter.

The panel wasn't really about journalism. It was about what happens when broadcast stops working and relationship becomes the only currency that converts.

Swap "news organization" for "employer brand" and you have the exact same problem. A polished career page, a well-produced culture video, a Glassdoor response strategy. That's broadcast. It's one way. And candidates, especially the ones you're actually trying to reach, are going somewhere else to form their opinion before they ever apply.

The employers winning on trust right now look less like media companies and more like creators: a consistent voice, a point of view, real people talking about what it's actually like to work there.

At AONL, CNOs and workforce leaders were working through the hardest staffing problems in any industry: rural hospitals, five generations in one workforce and 40% of nurses expected to leave the profession in the next few years.

What struck me wasn't the crisis. It was the infrastructure they've built in response.

One hospital system in North Carolina started embedding staff inside elementary schools in 2017. Their first graduating class of high school students last year came out with CNA certifications, dual enrollment college credits and in some cases EMT licenses before they walked across the stage. Those kids are now pipeline. A health system that started from kindergarten and created a direct path to employment before a job ever opened up.

On the retention side: a CNO at a small upstate New York system described building a tiered internal float pool that grew from 60 nurses to over 120 in its first year. They stopped paying 30-40% agency markups by creating a program nurses actually wanted to join. Flexible tiers, competitive pay and the option to work across multiple facilities or stay put. The float pool now covers over 5,500 hours a month that used to go to agency spend.

The through-line in both cases isn't the tactic. It's the orientation. These teams stopped waiting for candidates to find them and built infrastructure to own the relationship long before a job opened up.

That's the same conversation I've been having with TA leaders all year, just under different vocabulary. The database you already have. The candidates who opted in and went quiet. The communication strategy that never existed after the "we'll keep your resume on file" email.

I walked both conference floors talking to recruiters, CNOs, nursing school deans, journalists, and media executives.

Nobody was talking about job boards as a growth strategy. They were talking about relationships, trust and content that earns attention rather than buying it.

Audiences you build and own instead of rent.

The tools that dominated the last decade (sponsored listings, programmatic job ads, third-party job boards, etc.) are distribution plays. They can work, but they don't compound and they don't create loyalty. Every dollar you spend stops the moment you stop spending it.

The teams building something durable are doing it the same way those healthcare systems and innovative media companies are: showing up consistently, creating something worth paying attention to and treating their pipeline like a community instead of a database.

If you want to talk through what that looks like for your org, reply to this email. We're working with employers on three things right now: getting found in AI search through our Employer AI Discoverability monitoring, getting distributed across our 500+ community and newsletter network, and helping teams activate the candidates already in their ATS or CRM through content-first talent communities. Reply and I'll walk you through which piece makes the most sense to start with.

More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• Before Candidates Apply, They Ask AI. Are You Showing Up? — If you missed the webinar I hosted with HR.com yesterday about Employer AI Discoverability, this blog posts includes the highlights. I cover how AI has become the first stop in the job research process, what employers can actually do about it, and why most career sites aren't giving AI models enough to work with.

• Zapier Just Raised the Bar on AI Fluency in Hiring — Zapier released V2 of their AI Fluency Rubric this week. V1 was open-sourced last May and hundreds of companies used it to screen candidates and develop teams. V2 raises the floor: candidates now need to show they're meaningfully improving their work with AI, not just using it. The four dimensions they assess across every hire are mindset, strategy, building, and accountability. I believe this will be rolled out to hundreds of companies this year.

• IKEA's $1.4 Billion Reskilling Playbook — IKEA’s AI chatbot Billie took on 47% of customer service interactions. Instead of cutting jobs, IKEA retrained 8,500 employees and unlocked $1.4 billion in new revenue. In light of the Oracle layoffs this week, the question shouldn’t be what AI replaces. It's what your people can do with the right reskilling and alignment to business needs.

Last week I got to catch up with Bryan Chaney about the newly launched People Brand Collective. He introduced a new phrase I hadn’t heard before: Employer Blanding.

Most companies don’t build a distinctive or bold employer brand. They use generic language on their corporate career pages like “we're collaborative," or "we invest in our people,” or the classic "we move fast and break things."

You've read it a thousand times. So have candidates, and now so has AI.

The same instinct that produces bland employer brand content is the same instinct that makes you invisible in AI search.

LLMs don't synthesize your mission statement. They synthesize what the internet actually says about you from third-party sources, community conversations, earned media, and yes, Reddit threads and LinkedIn articles from years ago that happen to be specific and credible. When a candidate asks "what's it like to work at [company]," the answer they get is built from whatever the open web has decided to say about you.

If you've spent years producing content that sounds like everyone else, that's exactly what AI has to work with. LLMs have nothing distinctive, nothing citable and nothing that makes a candidate think "that's the place for me."

The companies getting this right are the ones willing to say something real.

I loved Brex’s new EVP they launched in the fall: “be the founder of your career.” Brex’s CEO on LinkedIn said that over 100 alumni have started companies. He was celebrating people leaving! And it worked, because it was specific, it was honest, and it told a candidate exactly what kind of environment they'd be walking into.

That's the kind of content AI can actually work with. It has a point of view. It's attributable. It says something that isn't true of every other employer in your space.

The brands playing it safe, running everything through legal and comms until it's inoffensive and indistinguishable, are the ones that AI has the least to say about. And increasingly, if AI has nothing to say about you, candidates are forming their picture of you from whatever's left.

Oh and BTW - I asked ChatGPT and Perplexity what is was like to work at Brex. Here’s the proof how differentiation gets picked up.

This came up in a conversation with agency leaders this week. What's actually working is a layered stack. Visibility across the prompts your candidates are asking. Traffic patterns including brand and direct search lift. Self-reported attribution from candidates who found you through AI. None of these tell the whole story alone, but together they start to.

And the metric that cuts through executive conversations fastest isn't a visibility score. It's competitive benchmarking. How are you showing up relative to your talent competitors in these searches? That question everyone understands immediately.

One more thing worth getting right before you start: stop thinking in individual prompts. Candidates researching you are asking dozens of variations of the same underlying question. "Best companies to work for in [city]." "What is it like to work at [company]." And “[Company] vs [competitor]." These all ladder to the same thing.

Build presence across the whole topic cluster. Not one search. Think index fund, not individual stock. That coverage compounds over time.

Last week I asked if anyone wanted to compare notes on AI discoverability in a small, curated group. The response was significant so we're moving forward.

If you want in, fill out the form here and we'll be in touch. Anyone who joins gets a free CollabWORK AI Employer Discoverability audit to start: https://app.youform.com/forms/jugmduzb

And if you have a take on any of this, reply to this email. More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• Before They Apply, Candidates Ask AI: How to Shape Your Employer Brand and Job Visibility. I'm speaking on a free HR.com webinar next Tuesday, March 31st on exactly what this newsletter covers. I’ll be diving deeper on the latest research and what you can actually do about it. Register if you want to join live.

• What Young Workers Are Doing to AI-Proof Themselves. Nearly 60% of Americans between 18 and 29 see AI as a threat to their job prospects. Stanford research found employment in AI-exposed roles for workers 22 to 25 declined 16% between late 2022 and September 2025. Young workers are pivoting to trades and emergency services. If your employer brand is still pitched at an audience that's increasingly opting out of that career path, that's worth thinking through now.

• What Semrush Found in 300K+ URLs Cited by AI. The most practical breakdown I've seen on what makes content get cited by LLMs versus ignored. Question-based headings showed a 22.91% higher citation rate. Q&A formatting correlated with citations at 25.45%. Strong author credentials correlated at 30.64%. The pattern is consistent: content that's easy to extract, easy to verify, and easy to summarize gets cited. Everything else gets skipped.

A few weeks ago I was on a call with a leader at a large healthcare staffing company. We pulled up their CollabWORK AI Employer Discoverability dashboard together which tracks candidates prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews daily.

One of the top cited sources shaping their employer brand? A Reddit thread from 2022. Another? A LinkedIn article from 2020 about working at a hospital during the pandemic. That is not accurate to working conditions today.

I'm seeing this conversation about monitoring and optimizing for AI Discoverability go mainstream on LinkedIn right now. But most of what's circulating is observation: AI changed how candidates discover employers. AI is synthesizing your reputation whether you participate or not. AI is reading your receipts.

All true, and I've been saying this since the fall. What I'm not seeing is the next part. What do you actually do about it? What does the data actually look like when you pull it? What's working, what isn't, and who do you compare notes with when you're figuring this out in real time?

That's the conversation I want to have.

We've been working on this from three angles.

1. Distribution into trusted communities and newsletters. The Hidden Job Market where the best candidates already spend time. We're the exclusive job partner for Morning Brew, and we work with 6AM City across 400+ local newsletters in all 50 states. These placements don't just reach candidates directly. They show up in the sources LLMs actually cite.

2. Employer AI Discoverability monitoring. Daily tracking of how your employer brand appears across the major AI platforms, which sources are being cited about you, and how you benchmark against competitors. Most teams have never seen this data let alone know what do do with it.

3. CRM reactivation. Turn your existing candidate pipeline is one of the most underused assets in recruiting: a living, breathing talent community through AI-generated content. We help employers re-engage warm contacts through owned distribution before they start over from scratch. Bonus: not only does this reach potential applicants, but you can publish this as a rich content asset on your careers page to get cited and indexed by LLMs.

BTW: A published an article on LinkedIn last week about the 5 new layers of Hidden Job Market which shares more about how I’m thinking about this evolving space.

Every job I've ever had came through a community. A Google listserv for women journalists let me to Katie Couric. A Facebook group in media production got me hired at WPIX-TV in NYC. A Slack community at Columbia Business School alerted me to my role in product at Amazon Studios. That's not a marketing line; it's why CollabWORK exists.

Not only did these spaces open doors for me: they were places I grew. I was able to ask questions, connect with industry peers and see the latest tools and workflows that others were implementing in their everyday work.

I know how to build communities. And right now I want to build one specifically for TA leaders, employer brand practitioners, and recruitment marketers who are doing the actual work on AI discoverability.

I don’t want this to be a webinar or a panel. I want this to be a curated, real working group sharing what we're testing, what the data is showing, and what questions none of us have answers to yet.

If you want in, reply to this email. I'll follow up with details based on how many of us are ready to go deeper together.

More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• The metric that lied to newsrooms — Major publishers lost up to 97% of organic search traffic as AI absorbed the clicks. The publishers who survived built direct audience relationships through newsletters instead of renting reach from platforms. The TA parallel is obvious and urgent.

• From rented audiences to engaged communities — Traffic is rented. Participation is owned. Digiday on why the publishers building first-party community relationships are pulling ahead. The framing maps directly onto how employers should be thinking about candidate relationships.

• Payrolls to Prompts — New academic research tracking firm-level spending shifts from contracted human labor to AI tools post-ChatGPT. Useful context for any TA leader trying to explain the talent market shift to leadership right now.

• How to write content that gets cited by LLMs — A practical breakdown from an AEO practitioner. The stat worth keeping: B2B queries get cited in AI responses 17% of the time. B2C is under 4%. Know which bucket your employer brand content falls into before you optimize.

Hi everyone,

I’m sending this newsletter on the train to Philadelphia for IAMPHENOM. If you're there today, come find me; would love to connect in person!

This week, The New York Times published a quiz asking readers to compare passages written by humans or AI and vote on which they preferred. More than 86,000 people took the quiz and 54% liked the AI versions more.

I took it and picked the human passage 4 out of 5 times. As a former journalist who spent years working alongside Katie Couric — someone who built a career on the irreplaceable power of human storytelling — I'm the first person to say AI cannot replicate the nuance, the intellect, or the creative direction that humans bring and articulate.

But what this quiz is telling us is that people's appetite and willingness to trust AI-generated content is shifting. And that matters for hiring in ways I don't think the industry has fully worked through yet.

Understanding a company's culture, speaking to C-suite leaders and translating business objectives into human capital strategy, building an EVP that actually means something — none of that can be handed to a model.

That work requires human insight and strategy and it always will.

But once that EVP exists, once a workforce shortage has been identified — whether that's radiologic technologists, where vacancy rates just hit an all-time high of 18.1%, or CDL drivers, where losing one can cost a fleet nearly $13,000 — the strategic work is done. What's left is communication and reactivation.

That's where I think most TA teams are leaving a lot on the table.

The candidates in your ATS and CRM already raised their hand: silver medalists, people who applied two years ago, former employees who left on good terms. They opted in, they gave you their email address, they joined your talent community…and most of them haven't heard anything useful from you since.

AI changes what's possible here. Not by replacing the strategy, but by executing on it at a scale and consistency that most teams can't sustain manually. You can take the employer brand your team built, the roles you've identified as critical, the story of why someone should come back or stay in your orbit, and actually deliver it consistently to the people who already know you.

A newsletter is the best place to start: consent is already there and the relationship already exists even if it's gone cold. And there's a compounding benefit worth naming: that content doesn't just live in someone's inbox. You can publish it to your career page or your company blog, and it becomes a fresh, indexable asset that AI models pick up when candidates ask "what's it like to work at X" or "who's hiring for Y right now." Re-engagement and employer AI visibility are the same work, done once.

The NYT quiz didn't change my mind about journalism, storytelling, or the kind of work that moves people. It’s also why people need to show up consistently in the places candidates trust such as digital communities to form relationships that can’t scale through automated outbound.

But re-engagement isn't that work. Showing up consistently in someone's inbox with something relevant and useful — that's execution. And for execution, 54% of 86,000 people just told us the bar has moved.

If you want to think through what this looks like for your org, reply to this email. Looking forward to walking the floor at IAMPHENOM today and chatting more about this topic.

More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• Labor Market Impacts of AI —You've probably seen the viral graph floating around LinkedIn this week from Anthropic highlighting theoretical AI capacity versus observed usage. But the findings buried inside the research are what I keep coming back to: the workers most exposed to AI displacement are more likely to be older, female, more educated, and higher-paid. And while there's no systematic increase in unemployment for those workers yet, there is early evidence that hiring of younger workers in the most exposed occupations is already slowing.

• Claude Has Its Own Substack — Anthropic is the latest brand launching a newsletter and unsurprisingly, Claude is writing it. My prediction for 2026: the employers building direct relationships with people who already want to hear from them will win on hiring efficiency.

• If I Got Laid Off Tomorrow — I've been posting job seeker tips on TikTok and cross-posting the ones that land on LinkedIn. This is a recent video that got traction. The short version: one quality application a day beats 50 spray-and-pray ones, the referral is still the highest-converting path to a job, and the “hidden job market” continues to live in professional communities. Sharing it here because I know some of you might be forwarding this newsletter to people in a job search right now.

Hi everyone,

I was on a call last week with a potential customer in healthcare.

They told me something I keep coming back to.

For one specific licensed role — one job title — they estimate they have 80% of the qualified candidates in the country already sitting in their database.

TA teams have spent years building out their ATS and CRM. The pitch was always to own your pipeline and stop paying to find the same candidates twice (or three times, or four times…).

Good idea, but the execution stopped halfway.

Most teams captured the name and email, sent a "we'll keep your resume on file" note, and went quiet. The candidate moved on. Changed jobs. Got a new email address. Updated their credentials. But none of that made it back into your system because there was no reason for them to tell you.

So now you have a database that looks like an asset and functions like a museum.

There are a lot of data enrichment tools out there. Clay and others that do a solid job pulling in signals from LinkedIn, job changes, company updates, etc.

But there's a category of data that enrichment tools can't touch: what someone actually wants right now. Where they're trying to take their career. Whether they'd consider relocating. Whether their priorities have shifted since the last time they talked to you. That information lives in someone's head and the only way to get it is to give them a reason to tell you.

For the first time, AI makes that possible at scale.

You can build a content-first talent channel — starting with a newsletter — tailored to each person in your database based on what you already know about them: their role, their location, their last employer, their expressed preferences, etc. You deliver something worth opening every week, with job matches that actually fit, instead of a generic blast they've been ignoring for two years.

And because it's a living touchpoint, not a static job alert, it creates something that's never really existed before: a low-friction reason for candidates to update their own information. "These roles aren't quite right. Here's what I'm looking for now." That response is worth more than any enrichment vendor you're currently paying for.

The database doesn't have to stay frozen. It just needs a reason to come back to life.

We launched Nurse Ascent because we kept running out of places to distribute nursing jobs, so we built our own community. We've shared the results before, but the headline is this: 53% open rate. More than double the average recruitment email.

Not because we got lucky. Because we led with content first and gave nurses something worth reading before ever asking them to apply somewhere.

What's changed recently is what employers are now asking us. We're not just getting inbound from companies that want to advertise in Nurse Ascent. We're getting: can you help us build our own version of this for our talent database? Their own Morning Brew. Their own content-first channel that keeps their pipeline warm, updates stale data, and actually builds the relationship between sends.

That's what we're standing up for employers now.

If you want to talk through what that could look like for your org, just reply to this email.

More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

P.S. Are you heading to IAMPHENOM? Would love to meet up!

• Reddit's AI Citation Share Dropped 50% in Four Months — Conductor's latest research shows Reddit lost half its AI citation share between October 2025 and January 2026. The nuance worth paying attention to: when Reddit does get cited now, it's increasingly the only source cited. LLMs aren't abandoning community content: they're concentrating authority around it for specific intent types. The opening this creates for brand content is real, but you have to actually show up with something better.

• YouTube, Podcasts, Newsletters — The Only Three Channels That Matter — A clean framework for thinking about owned media: YouTube is the new TV, podcasts are the new radio, newsletters are the new magazine. The argument for newsletters specifically is durable: email is the only channel that doesn't depend on an algorithm, travels with a person regardless of job or platform, and compounds over time in a way paid distribution never will.

• Pew: 3 in 10 Americans Now Get News From Newsletters — Pew's February 2026 data confirms newsletter readership is growing across all age groups which is notably different from almost every other news format, which skews heavily by generation. The audience getting news from newsletters also over-indexes on higher education and income.

• The Content Marketing Middle Class is Dead— Matt Charney's breakdown of SEMrush data analyzing 8,000 marketing job postings: Content Marketing Manager roles are down 73% since 2023, but Content Producer and Content Creator is up. Companies want people who either do the work or who own the strategy, and AI is replacing everyone in between. The TA parallel writes itself: the recruitment marketing teams that survive aren't the ones with a full content operation. They're the ones with a senior strategist and infrastructure that handles the execution.

Hi everyone,

Most companies have thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of candidates sitting in their ATS and CRM right now.

Past applicants. Silver medalists. People who applied two years ago, got a "we'll keep your resume on file" email, and never heard from you again.

Everyone calls this a talent community. It isn't.

And it's not a trend. It's a signal.

People are finally internalizing something media figured out years ago: the most durable relationship with an audience is the one you own. Not the one rented from an algorithm. Not the one dependent on a platform's reach. The one built directly — where you have a first-party connection to your reader, your follower, your community, and no one can take it away from you.

Brands are already acting on this from a marketing lens. Shopify launched In Stock, an editorial newsletter for founders and operators. Rare Beauty built newsletter storytelling around identity and mental health, deepening community far beyond the transaction. NASCAR launched on Substack to connect fans directly to drivers and the culture of the sport, bypassing broadcast entirely.

These aren't vanity projects. They're infrastructure decisions. These companies understand that owned editorial compounds over time in a way that paid distribution never will.

This has not caught up to talent acquisition yet.

And I believe it will be the next big opportunity in hiring, especially as companies are rethinking their media spend on some of the biggest job boards in the space. When the platforms you've relied on start shifting their models, raising their prices, or simply delivering diminishing returns, the question becomes: what do you actually own?

Most TA teams have tried to maintain candidate relationships through job alerts. It's not working.

The average recruitment emails see under 20% open rates. That means the vast majority of the people you fought to attract are not opening your content — let alone taking action from it.

A job alert is not a relationship. It's a notification.

A real newsletter. Not a job alert dressed up in a template. An actual content-first email that gives candidates a reason to open it — and a reason to keep coming back.

I know this because we built one.

We launched Nurse Ascent because we kept running out of places to distribute nursing jobs. So we built our own community. Today it reaches 10,000+ nurses across all 50 states, and we collect 8+ first-party data points on each subscriber: where they work, what licenses they hold, what roles they're looking for, which state they're in, etc.

They give us that information because we give them content first. Community. A space where they feel seen.

Our open rate is 53%. That’s more than double the average job alert email.

That's what happens when you stop leading with "we're hiring" and start leading with something people actually want to read and be a part of.

You don't need a full content team to start. You can pull from executive interviews already on your site. Industry news your team is already tracking. Thought leadership you've already published. New benefits, company milestones, relevant data from your sector. And yes, job listings, woven in with context rather than fired off in a blast.

A human still needs to sign off. But instead of someone's full-time job, it's 30 minutes of editorial oversight per newsletter.

And there's a compounding benefit most teams haven't thought about yet: that newsletter content is fresh, indexable material you can publish directly to your career site. AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are pulling from exactly this kind of content when candidates ask "what's it like to work at [company]?" or "who's hiring in healthcare right now?" A consistent newsletter isn't just a retention tool for your talent pool: it's actively feeding your employer AI discoverability at the same time.

The candidates in your ATS and CRM have already opted into your brand. They raised their hand. You just stopped showing up.

A newsletter fixes that. It turns a stale list into a living channel. It keeps your brand warm with people who are already primed to hear from you. And when a role opens that fits, you're not cold-calling; you're following up with someone who's been hearing from you every week.

You say you have a talent community. This is how you actually build one.

If you want to explore what this looks like in practice, reply to this email. We can pull your jobs directly from your ATS or XML feed, layer in blog posts, company news, and any external content that's brand-safe, and build the whole system for you.

It's not a custom project that takes months: it's infrastructure we've already built and that’s working, and we're standing it up for employers right now. I'd love to walk you through what that looks like for your organization.

More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• Something Big Is Happening — Matt Shumer's viral piece comparing AI's current moment with work to February 2020. He makes one point worth sitting with: relationships, trust built over years, and work requiring human presence are the last things AI displaces. That's where talent and employer brand teams live. The question is how long that window stays open.

• Something Messy Is Happening — Ann Handley's thoughtful follow-up to the panic. Her point: AI adoption is still mediated by trust, regulation, human judgment, and accountability. Don't catastrophize. Do pay attention. A good read for anyone trying to frame this internally for leadership.

• LinkedIn Abandons Traditional SEO After 60% Traffic Loss — LinkedIn formed an internal AI Search Taskforce after B2B traffic fell 60%. If the platform your employer brand lives on is overhauling its entire discovery model, that's a signal worth taking seriously.

• The Year Of The Candidate Is Not About Kindness — Bill Boorman’s latest piece argues the candidate-friendly features exploding across platforms right now aren't about empathy — they're a battle for who owns candidate discovery before someone even becomes a job seeker. Relevant context for anyone thinking about where employer brand fits in that fight.

Hi everyone,

Yesterday, a community leader running a women-in-robotics network wanted to build a talent solution for her members. Instead of Googling, she asked Claude.

Claude told her to check out CollabWORK. She booked a call and now we're working together (if you are hiring robotics engineers, mechanical or systems engineers, or data scientists with deep tech experience, email me).

She wasn't on job boards. She wasn't on LinkedIn. She asked an AI a practical question — and it pointed her to us by name.

This is our first inbound lead (that we know of) from an LLM. And here's what makes it more interesting: we pushed updates to make our site more readable by AI models less than a week before that conversation. That's how fast these models respond when you give them something clear to work with.

This discoverability is happening across hiring — and most employers have no idea.

Candidates and the communities that influence them are discovering who's hiring by asking AI. Not searching. Asking. And AI is answering with specific company names and specific roles. Whether your company shows up depends on how clearly your hiring story is understood by these systems.

Everyday I talk to agency leaders and employer brand strategists. People know AI is changing discovery, but most aren't prepared. One agency founder is seeing 600–700% growth in LLM-driven traffic across client career sites. The volume is still small — but the people arriving through AI convert at higher rates.

Another strategist put it simply: AI visibility improvements show up in days, not months. Now is the time to move — because eventually this is table stakes.

This isn't about keywords or meta tags. It's about whether your roles, your brand, and your intent to hire are visible where discovery is actually happening.

Here's the uncomfortable part: most employers are swimming in a sea of sameness. Same job descriptions. Same career pages. Same Glassdoor profiles untouched since their last EB campaign. A former enterprise TA leader I spoke with last week told me she'd be surprised if her previous company was even thinking about how they show up in AI.

That's the blind spot. And it's also the opportunity — because AI discovery is personalized. It doesn't flood your funnel with volume the way programmatic does. It shows roles to people based on what they've been researching and what matches their context. The right candidates find you. The wrong ones opt out before they ever apply.

The question isn't "are we posting jobs?" It's: do we show up when someone asks AI who's hiring?

SEO and programmatic won the talent war over the last decade. Employer AI discoverability wins it next.

Of all the ways companies are experimenting with AI in hiring, this is the lowest-risk entry point. AI visibility doesn't make hiring decisions. It doesn't judge candidates. It doesn't touch compliance. It's a mirror — showing you how your brand appears when people ask AI who's hiring. In a space where most AI adoption carries real legal and ethical weight, this is future-proofing without the risk.

At CollabWORK, we've built this into our core stack — Employer AI Discoverability monitoring across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. We track how you show up in daily prompts, benchmark against competitors, optimize your job feeds so LLMs can actually read them, and distribute roles across 500+ trusted communities that these models cite and find validation.

Want to see how your company shows up? Reply to this email and we'll run a visibility snapshot — no commitment, just clarity.

More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• Indeed Launches App in ChatGPT — Indeed brought its job marketplace into ChatGPT. Users mention @Indeed in any prompt and get personalized results. Of note: Indeed specifically said its "website and mobile app remain the primary places to apply to jobs." Speaking of…

• What TA Leaders Should Be Tracking as Indeed's Hiring Model Evolves — Chris Hoyt at CareerXroads has spent five months facilitating calls with enterprise TA leaders on Indeed's shifting model — job visibility, deeper ATS integrations, and data-sharing expectations with an April 1 deadline. Indeed is pushing toward tighter access to employers' systems of record, and governance teams are scrambling to keep up.

• AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58% — Ahrefs re-ran their Google AI Overviews study with December 2025 data. For every 100 clicks you used to earn on a #1 ranking, Google now keeps 58. If your career site strategy depends on organic search, this should change the conversation.

• Why TA Week Proved Humanity Still Runs Recruiting — Brian Fink recaps TA Week: despite all the AI noise, relationships and human judgment still close candidates. AI is reshaping discovery, but the people doing the hiring aren't getting replaced.

• Most Recruiters Don't Know About These Professional Communities — I've been experimenting on TikTok to reach job seekers directly. This one breaks down how Slack communities are quietly becoming one of the best places to find jobs — and most recruiters have no idea. But your hiring managers are already in them.

Hi everyone,

I posted a TikTok this week that got way more traction than I expected.

@summer.m.delaney

Want to get hired in 2026? Here is how you can actually stand out: join professional digital communities. There are a ton of free and appl... See more

I shared a Fast Company article where recruiters and hiring managers admitted they're not posting jobs on traditional boards anymore. They're going to niche online communities, professional groups and newsletters to source candidates. I showed real screenshots — hiring managers dropping roles casually in community channels, people making warm intros to open positions.

The video took off. But the comments were what got me.

One comment summed up the sentiment:

Others didn't even know these communities existed. They felt like the system was rigged toward people who already had the right connections.

Here's the part I think TA leaders miss: candidates aren't just frustrated with your process. They're frustrated with what happens after it. The silence. The black hole. The sense that they applied into a void and nobody ever looked. And now a growing number of them are opting out of that experience entirely — seeking jobs through channels that feel more human.

When I say "Slack communities," I don't mean your company's internal Slack. I mean external, professional communities that live on Slack — often thousands of members strong — organized around industries, roles, or interests. Think Serial Marketers (5,000+ marketing professionals), RevGenius, Finance Alliance, and our very own Nurse Ascent reaching 10,000+ nurses nationwide. There are hundreds of these across every function and vertical.

They have dedicated #jobs channels. Members share leads, make referrals, vouch for companies. Discord servers work the same way, especially in engineering and creative fields. Same goes for niche newsletters that curate job opportunities alongside industry content their readers already trust.

This isn't fringe. This is where a large and growing segment of intentional candidates are spending time — across healthcare, skilled trades, and beyond. Nurses are finding roles through vertical newsletters. Auto body technicians share job leads on YouTube and Reddit. Candidates are asking ChatGPT "who's hiring in [my industry]" before they ever open a career page.

If you're a recruitment leader or agency reading this and thinking "we're not showing up in any of those places," here's where to start:

First, audit where your candidates actually come from. Not just source-of-apply, but source-of-discovery. Ask recent hires: where did you first hear about us? You'll be surprised how many say a community, a newsletter, a referral from a Slack group, or an AI tool.

Second, identify 3-5 communities where your target candidates already gather. Search Slack community directories, look for industry-specific Discord servers, and find niche newsletters in your hiring verticals. These exist for almost every function and industry. At CollabWORK, we partner with 500+ networks.

Third, check what AI is telling candidates about you. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and type "what's it like to work at [your company]" or "best companies for [role] in [industry]." What comes back might surprise you — or concern you. Different LLMs pull from different sources, and the answers change frequently.

All of this is what we built CollabWORK to solve at scale. We distribute your jobs across trusted professional communities and newsletters — Morning Brew, 6AM City, niche Slack and Discord groups, vertical publications like Nurse Ascent. And we monitor how your employer brand appears across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews with daily prompt tracking, competitive benchmarking, and content gap analysis.

If you want to see how your company actually shows up when candidates ask AI about you, reply to this email. I'll send you a free snapshot.

More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• OpenAI Launching Job Search in ChatGPT? — Alexander Chukovski found five job-related feature flags buried in ChatGPT's source code: career advice, job search, resume optimization, outreach messages, and skills growth. It's not live yet, but the infrastructure is there. His take: the real losers aren't job boards — it's standalone AI apply tools that can't compete once ChatGPT offers the same features to 800 million weekly users.

• Who Controls Job Search in the Age of AI? — Graham Thornton argues AI search engines are now engineering where candidates apply the same way social platforms engineered our news feeds. Boeing's careers site ranks #1 on Google but doesn't appear at all in ChatGPT, where Indeed dominates. If you're not structuring job content for how AI parses information, aggregators will sit between you and your candidates.

• Top AI Leaders Are Begging People Not to Use Moltbook — Fortune covers Moltbook, a "social network for AI agents" claiming 1.5 million autonomous bots. Security firm Wiz found it was mostly 17,000 humans controlling fleets of bots — and the database was wide open, exposing API keys, emails, and raw credentials to anyone on the internet. If you're evaluating AI agents for recruiting workflows, this is a good reminder that "autonomous" doesn't always mean what vendors say it means — and that the security risks of plugging AI tools into your systems are real and largely unresolved.

For years, employer reputation lived behind a paywall.

Not the ability to respond to reviews or provide basic profile information—you could do that for free. But if you wanted to actually control your reputation? Remove competitor ads from your page? Access meaningful analytics? Keep your jobs visible past week two?

You paid. The review site model and the dozens of players in that space gave you just enough control to feel like you were managing your brand—while ensuring you never actually owned it.

Even when you paid, you were renting reach.

But something fundamental just shifted.

Both while working in media and HR Tech, I've watched this cycle for years: markets tighten, companies slash storytelling budgets and dump everything into media spend. In recruiting, that translates to applications flooding in. Quality tanks. Then everyone realizes they're drowning in the wrong candidates and scrambles back to "employer brand."

Right now feels different. The market needs both—better infrastructure AND better content.

Because candidates aren't just reading review sites anymore. They're asking ChatGPT: "What's it like to work at [your company]?"

And here's what changes everything: Review sites are just one voice in a much bigger conversation.

We've been running Employer AI Visibility reports for companies, and the pattern is striking. When someone asks an AI about your employer brand, outside from your owned career properties it consistently pulls from:

• Job boards and review sites (Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter)

• Rankings and validation lists (Forbes, Top Workplaces, Great Place To Work)

• Employer brand platforms (The Muse, InHerSight)

• Reddit threads and digital communities

• Medium posts

• GitHub discussions

• News articles, partner sites, historical pages

What do all these sources have in common? They're generated by humans.

It's ironic: AI gravitates toward the places where humans are actively having real conversations. Not polished marketing copy. Actual dialogue.

Yes, you still need to keep your profiles up to date on the major platforms. Right now, they consistently show up front and center in AI responses about culture and sentiment.

But here's the reality: we don't know how long that will be the case.

Each LLM pulls from different sources. The algorithms change. New platforms emerge. As someone who's been running these reports for dozens of companies over the past few weeks, I can tell you that sites like Indeed, Glassdoor, and ZipRecruiter are consistently cited today—but that could shift.

This is why monitoring can't be a one-time audit. You need to consistently track which channels AI is actually pulling from, how you show up, and where the gaps are.

And here's the thing: you already have more control than you think. It requires investment, sure—but the currency is attention, not budget.

You can update employer profiles. You can optimize job postings. You can publish content that shapes the narrative. You can respond to reviews—for free on most platforms. These aren't the enemy. They're channels you can influence.

And if you're getting overwhelmingly negative feedback? That's the mirror talking. One disgruntled employee is noise. A pattern is signal. AI isn't creating the problem—it's surfacing what's already there.

For the first time, you're not held hostage by the old model.

Instead of only reacting to reviews or paying for visibility that disappears the moment you stop spending, you can:

• Build owned newsletters that keep past candidates and alumni engaged

• Distribute your story through trusted communities where talent already lives

• Monitor how you actually show up across AI platforms—and optimize what you control

This isn't about drowning out negativity. It's about finally having leverage to shape your reputation proactively.

AI search is so new that even sophisticated TA leaders are still figuring this out. Nobody knows what they're doing yet. The rules aren't written.

I've been spending a lot of time here—tracking how companies appear across 20-40 AI prompts daily, identifying gaps between what employers control and what AI surfaces, and helping teams optimize both their content and their infrastructure.

It's early. But the companies that get this right won't need to keep paying for temporary visibility or fighting for scraps of control over their own story.

If this resonates and you want to explore what AI visibility looks like for your team, just reply. I'm happy to chat.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• DE Talk: Posting with Purpose: Tapping into the Hidden Job Market — Loved being on the DirectEmployer’s Association podcast to talk about my background working with Katie Couirc and the power of authentic networks. CollabWORK and DEA have an incredible partnership that we look forward to expanding this year.

• OpenAI to start testing ads in the U.S. on the free and Go tiers — Ads will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT responses, clearly labeled and separated from organic answers. Pro and enterprise accounts stay ad-free.

• Companies with strong reputations earn 5% more in shareholder returns, and workplace is the most overlooked dimension — New Burson analysis found that reputation directly impacts stock performance, generating up to $202 billion in unexpected returns. The catch? Workplace reputation is the most neglected factor (only 11% of companies prioritize it), despite being a key driver of overall reputation value. With AI reshaping work, companies that invest in upskilling employees—rather than using AI for headcount reduction—stand to gain the most reputational and financial upside.

This quarter has been all about expanding how and where you can reach top talent. We've partnered with 6AM City to connect you with job seekers across 400+ U.S. cities, launched a dedicated newsletter for nurses to help tackle healthcare's toughest hiring challenge, and we've been on the road (and online) sharing strategies that actually work.

Whether you're struggling to fill nursing roles or simply looking for better ways to reach passive candidates, this update is packed with resources, events, and insights to help you hire smarter.

It's not about spraying and praying. It's about Posting with Purpose. I'd love to reconnect; respond to this email to say hi!

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

CollabWORK is the first community-powered recruitment platform connecting employers to the Hidden Job Market — where top talent actually lives. We help companies reach candidates through niche newsletters, Slack groups, Discord servers, Facebook Groups, and more — high-trust environments with stronger conversion rates.

We’ve distributed jobs from 1,000+ companies and agencies to 500+ vetted communities and newsletters, reaching more than 12 million professionals across industries.

With CollabWORK, job postings are precision-matched to hyper-specific talent pools and surfaced organically in the online spaces where they’re already active. Find time to learn more.

Partnering with 6AM City
We’re excited to share a new partnership with 6AM City, a fast-growing local media company with nearly 2 million daily readers across more than 400 U.S. cities in all 50 states. Through this collaboration, CollabWORK is helping employers connect with job seekers in key metro areas. The partnership is currently rolling out in select markets — with more to come.

Tackling the Nursing Shortage
Healthcare remains one of the toughest industries to hire for, especially nursing. CollabWORK is doubling down on solutions to help employers address this challenge:

• Our upcoming webinar with HR West, “Cracking the Nursing Shortage” (Oct. 22, 12:00 PM ET) will provide a playbook for accessing the Hidden Job Market and scaling healthcare hiring. Register here →

• We recently launched Nurse Ascent, our twice-weekly newsletter for nurses. It’s already reaching thousands of nurses across all 50 states with job opportunities, career insights, and stories from the field. Explore Nurse Ascent →

📺 Demo Day w/ HR West | Webinar Replay
Missed it live? Watch the replay of our product showcase at HR West, where we walked through how CollabWORK helps employers tap into the Hidden Job Market. Watch On-Demand →

📅 AMO Summit | Oct 8–9 | New York City
The leading event for publishers, operators, and media innovators. We’ll be in New York connecting with partners on how community-powered hiring can can open new engagement opportunities. Respond to this email if you’d like to connect.

📅 RecFest | Oct 15–16 | Nashville, TN
The festival-style recruiting conference bringing together talent leaders, tech providers, and HR professionals from around the world. Let’s connect in Nashville to talk about next-gen hiring strategies. Respond to this email if you’d like to connect.

📺 Webinar w/ HR West | Oct 22 at 12:00 PM ET | Webinar
Cracking the Nursing Shortage
A healthcare-focused deep dive into how community-powered hiring delivers nursing candidates at scale. From strategy to execution, get the full playbook with real-world results. Register →

If you’re exploring new ways to connect with passive, diverse, and qualified talent, our award-winning core job distribution product is built for you. CollabWORK helps companies distribute open roles directly into trusted communities and newsletters where top talent actually spends time online.

Whether you're hiring for one role or launching a full campaign, we make it easy to scale recruitment marketing. Learn more from our White Paper and find time to learn more.

CollabWORK Founder Recognized for Inclusive Leadership
The 2025 Most Inclusive HR Influencer List by SocialMicole highlights leaders shaping the future of work through inclusion, innovation, and authenticity. We’re proud that CollabWORK Founder & CEO Summer Delaney is among this year’s honorees. Read more →

We’d love to continue the conversation with both partners and customers to share more about how CollabWORK can improve your company’s hiring process.

Book a demo here.

You can also find us on LinkedIn and X.

As the founder of CollabWORK, I spend half my time with HR and TA teams working to reach the right talent, and the other half talking directly to that talent inside the “Hidden Job Market” — the niche communities, newsletters, Slack groups, and Discord servers where career conversations really happen.

One thing I hear from both sides? The hiring experience still feels transactional. That’s not just a branding problem: it’s a missed opportunity.

The post-apply moment is one of the most overlooked touchpoints in the hiring journey. It’s often a dead end, when it could be a bridge. In an age where applicants are often left in the dark, especially as AI accelerates the volume of applications, we saw an opportunity to bring humanity back into the process, while offering real value to candidates, whether or not they land the role.

That’s why we’re introducing a new Post-Apply Experience. It’s a completely free way for companies to turn their application flow into a moment of delight, brand-building, and advocacy.

We believe small moments can carry big impact. This is one of them.

More below. If you're interested in learning more, please reply to this email.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

CollabWORK is the first community-powered hiring platform connecting companies to the "Hidden Job Market" — niche newsletters, Slack communities, Discord servers, Facebook Groups, etc. — to automate recruitment marketing at scale. CollabWORK currently reaches over 12 million targeted, passive and diverse talent with 200+ vetted communities and newsletters, including Morning Brew, and has an average 33% conversion rate.

Our precision marketing matches job postings to hyper specific talent pools organically in the online spaces they frequent. Now, with our new Post-Apply Experience offering, we help companies extend that impact by transforming the application confirmation page into a branded moment of value and support for every candidate. Find time to learn more.

The Post-Apply Experience is one of the most overlooked in the hiring process—but it doesn’t have to be. What if the confirmation page was more than a polite “thank you”? What if it became a branded, strategic interaction that offered real value to candidates—especially the ones who don’t get the job?

That’s the idea behind CollabWORK’s new Post-Apply Experience. Instead of a dead end, candidates are offered curated, opt-in content tailored to their profession—like the best newsletters for product managers, cybersecurity professionals, or healthcare workers.

It’s a win-win: newsletter publishers fund the placements, and companies reinforce their employer brand while supporting candidates in their career journey.

🧠 Reinforce EVP with real value
💡 Generate new revenue through publisher-funded placements
🔌 Zero heavy lifting to implement

👉 Curious how this could work for your platform? Book time to chat with our Head of Partnerships.

📅 Wednesday, June 25 | 2-3 PM ET
Hosted by: CollabWORK and HR.com

What exactly happens after someone applies to your job? In this session, we’ll explore how TA teams are using the Post-Apply Experience to:

• Drive employer branding (without spending more)

• Offer free resources that actually help candidates

• Improve candidate experience scores

• Tap into new revenue with no added work

👉 Register Now

If you’re exploring new ways to connect with passive, diverse, and qualified talent, our award-winning core job distribution product is built for you. CollabWORK helps companies distribute open roles directly into trusted communities and newsletters where top talent actually spends time online.

Whether you're hiring for one role or launching a full campaign, we make it easy to scale recruitment marketing. Learn more from our recent White Paper and find time to learn more.

We’d love to continue the conversation with both partners and customers to share more about how CollabWORK can improve your company’s hiring process.

Book a demo here.

You can also find us on LinkedIn and X.