Talent acquisition keeps getting handed tools built for speed and efficiency.

I understand why it is happening. Talent acquisition is a cost center, and the age of AI is all about supercharging knowledge workers so that smaller teams can do more with less. The pressure to shrink teams and automate processes is relentless.

Faster scheduling. Faster interviewing. Faster screening.

But the theme that I heard running throughout the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit was that faster workflows alone do not produce better hires. There was a recognition that if TA is going to be judged on hiring outcomes, then we need to design the conditions that make those better outcomes possible.

Four ideas stood out.

The decision starts before the req opens

Several speakers pushed back on the assumption that "quality" is something that happens once candidates are already in the funnel.

"Quality of hire, from my perspective, is not solely a recruiter problem. It's an architecture problem," said Erin Walker of Teach For America.

Walker’s team was not trying to solve quality of hire by simply adding more candidates to the top of the funnel. She said the top of the funnel “has never really been an issue.” The harder work was identifying readiness and fit earlier, before those gaps were discovered too late in the process.

Damon Grothe of MacAllister Machinery made a similar point about interviewing. What we need isn't a better list of interview questions, it's a better foundation underlying the call itself: "I don't think it's that companies have an interviewing problem as much as it's a decision consistency problem."

AI should sharpen judgment, not replace it

There was plenty of practical talk about AI and its role in the hiring process at RIS.

AI is genuinely good at scale, prioritization, pattern recognition, and clearing administrative sludge. But the more invisible the process becomes, the less likely anyone is to question what comes out of it.

"Accountability rests with our recruiters. No algorithm can fully account for all of the decisions and nuances and edge cases it was never trained to see," Salesforce's Ed Delgado said.

Delgado was even sharper on accountability later in his session: "An AI tool is a prioritization tool. It's not a sole decision maker."

The choice isn't a binary "automate" or "don't." It’s deciding where AI assists, where it recommends, and where a human owns the call.

Candidates are deciding too

Candidates aren't just being evaluated. They're evaluating the company, the manager, the work, the recruiting experience, and whether the pitch they're hearing has anything to do with reality.

“When candidates are looking at organizations, they are trying to determine what’s real and what is just corporate polish,” Jay Olson of Medtronic said. “They are experiencing your people, the conversations that are taking place. That's what's actually leaving the imprint.”

Trust, but verify

In their session, Hannah Rodriguez and Rory Herriman of Zip described a hiring environment where fake candidates, AI-assisted interviews, and weak validation are no longer just recruiting annoyances. They affect the business’s ability to trust the hiring process itself.

As Herriman, Zip’s CTO, put it: “Talent acquisition is squarely now a fraud challenge and a cyber risk.”

Their answer wasn’t to bolt on more screening steps. Zip’s approach can be described as a system of controls: clearer role definitions, shared success metrics, checklists, escalation paths, hiring-team certification, and a process for stacking signals before making a call. The goal, Rodriguez said, was “a process that makes it harder to fake capability and easier to expose it.”

Special offer for ERE Weekly readers

These are exactly the kinds of deep practitioner conversations we want to continue having.

The next ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit takes place on November 10–11 in San Diego, with practitioner-led sessions, small-group speaker AMAs, and the kind of peer-to-peer conversations where TA leaders can compare what’s working, what isn’t, and what they’re still trying to figure out.

And for ERE Weekly readers, we’re offering a special price for San Diego: the first 25 readers to register can attend the Summit in person for only $899. That is the lowest rate we’ll offer from now until the Summit.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along — and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

More Recruiting Insights

Amazon workers are under pressure to up their AI usage—so they’re making up extraneous tasks. Some Amazon employees felt pressure to “use more AI” without receiving clear guidance on what “good” usage looks like, so they started creating unnecessary agents just to burn tokens. I’m sure that many in TA can relate to the pressure from the top to get with the AI program. (Fast Company)

American Jobs with AI Exposure Really Are Starting to Disappear, Data Show. Gizmodo reports that BLS data shows employment in several AI-exposed occupations, especially customer service, sales, and administrative roles, is starting to decline even as overall employment grows. These rolls shrank by 0.2% in the last year, while overall employment rose by 0.8% in the same period. (Gizmodo)

Tech Layoff Wave Has Already Hit 100,000 Jobs This Year. Tech and startup layoffs have been the tip of the spear of AI-related layoffs, although it is debatable how much is just overcorrecting for over-hiring. These layoffs accelerated sharply in 2026, with more than 100,000 jobs already cut worldwide by early May and Q1 alone reaching about 81,700 layoffs. (Statista)

The AI economy is rewriting the American Dream — and blue-collar workers are poised to win. AI is cooling demand for many white-collar and entry-level jobs while creating a parallel boom in skilled trades tied to data centers, energy, construction, and infrastructure. All this is coming as the number of college graduates is expected to continue to rise for the foreseeable future. (CNBC)

Colorado’s fierce two-year fight over AI regulation ends with watered-down law. Colorado lawmakers passed a compromise bill that waters down and delays the state’s first-in-the-nation AI law, replacing detailed disclosure requirements with notice when AI is used in consequential decisions like hiring, housing, and lending. For a more pointed look at how this will impact hiring and TA, check out this video from Martyn Redstone of Warden AI. (Colorado Sun)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

San Diego, CA
November 10-11, 2026

Talent acquisition is moving fast. The best leaders are not just chasing trends. They are comparing notes, testing new approaches, and learning from practitioners who are already deep in the work.

This November, the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit comes to San Diego for two days of practical insight, honest discussion, and peer-to-peer learning. You’ll hear real examples from recruiting teams tackling today’s biggest questions, from AI and automation to candidate trust, quality of hire, hiring manager alignment, employer brand, and recruiting at scale.

Experience the future of talent acquisition next month. We hope to see you there! (ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

I'm coming away from last week's ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit reinvigorated.

Yes, it felt good to see months of work come together. But what really stayed with me was watching our community come together: talent acquisition professionals realizing how many challenges they share, comparing notes on what is working, and being generous about what they learned along the way.

The best conversations are the ones that go beyond that. It's one thing to know that a company changed its recruiting process and got terrific results. But the real learning comes from understanding their journey: what they tried, what worked, what did not, and which mistakes they made along the way.

The big topic last week, as it has been for the last couple of years and will be for the foreseeable future, was AI and its impact on the future of work. But some of the most valuable moments happened offstage, in hallway exchanges and small-group discussions with speakers after their sessions.

We are finally moving beyond the promise of how AI is going to change the world and into the nuts and bolts of how companies are actually implementing these technologies.

We are seeing real AI success stories, but the fundamentals are more important than ever. If you throw AI at poorly designed processes, you are going to get faster and more efficient undesirable outcomes.

As Meghan Rhatigan, Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition Experience at Marriott International, put it in her session with colleague Chris Van Bavel, “You can't scale a process that was not built to be scaled.” She continued, “If you think you're going to take your process that you haven't cleaned up and you haven't designed to be scaled, you're not gonna be successful.”

That may be the most important AI lesson for TA leaders right now. The teams seeing real value from AI are the ones that get the basics right first.

AI Hits Earnings Reports

While I was away at the Summit, AI also showed up in TA tech earnings reports.

Upwork’s revenue has been falling since its peak in Q3 2025, which is not surprising given how challenging the job market has been. The company also announced that it was laying off 24% of its workforce.

The bright spot? Revenue from AI-related work exceeded $300 million on an annualized basis, growing more than 40% year over year.

LinkedIn, the 800-pound gorilla of TA tech, released information about Hiring Assistant, their AI agent for talent acquisition. Hiring Assistant is now on track for a $450 million annualized run rate, with sales growth averaging 36% week over week in the first quarter after its release. LinkedIn's trailing 12-month revenue was $17.4 billion, up 12% over the prior year, which is impressive given their size and the current state of hiring.

If LinkedIn's current growth rate continues, nearly a quarter of the company’s growth will be coming from Hiring Assistant in the next year.

AI in recruiting has moved out of the “promise” phase. The money is being spent, and it’s driving serious revenue for the best-positioned TA tech companies. But there remains a gulf between the TA teams that are seeing returns on those investments and the ones that are not, and the big difference comes back to those fundamentals.

See you in the next one,

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along — and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

More Recruiting Insights

Amazon Launches Talent Connect. There was a lot of buzz about Amazon Talent Connect at the Summit this week, and a lot of confusion about how serious of an entry it is into our space. Jim Durbin and Glen Cathey have some smart questions. (I’ve reached out to Amazon for more details on the product but have not heard back. Anyone know somebody over there?) (Jim Durbin, Glen Cathey)

Microsoft’s LinkedIn names longtime exec Dan Shapero its new CEO. Microsoft’s LinkedIn has named COO Daniel Shapero as its new CEO. He replaces Ryan Roslansky, who is staying at Microsoft in an expanded leadership role that spans LinkedIn and parts of Microsoft’s broader productivity business. (CNBC)

Greenhouse Acquires Ezra AI Labs. George LaRocque frames Greenhouse’s acquisition of Ezra AI Labs as a sign that voice AI is moving from recruiting experiment to core platform capability. I also had the chance to interview Ezra Founder Ophir Samson at the Summit last week about their future plans. (WorkTech)

How David Sacks crashed and burned in the White House. In a sudden about-face, the White House has reportedly started to get more serious about AI regulation. Behind the scenes, a big part of this was David Sacks being pushed out as the AI czar, as well as the growing unhappiness of Americans with the impact that AI is having on their lives. (The Verge)

Next week, I’ll be in Atlanta for the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit, where the focus will be on meaningful conversations between the talent acquisition professionals who are leading our profession. The ERE team has put a lot into creating an experience built around connection, practical ideas, and the future of the profession. In that spirit, this week we’re going to take a look at how the team at GALLO has rebuilt talent acquisition around AI and agile squads in a fast-changing business.

When people think of GALLO, they think of wine.

Almost nobody thinks of a vertically integrated manufacturing and distribution empire that spans glass manufacturing, silica mining, logistics, bottling, spirits, beer, and non-alcoholic beverages.

Ryan Cook, Head of Talent Acquisition at GALLO, leads the team that hires for all of it.

Two years ago, Cook said, GALLO reassessed its talent acquisition operations “knowing that AI was going to have a significant impact,” and concluded that a more agile model would be needed.

From Traditional Teams to Agile Squads

GALLO’s talent function supports roughly 2,500 hires per year with a team of about 35 recruiters, scaling up during seasonal peaks.

Those hires span wineries, glass manufacturing, sales, logistics, and corporate staff. With so many necessary skill sets, hiring demand can be unpredictable. When GALLO entered the beer category in 2024, for example, sales asked TA to hire dozens of people in 90 days in a category where the recruiting team had no prior experience.

That kind of demand creates bottlenecks, handoffs, and chaos, so GALLO needed a more agile approach.

The team eliminated the idea that recruiters “belong” to business units and rebuilt recruiting around agile squads that realign daily based on what the business needs most.

Every squad includes a senior TA partner who acts as the business point of contact. But within the squad, there are no handoffs.

As Cook describes it: “Everyone has to know how to do everything.”

If an offer falls through, the squad pivots to sourcing. If an offer letter needs to go out, even senior recruiters do it themselves rather than creating a ticket for someone else.

This model removed much of the friction that exists in most TA organizations, but it also created a new problem. To allow everyone to be jacks of all trades, the processes themselves needed to be simplified.

Using AI to Streamline the Offer Process

Offer letters were one of GALLO’s biggest operational bottlenecks.

With different unions, business units, relocation packages, and compliance rules, the company had over 50 different offer letter templates. On top of that, there are often state rules, and even county-level requirements. With so many possible scenarios, recruiters found it challenging to remember every nuance.

To address this, the GALLO TA team built a single “alpha file” containing every clause that could ever appear in an offer, along with a rules engine that determines which clauses apply in which situations. Together, this created a single dynamic framework that now covers more than 1,482 unique hiring scenarios.

That framework is now embedded in an internal AI agent, built on an internal AI enabled compliance framework. Recruiters can ask the AI which clauses or documents are required for a given candidate, and the system checks every offer for compliance before it goes out.

For the first time, GALLO no longer has to audit offer letters after the fact. More importantly, any recruiter can easily generate an offer, which helps enable the squad model.

As Paradox (called Sophia at GALLO) took over scheduling and routine candidate questions, Cook shifted recruiting coordinator headcount into recruitment operations. That team now includes specialists focused specifically on hiring compliance, recruitment efficiency, candidate experience, and data analytics.

The Impact So Far

The new model is already producing results.

GALLO has improved its candidate experience, moving from #12 in 2024 to #6 this year in the Candidate Experience Awards, with an NPS of 47 versus the CandE average of 27. The team also saved 2,500 hours of recruiting work through efficiency initiatives.

Operationally, the impact shows up in speed and quality. In 2025, average days to offer acceptance dropped by 37 percent, and average days to official start fell by 21 percent. Over the same period, offer acceptance rates increased by 10 percent.

Productivity has improved as well. With roughly 2,500 annual hires across a team of 35, GALLO averages about 71 hires per TA staff member per year, putting the team well above typical in-house recruiting benchmarks.

AI is going to change the talent acquisition function whether companies are ready for it or not. What separates leaders from laggards is how they use AI to solve real operational pain points and then reorganize around what produces results. GALLO’s experience shows what that looks like in practice.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along — and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

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Phenom Acquires Plum. I met Plum CEO Caitlin MacGregor at last year’s HR Tech Conference, and talking to her was an education on which skills are proving durable in the age of AI. Phenom has now acquired Plum, adding Plum’s assessments to help employers evaluate traits like judgment, resilience, and empathy in a more consistent way. Congrats to Caitlin and the Plum team, and to the Phenom team as well. (Phenom)

Workday's Last Workday? Joe Schmidt at a16z suggests Workday’s staying power in enterprise HR has come largely from how difficult it is to rip out and replace, not just from customer love. He sees HCM as one of the few big enterprise software categories still waiting for a truly AI-native competitor, and thinks agent-driven workflows could finally lower the switching pain that has protected incumbents. Thanks to John Sumser for sharing the post, and for pointing out that it’s not every day that you see a VC invite challengers to a specific company in this way. (a16z)

LLMs prefer resumes written by other LLMs. Gartner’s Jamie Kohn writes that LLMs can implicitly favor resumes written by other LLMs, and in some tests even prefer resumes generated by the same model. If recruiters are using AI to screen candidates, that can create a quiet bias toward AI-polished applications and away from equally qualified people who wrote their resumes the old-fashioned way. (Jamie Kohn)

Fama Technologies Granted U.S. Patent on Foundational AI-Powered Social Media Screening Technology. Fama says the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has allowed all claims in its patent application covering the core technology behind its social media background screening. The 22 allowed claims cover steps like extracting identifying information, pulling online activity, converting images into structured data with object recognition, and presenting results in interactive reports. (FAMA)

3 Cold Truths About Your Profile. Brian Fink is one of my favorite people in the TA profession, and his piece is a reminder that your LinkedIn profile is your real first impression, and most people are still broadcasting generic filler. His prescription is simple: get clear on what you want to be known for, then get specific with proof instead of vague claims. (Brian Fink)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2026

Real-world challenges will meet real-world solutions next week at the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit. It’s not too late to join us in person in Atlanta or stream the entire Summit live from your home office.

Connect with today’s talent acquisition leaders, explore what works and what doesn’t, and get solid advice from peers who share many of your own experiences and challenges.

Experience the future of talent acquisition next month. We hope to see you there! (ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

I got back from a great family vacation in Istanbul a few days ago. I love cities where history is palpable. There’s a mosque called Yeni Cami, which translates to the “New Mosque.” This Johnny-come-lately was completed in the 1660s, more than a hundred years before the independence of the United States.

Photo by Jorge Franganillo used under CC BY 2.0

I hope that you enjoyed Vadim’s writing for the last couple of weeks - big thanks to him for filling in.

This week, I was blown away by a particularly smart piece about the ongoing crisis of trust in higher education and what it means for talent acquisition. It was written by Raghav Singh, a longtime contributor who will be speaking about the hidden cost of AI in hiring at the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit in a couple of weeks.

Enjoy!

Earlier this month, a faculty committee at Yale University released a report that should get the attention of every recruiting leader in the country. The report was not about hiring. It was about something upstream: the collapse of public trust in higher education.

But for talent acquisition leaders, the implications are immediate—and profound. Because if employers can no longer rely on universities to consistently signal ability, rigor, and readiness, then the burden of validation shifts. It shifts directly to hiring. And most recruiting systems are not built for that reality.

The Signal Is Breaking

Since the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. ruling in 1970, employers have been discouraged from using assessments in hiring. In response, they switched to using degrees as a proxy, with high GPAs and admissions to elite institutions signalling greater ability and potential.

That logic is now under strain.

The Yale report documents a steep decline in public confidence in higher education—from 57% expressing strong trust a decade ago to just 36% in 2024 . At the same time, 70% of Americans believe higher education is heading in the wrong direction. More importantly, the report highlights structural issues that directly undermine the signaling value of degrees:

• Grade inflation: Nearly 80% of grades at Yale are now A-range.

• Opaque admissions: Decisions are subjective and difficult to explain.

• Unequal access: Wealth and legacy status still influence outcomes.

• Inconsistent standards: No shared academic baseline across institutions—or even within them.

• AI disruption: Traditional academic work is increasingly assisted—or replaced—by generative tools.

Taken together, these trends frame a new reality: candidates with identical degrees (major, GPA, institution) may no longer have comparable skills, discipline, or readiness.

The Collapse of Proxy Hiring

Most recruiting systems still operate on proxies. We use school pedigree, GPA thresholds, degree requirements, and keyword-based resume filters. These proxies were always imperfect. But they were directionally useful because they relied on relatively stable institutional signals.

When grading systems compress, admissions lack transparency, and academic work itself becomes ambiguous in an AI-enabled environment, the usefulness of these proxies weakens.

This is already visible in hiring outcomes:

• Increased variance in new hire performance

• Higher early attrition rates in some roles

• Growing reliance on “experience” over “education”

Recruiters often interpret these as labor market issues, when in fact they signal integrity issues.

The Shift: From Credential-Based to Evidence-Based Hiring

If degrees can no longer be trusted as consistent indicators, hiring must evolve. The future of recruiting is not credential-based. It is evidence-based. This means moving from:

• “Where did you go to school?”
  to

• “What can you demonstrably do?”

That means employers should move towards using:

• Work sample tests

• Job simulations

• Structured interviews

• Skills assessments

• Portfolio reviews

These approaches are not new, but their importance is rising. They are no longer enhancements to the hiring process and should become the core.

A New Risk Surface: Fairness and Transparency

The Yale report repeatedly returns to one theme: trust is built on transparency and fairness. This is not just a higher education problem. It is also a hiring problem. Criticism of admissions systems—opacity, bias toward privileged groups, lack of explainability—maps almost perfectly onto modern recruiting processes.

Consider the parallels:

• Unstructured interviews are no different than holistic admissions. The selection criteria in either case are largely “feel good”, aka BS, and missing any validation.

• Referral hiring is basically the same as colleges allowing legacy preferences.

• Black-box AI screening lacks transparency.

As scrutiny increases, these parallels will not go unnoticed. Recruiting leaders should expect:

• Greater demand for explainable hiring decisions.

• Increased focus on auditability.

• Legal challenges to opaque or biased processes.

• Pressure to demonstrate fairness across candidate groups.

In other words, the same trust crisis affecting universities is coming for hiring.

AI: The Double-Edged Sword

The report identifies AI as a disruptive force in education, undermining traditional models of learning and assessment. The same is true in recruiting where AI is used for resume screening, candidate matching, interview analysis and making hiring recommendations.

But here’s the paradox:

• As trust in educational signals declines, reliance on AI in hiring increases.

• At the same time, trust in AI systems is fragile—and declining.

This creates a high-stakes environment for recruiting leaders. AI is not optional. But it must be governed.

Organizations will need to ensure:

• Transparency in how AI systems make decisions.

• Documentation of data sources and model behavior.

• Regular bias audits and impact analysis.

• Human oversight in high-stakes decisions.

Without this, AI risks becoming another black box—replicating the very trust failures seen in higher education.

Recommendations for Recruiting Leaders

The implications of declining trust in higher education are clear. The question is how to respond. Here are four strategic moves recruiting leaders should prioritize:

1. Replace Proxies with Proof. Reduce reliance on degrees, GPA, and school pedigree.
   Increase use of structured, role-relevant assessments.

2. Build Transparent Hiring Systems. Document evaluation criteria and ensure decisions can be explained and defended.

3. Expand Talent Pipelines. Move beyond elite institutions. Invest in partnerships with community colleges, bootcamps, and alternative credential providers.

4. Govern AI in Hiring. Treat AI systems as high-risk decision tools. Implement audits, monitoring, and human oversight.

For decades, employers outsourced part of the talent validation process to universities. That model is breaking down and the responsibility is shifting back. Recruiting is no longer just about finding candidates. It is about establishing trust in who is qualified—and why.

The organizations that recognize this shift early—and build systems to support it—will define the next era of talent acquisition.

Thank you again to Raghav!

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

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As AI automates the lower-effort parts of recruiting, recruiters are left spending more of their day on the “high-cognitive-load” work: judgment calls, influence, complex coordination, and navigating uncertainty. Our brains are only wired to handle finite amounts of this intense mental work, and Jason Pistulka writes about the dangers of AI burnout. (ERE)

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Humanly raises $25M to put AI to work for job seekers, not just the companies hiring them. Humanly raised a $25M Series B and is launching a job seeker product that provides AI coaching for interview prep, resumes, and salary negotiation, and says it is conducting about 9,000 interviews per day while building partnerships to reach up to 20 million job seekers over the next year. (GeekWire)

Feeling stuck in a job you don't want? You're not alone. For the first time in the history of the poll, Gallup found that U.S. workers have turned sharply pessimistic about the job market even with relatively low unemployment. Only 28% say it is a good time to find a quality job, down from nearly 70% in mid-2022. (USA Today)

Meta is cutting about 8,000 workers, and more layoffs are coming. Meta will begin a first wave of layoffs on May 20, cutting about 8,000 jobs, roughly 10% of its workforce, as part of a broader restructuring tied to heavy AI spending. More cuts are expected later in 2026, even though Meta remains highly profitable. This is the new normal in tech, as Snap also announced that they will lay off 16% of their workforce, or around 1,000 employees. (Quartz)

Two Americans sentenced to prison for North Korean tech worker scheme. Two Americans were sentenced to prison for running “laptop farms” that helped North Korean IT workers pose as U.S.-based remote employees, using stolen identities to get hired at more than 100 companies and generating over $5 million for the regime. (CNN)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Now that the updated agenda is live, this is your chance to explore the sessions, speakers, and conversations shaping the future of recruiting.

Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live Ask Me Anything office hours with speakers. If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Would you give up part of your salary for the promise of job security?

Don’t bother answering. The question may as well be strictly theoretical because job security may as well be strictly theoretical.

Monster asked it anyway.

The online employment platform’s 2026 State of the Graduate Report shows that new graduates are prioritizing job security in their job search. Findings indicate that 69% are more willing to compromise on their ideal role than they were a year ago, and almost the same number would accept a lower-paying job if it offered greater long-term security.

What’s more, while 68% of recent grads say that salary is their top factor in evaluating offers, job security (52%) now outranks career growth (49%).

The challenge for job-seekers, as well as talent acquisition professionals, is that it is impossible to discuss job security in any meaningful way. It’s not as if it’s a guaranteed benefit like health insurance, PTO, or a 401(k). Yet there also never has been a time that rapidly advancing technology has threatened the job market like today.

‘Stop Hiring Humans’

Before you point your finger at me like I’m Chicken Little ranting in 1820 about job threats related to railroads and other wonders of the Industrial Revolution, I understand that machines have always been coming for — and taking — human jobs. This time, however, is different.

For starters, many leaders of AI companies and ventures are themselves sounding alarms about the future of the job market. Dario Amodei, CEO of AI powerhouse Anthropic, not long ago told Axios that AI could snuff out half of all entry-level white-collar positions and spike unemployment up to 20% in the very near future.

Sure enough, just one year ago Monster found that 64% of graduates worried that AI could replace entry-level roles. Today, that number is 89%. (Um, I’d like a word with the other 11%.)

And by the way, it’s not just recent grads emphasizing job security. Research shows that 62% of people overall prioritize long-term security over higher pay and better benefits.

Here’s more evidence that job-seekers and recruiters should worry: Several days ago at HumanX, a major conference focused on practical applications of AI in business, an ad at the entrance read: “Stop hiring humans.”

Many organizations already have, or at least have cut back on staff — specifically due to AI. For instance, Salesforce eliminated 4,000 customer-support employees, pointing out that AI now handles half of such work. Additionally, Block recently cut its workforce by 40%, from 10,000 to 6,000, not because the company is struggling but because AI has contributed to a strong business, according to founder Jack Dorsey.

Perception Trumps Reality

What might matter most is not whether AI will create a dystopic job market in the future. It is that many job-seekers believe that dystopia is already here. A classic example of perception trumping reality. In the meantime, ADP research shows that only 2 in 10 workers feel confident that their job is safe from elimination. Delusional suckers (my words, not ADP’s).

I have a friend who was recently laid off from a customer-success leadership position. After looking for his next role for almost six months, he’s thisclose to giving up. “Aside from all the competition due to layoffs in my field,” he explains, “customer success is a dying field thanks to AI.” With his finances dwindling, he worries he will soon find himself waiting tables or as a store cashier. (Heads up: The cashier sector is likewise terminally ill.)

The emphasis on job security now even has its own faddish name: job-hugging (I really hate the term!). It’s basically staying in a role not because you want to but because you have to.

Parsing the Paradox

This leads to an interesting paradox: Your company may show great retention rates, which can give job-seekers the impression of job security — but the dark secret underpinning those numbers may be that employees are fearful to leave.

Which brings us back to Monster’s recent survey. It’s one thing for older employees and job-seekers to prioritize job security. But as Monster’s research demonstrates, that feeling has now trickled down to early-career talent.

The tragedy here is also the irony: Individuals just entering the world of work should be excited to grow their new careers. Instead, they are so consumed by panic that they will place a nonexistent benefit like job security near the top of their employment wish list. That is sad.

— Vadim Liberman

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along — and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

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Featured Story

How We’re Teaching Our Recruiting Team to Work With AI (and What We Got Wrong on the Way)

How many times have you listened to some corporate figurehead drone endlessly about how their company deploys AI — only to realize that what the person really talked about was that, not how, the organization uses new tech? Frustrating, right? What makes this article especially useful is that it fills that gap to explain how one business is actually and specifically leveraging AI in recruiting. Perhaps most interesting is how Elena Volk describes the mistakes she made during the adoption process. After all, there’s often just as much to learn from mistakes as from successes. Maybe even more. (ERE)

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Almost all new jobs are going to women. “Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men,” according to NPR. Much of this has been driven by health care, where women hold roughly 4 out of 5 jobs. As Betsey Stevenson, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, says in the article: "This is happening at a time where it's become verboten to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. And yet the people we need to be talking about right now are men." (NPR)

The labor market is sick with long Covid. Indeed Hiring Lab explains how the pandemic is still impacting the job market. The last three years especially have been the longest stretch of labor-market cooling without a recession on record. “With the Indeed Job Postings Index back near pre-pandemic levels,” according to the story, “the labor market appears to be normalizing, not collapsing. But several dynamics bear close watching with potential trouble on the horizon.” (Indeed Hiring Lab)

The FAA turns to gamers to address labor shortage. With the Federal Aviation Administration struggling to recruit air traffic controllers, the agency is targeting gamers with a new campaign. It hopes that gamers will bring skills transferable to air traffic control, including demonstrated high cognitive functions, multitasking, spatial awareness, and strategy and problem-solving. This week, the agency’s new training program will start accepting applications, which will be capped at 8,000. No college degree is required, but applicants must be no older than 31 (so that they can work for 25 years before mandatory retirement at 56). (FAA)

Smaller businesses are struggling to hire under the new H-1B visa program. Since imposing a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas, many smaller companies, nonprofits, and rural hospitals are stuck with staffing shortfalls. In trying to hire a doctor from India, an office manager at one North Carolina medical practice reveals that filling “the position with a domestic candidate is not feasible. [Domestic employees] are not interested in coming here. We can’t compete with bigger areas.” (NY Times)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2026

Real-world challenges will meet real-world solutions at the upcoming ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit. Unlike other conferences that often present nice-sounding theories, RIS 2026 is a practitioner-led event built around actual practices that you’ll be able to apply at your organization. 

The summit is a terrific opportunity to network with many of today’s talent acquisition leaders to explore what works, and what doesn’t, to elevate hiring at your company. No BS, just solid advice from peers who share many of your own frustrations and aspirations. 

Experience the future of talent acquisition next month. We hope to see you there! (ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

What’s easier than landing a date on Tinder? Landing a job — at least according to Samantha Rogers, who says she scored three interviews via the dating app. Sure, Rogers scoured LinkedIn, Indeed, and the usual outlets to chase her next role, but it wasn’t until she wrote “seeking work opportunities” on her Tinder profile that employment prospects began percolating.

“It got me in the door quite quickly for interviews,” Rogers told Fortune.

The job she ultimately accepted wasn’t a result of Tinder. Still, Rogers evangelizes using dating apps for professional networking, explaining that the job market is “obviously a very crowded marketplace and there’s so many new emerging channels all the time that may be untapped.”

Which begs the question: Are Tinder, Bumble, and other dating apps the new LinkedIn?

Judging by the tally of articles on this topic in recent times, it’s easy to believe that countless job seekers are flocking to such apps to swipe for work. But should you believe that? And if so, should you start swiping on Bumble to connect with candidates?

First off, let’s touch on the reverse — that is, people increasingly exploiting LinkedIn for romance vulgarity. Ninety-one percent of women on the site report receiving inappropriate sexual messages. Rogers reveals she is one of them, recalling that “I had received multiple flirty messages by men on apps and platforms intended for anything but that. So I thought I would turn the tables on them and use the dating app as a platform for job seeking.”

It’s as if there’s a trend to “personalize” LinkedIn and “professionalize” dating apps in ways that obscure lines between the two. While the former trend feels true, I remain skeptical of the professionalization of dating apps. But before my eyes complete their roll, let’s look at some recent research.

An oft-cited study by Resume Builder from late last year shows that 34% of users on dating apps are taking advantage of them for professional purposes. Furthermore, 1 in 10 say they joined such apps primarily for such reasons.

Resume Builder frequently promotes findings seemingly meant to produce virality. Its methodology is not exactly scientific and rigorous. We’re not talking Mercer white papers here.

But even if Resume Builder’s stats do not fully reflect reality, they nonetheless indicate that there is some contingent of job seekers taking an unconventional approach in an increasingly tight labor market.

“Traditional networking platforms, such as LinkedIn, can feel oversaturated and transactional, where everyone is pitching rather than genuinely connecting,” explains Resume Builder’s Chief Career Advisor Stacie Haller in a press release. “Dating apps, in contrast, provide a more personal and low-pressure environment for building authentic relationships.”

Meanwhile, George Arison, CEO of gay dating (ok, fine, more like hook-up) site Grindr, told The Wall Street Journal that 25% of its users are on the app to network professionally. “We encourage people to network on Grindr,” Arison admits.

“People are looking for any unique avenue to stand out,” says Mary Faulkner, former ERE strategy columnist and a principal with boutique advisory firm IA. “They are trying to find a job apart from the usual methods clogged by thousands of other individuals trying to find the same job. It speaks to the desperation that job seekers have right now.”

Faulkner is quick to point out, however, that we should not take a negative view of this. “The problem is the system, not the people,” she explains. “The economy is forcing job seekers to make choices that they probably would not have made two years ago.”

Google search stats seem to confirm this. Check out the chart below, which portrays a clear spike in searches connecting dating apps with work:

I wrote “seem” a moment ago because the cynic in me suspects that the rise in these searches stems from the broad coverage of Resume Builder’s recent survey.

Ultimately, the practical takeaway is definitely not that every TA pro should log on to Hinge to find their next hire. “The beauty of dating apps is that everyone is there presumably for the same reason — a relationship, a hookup, or something similar,” says Kate Bischoff, an employment attorney and regular legal contributor to ERE. “Once you start mixing motives, the potential for harassment skyrockets.”

Plus, Bischoff points out that a government body like the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs may look unfavorably at practices that include amassing candidates via apps like OKCupid. Throw in potential problems around discrimination, conflicts of interest, and favoritism, and Bischoff’s guidance is simple: “Stay off the dating apps for the purposes of recruiting.”

The real takeaway here is to improve your hiring process so that job-seekers do not feel compelled to head to dating sites in the first place. Make your application process more efficient. Ensure timely and accurate communication with applicants. Use tech in ways that respect individuals, not merely screen them out. (What a coincidence! There’s an amazing conference coming up to show you how to accomplish all this and more.)

Finally, when it comes to leveraging LinkedIn for romance, don’t. The site’s policy states that it is “a professional networking platform, not a dating site. Do not use LinkedIn to pursue romantic connections.”

Never mind that most true professionals on LinkedIn are interested in what happens in your boardroom, not your bedroom.

— Vadim Liberman

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along — and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Sponsored Content

The $75K Reason to Audit Your Hiring Stack

Most engineering hiring processes weren’t designed for how engineers work today.

AI is now part of how developers write code, debug systems, and solve problems. But many hiring platforms still evaluate candidates as if that shift never happened.

That creates a gap — and it’s costly.

A single bad engineering hire can cost over $75K in lost productivity, recruiting time, and team impact. Just as important, strong candidates can get filtered out by processes that don’t reflect real-world work.

To help teams close that gap, CoderPad put together a practical resource:

The Technical Hiring Platform Checklist for the AI Era

It includes:

• Six core categories to evaluate any hiring platform

• 40+ specific features used by leading engineering teams

• Key questions to ask vendors (including your current one)

• A framework to align stakeholders on hiring decisions

This checklist is based on how some of the most advanced engineering organizations approach hiring today — including many from the Forbes AI 50.

If your team hasn’t revisited its hiring stack recently, it’s a useful place to start.

Featured Story

The Etch-A-Sketch Theory of Technology

If your company is like most, chances are you’ve invested a good chunk of money — again and again — in tech systems that continue to fall short of producing the outcomes you want. As Jason Pistulka asks, “If the technology keeps changing, why do the results stay the same?” The answer is because the problem is never the technology. It’s the design. Read about how it’s possible to boost the latter without entirely replacing the former. (ERE)

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AI is powering a blue-collar hiring boom few saw coming. According to Randstad, since 2022 (when generative AI started becoming more affordable and accessible to businesses), the demand for many skilled-trade workers has more than doubled compared with the demand for knowledge employees. As this article points out, a main consequence has been that this has “allowed skilled blue-collar workers to flip decades of recruiting history by becoming the hottest ticket on the labor market.” After all, as Randstad points out, “AI can’t build data centers.” (Inc.)

The latest job gains are three times more than expected. U.S. employers added 178,000 jobs last month, while unemployment fell to 4.3%. However, that percentage conceals a tough truth: The drop in unemployment is partly because people working and looking for work decreased by 396,000 last month. Now for an even more sobering stat: The percentage of people in the labor force dropped to 61.9% last month, the lowest since November 2021. (AP)

Job-seekers are dropping serious cash to land job interviews. Some people are paying up to $2,500 — per month! — to “reverse recruitment” agencies. Essentially, these firms act as matchmakers, many guaranteeing a certain number of interviews within a given timeframe. And here I thought people are supposed to get paid for work, not pay to work. (CBS News)

No mediocre worker is safe as companies aim to fire then hire. There’s been a lot of talk lately about businesses pulling back on hiring, but this story points out that some organizations are actively hiring…after first firing employees. It’s almost as if Jack Welch wrote this article from the grave. (Business Insider)

Unilever imposes a global hiring freeze due to war in the Middle East. In an effort to cut costs, the consumer-products giant recently implemented a hiring freeze that it says will last at least three months. Notably, the company’s headcount of 96,000 is already down from 149,000 in 2020. Citing “macro economic and geopolitical realities, especially in the Middle ​East conflict,” the organization is especially struggling given that it’s share price has plummeted since early March. (Reuters)

The ever-elusive internship. Career-development site Handshake reported that in 2025, there were 109 applications per internship posting. As a result, the stress of finding work is hitting young talent before they enter the workforce officially. Anecdotally at least, it appears that employers are demanding more and more experience for internships. It’s the infamous catch-22: How does one get experience with no experience? (CNN)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2026

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event that brings together the leaders, ideas, and technologies shaping the next generation of talent acquisition. It’s an ideal opportunity to gain practical, real-world insights to address your most critical hiring challenges.

Join us for an interactive experience geared around community and connection, with sessions followed by speaker office hours for real-time Q&A, deeper discussion, and meaningful peer conversation among TA leaders.

Be a part of the future of talent acquisition next month. We hope to see you there! (ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Last week I took a poll of ERE Weekly email subscribers to cut through the noise and get a clearer sense of how concerned talent acquisition professionals really are about candidate fraud.

The results were interesting. There was a fairly even split between talent acquisition professionals who said candidate fraud is a major concern and those who said it is not a major focus or not even on their radar. 

That said, more than half of respondents said they are actively taking steps to address this. Candidate fraud is not just another overhyped talking point from vendors. It is clearly becoming a real operational issue for a growing share of TA teams.

This week, I want to highlight the recent launch of the People Brand Collective, a new association for employer branding, internal communications, and recruitment marketing professionals.

Its founders, Bryan Chaney, Crystal Lay, and Allison Kruse, are trying to build the association around a broader and more ambitious view of employer brand. In their telling, employer brand is not just a recruiting support tool that gets turned on when a company needs more applicants. It is a strategic role that helps organizations align what they say with what employees and candidates are actually experiencing.

Chaney will be digging into those ideas in more detail at the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit, where he is leading an interactive workshop on the state of employer branding and recruitment marketing. He is also leading a panel on the connection between employer brand and experience brand with Camille Richardson, head of Global Employer Brand at Meta, and Holland McCue, who leads Cox’s continuous listening program.

I spoke with Richardson last week about her work at Meta. She strongly believes employer brand should have a voice in decisions about programs, flexibility, and onboarding, because those teams have some of the clearest insight into what talent wants and how that aligns with the reality employees experience every day. The job is not simply to put the best possible spin on the company. It is to actively shape an experience that can live up to the promises being made.

One thing that came up repeatedly in my conversations with both Chaney and Richardson is just how research-based the process is. Richardson described a mix of external quantitative and qualitative research, internal interviews and focus groups, social listening, and feedback from places like Glassdoor and LinkedIn. Chaney framed the work similarly, saying the job is to pull together feedback from referrals, reviews, and online platforms in order to “stitch the story together” about what the market is saying and what the company needs to respond to.

The Meta team brought that research into the design of the engineering boot camp that new hires go through when they join the company. They observed the onboarding experience, looked at which themes were resonating, and worked with program owners to revise the agenda, the script, and the communications based on what technical talent actually values.

“It almost immediately impacted the experience that all of the engineers who are joining Meta have,” Richardson said.

I’ll be on vacation for the next couple of weeks, but former ERE Editor Vadim Liberman has agreed to step in and keep you up to date on the latest in talent acquisition while I’m away. You’re in good hands.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Featured Story

The Rise of Experience Intelligence: Why Human Connection Is the New Leadership Advantage

Drawing on Marcus Buckingham’s concept of “Experience Intelligence,” Ron Thomas contends that the most effective leaders will be those who create trust, belonging, emotional alignment, and meaningful day-to-day experiences for employees. The article makes the case that human connection is becoming the most durable competitive advantage an organization can have. (ERE)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Now that the updated agenda is live, this is your chance to explore the sessions, speakers, and conversations shaping the future of recruiting.

Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live Ask Me Anything office hours with speakers. If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Zip, the digital financial services company, discovered a handful of suspicious candidates who had slipped through its hiring process. Like most, the company’s hiring model had always assumed a baseline level of trust: that the applicant is who they claim to be, that the interview is a direct interaction, and that a polished presentation signals real capability. In a remote-first environment and as candidates increasingly use AI for both legitimate and deceptive purposes, those assumptions are becoming harder to sustain.

“We didn't hire any bad actors, but I took it personally when they got past us because we do have a really strong structure,” said Hannah Rodriguez, Zip’s Head of Talent Acquisition, Canada & Americas.

Zip is investing heavily in growth and expansion, with much of its hiring focused on engineering and product delivery. Among other things, the company is hiring AI engineers, leaders, and builders while competing for talent against companies like Anthropic that can often win on brand and compensation alone.

In a fast-moving environment like this, the company came to see recruiting not just as an entry point for talent, but also as an entry point into its security model.

The answer at Zip has not been to throw more automation at the problem. It has been to engage a cross-functional team that includes legal, IT and talent acquisition, and to invest heavily in training the talent function.

“TA's moved into this first line of defense position,” Rodriguez said. “What we're doing is upskilling the TA team and all of the hiring teams to differentiate between AI-generated polish and genuine depth.”

Rodriguez will be participating in an online panel discussion on application fraud tomorrow, and she’ll be co-presenting with Rory Herriman, Zip’s CTO/COO, on the same topic at the upcoming ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit in May.

“I'm very excited about our Summit session. I think it's a bit different because it is the head of TA and our CTO making the same argument in the same room,” Rodriguez said. “When we started building our relationship, it was really about more rigor and perfecting the foundation. So, what are we doing well? What are we missing?”

Zip is not alone in seeing the problem this way. Anita Chandrasekhar, Global Head of Talent Strategy and Operations at Zapier, described the challenge this way, “The number of fraud candidates we were starting to see coming into the pipeline was so high. Who are the real candidates?” For Chandrasekhar, the answer was a partnership with Ezra AI to identify fraud at an earlier stage of the hiring process so that their recruiting team could filter out the noise and focus on the strongest candidates.

Not everyone agrees that candidate fraud is this big a problem. The inestimable John Sumser believes that much of it is manufactured by background checking companies. I understand the skepticism, and it’s certainly a convenient marketing position. But in conversations with TA leaders, this issue comes up repeatedly.

I’d love to hear from the TA practitioners and leaders in our community. What are you seeing?

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Featured Story

Findem’s Glider AI Acquisition Isn’t Really About Hiring. It’s About Data.

The ever-insightful Matt Charney breaks down Findem’s acquisition of assessment company Glider AI, it’s second in the last four months. The deal is all about data integrity and owning trustworthy hiring data end to end. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Payscale’s 2026 Gender Pay Gap Report. Payscale’s 2026 Gender Pay Gap Report finds that women in the U.S. earn $0.82 for every $1.00 men earn on an uncontrolled basis, and $0.99 for every $1.00 on a controlled basis (same job and comparable factors). It also notes that the gap widened in 2026 after years of narrowing, and highlights that pay gaps are significantly larger for mothers and for many women of color. (Payscale)

Is Taste the One Thing A.I. Can’t Replace? In so many of the conversations that I have with TA Leaders, a familiar refrain comes up: “AI can’t replace the human touch.” Tech workers are now actively embracing their own version of this mantra and working on developing good taste as a quality that AI will not be able to quantify. (NY Times)

Meta begins laying off hundreds of employees across five divisions. Meta is cutting hundreds of jobs across multiple divisions, including recruiting, as it reshuffles teams while continuing to pour money into AI and data centers. Earlier this month, reports leaked that raised the possibility of a much larger move, with Meta considering layoffs of up to 20% of its workforce to offset rising AI-related costs, though Meta publicly called those larger-cut reports “speculative.” (NBC)

OpenAI reportedly plans to double its workforce to 8,000 employees. In the same week that Meta is cutting hundreds of roles and even floating the possibility of much deeper reductions, OpenAI is reportedly moving in the opposite direction, planning to nearly double headcount from about 4,500 to 8,000 by the end of 2026. The contrast captures the moment: AI is eliminating jobs inside mature companies looking for efficiency, while creating jobs inside the firms building the models and the enterprise adoption machinery that powers the AI boom. (Engadget)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Now that the updated agenda is live, this is your chance to explore the sessions, speakers, and conversations shaping the future of recruiting.

Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live Ask Me Anything office hours with speakers. If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Webinars

Outbound is Back: How Lean Teams Win Without Burning Out

March 25, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

We will walk through a repeatable outbound system for lean recruiting teams: build strong lists, use real signals to prioritize who to contact, write relevant messaging, and run a cadence that stays consistent without overwhelming candidates. We’ll also cover guardrails like deliverability basics and frequency caps to protect employer brand, plus what you should be measuring to succeed. (ERE)

Detecting and Defending Against Candidate Misrepresentation

March 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

In this webinar we will tackle the rise of fake applicants, from AI-generated resumes and deepfake interviews to third-party test takers. We’ll cover practical tactics such as screening “traps,” interviewer training, verification tools for technical and non-technical roles, and legally defensible documentation. (ERE)

User conferences rarely surprise me.

The format is polished, the customer stories are carefully framed, and if you’ve been to enough of them, the formula wears thin.

Last year’s IAMPHENOM stood out.

At the time, the market was already full of companies pitching AI agents that could handle individual recruiting tasks. There were tools for sourcing, tools for screening, tools for scheduling, and tools for every aspect of the hiring workflow. Phenom’s vision felt more comprehensive. Instead of presenting agents as isolated features, the company unveiled 25 new agents at the same time, and showed what it looked like to systematize and productize virtually every aspect of talent acquisition.

I went into this year’s event wondering whether Phenom could still produce that same sense of possibility.

TL;DR: It could.

This year Phenom was no longer focused on touting the number of agents it offers. There are effectively an infinite number of unique agent possibilities because each agent is aware of context and local conditions. The emphasis now is on enabling talent acquisition teams to create customized groups of agents and coordinate them through what Phenom calls their “Orchestration Engine.”

In one of the more compelling demos, a Phenom employee gave verbal instructions to an agent and asked it to set up a program to recruit ICU nurses. After asking a few questions about the role and hiring context, the system went on to assemble a “symphony” of agents, spanning sourcing, scheduling, interviewing, and other steps in the process, then put the plan into motion. All of this from a single voice conversation.

Much of the conversation around AI in recruiting over the past year has centered on the idea that humans will orchestrate legions of agents that handle the repeatable work of hiring. In practice, many products still require so much manual setup, supervision, or task-by-task prompting that the larger vision remains just that: a vision. What Phenom showed, at least in demo form, was a level of self-direction that begins to make the orchestration model feel operational rather than merely conceptual.

Hiring a nurse in Dallas is not the same challenge as hiring a financial analyst in Dubai. The sourcing channels, labor market conditions, workflow requirements, and candidate expectations can all vary significantly.

When AI is expected to act with that level of nuance, context becomes the decisive factor. Phenom’s answer is the “hypercell,” which it says gives agents the contextual grounding they need to make educated decisions about how to structure themselves. In other words, the goal is not simply to automate tasks, but to make agent behavior responsive to the specifics of the role, geography, process, and organization.

Modern talent acquisition is complicated, and a bot that can do one thing well was never going to fundamentally change the profession. It was always going to be about whether AI could coordinate across an end-to-end hiring process in ways that reduce friction, adapt to local conditions, and execute against organizational goals. Phenom is pushing hard on that bigger idea.

The market is still catching up to the vision.

According to CEO Mahe Bayireddi, today only 20% of Phenom customers are deploying the agents correctly. The gap between what is possible and what is being utilized remains wide.

Nicole Mundy, Senior Analyst at Talent Tech Labs, put it this way: “As a front-end recruitment solution, Phenom is hard to match. They've created some very elegant programs for certain verticalized use cases that clearly generate ROI, but it's challenging for most organizations to get enterprise-wide value from the system. Those who can level up to what Phenom offers will have a competitive advantage, but it requires a deep commitment across many functions to really make it sing.”

That does not diminish what Phenom is showing. If anything, it makes the company’s positioning more consequential. Phenom is not simply marketing AI features. It is making a case for a different model of recruiting execution, one in which teams define objectives and set guardrails while coordinated agents carry out much of the operational work.

Phenom has a clear vision of the talent acquisition department of the future. Their challenge is helping organizations get there.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Featured Story

AI Won’t Replace You. But It Will Expose You

Grant Wyatt frames AI less as a job killer and more as a mirror that exposes the quality of our thinking and standards. He contrasts low performers who use AI to avoid thinking with high performers who use it to pressure-test assumptions and sharpen judgment, then suggests a practical “exposure therapy” audit: map your role’s repeatable, rules-based work (easy to automate) and intentionally expand the human parts that remain, like accountability, ethical decision-making, and discernment. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

What was really behind Jack Dorsey laying off nearly half of Block’s staff? The Guardian reports that Block CEO Jack Dorsey blamed “AI productivity” for laying off about 4,000 employees, roughly 40% of the company, but the piece suggests the AI rationale may be covering for more traditional pressures like a weak crypto market, a falling stock price, and post-boom over-expansion. The narrative around AI taking knowledge worker jobs has been building for years (see the next insight), but so far it is not born out by the labor market numbers, and it’s much easier to blame a restructuring on AI and be rewarded by investors than to talk about the underlying weakness in your business. (The Guardian)

CEO of Glassdoor and Indeed parent says AI is not replacing workers: ‘We’re not seeing that kind of data at all’. Recruit Holdings CEO Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba says the data from Indeed and Glassdoor does not support the idea that AI is already replacing workers, with only a small fraction of layoffs directly attributed to AI so far. (Fortune)

Vhinod Khosla disagrees. He expects AI to be capable of doing about 80% of today’s jobs starting around 2030, and he forecasts a deflationary shock as AI and robotics drive the cost of many goods and services toward “near free.” (Fortune)

Littler’s Workplace Policy Institute Survey Report. Littler’s 2026 Workplace Policy Institute survey of 306 in-house lawyers, HR leaders, and executives finds the biggest policy shocks for employers came from DEI (71%) and immigration (65%), with 63% saying immigration policies created staffing challenges. Regulatory and economic uncertainty is already translating into workforce actions, with 35% reporting workforce reductions and 30% pausing or reducing hiring. (Littler)

The Worst Jobs Report Since The Pandemic. Andrew Flowers breaks down a grim February 2026 jobs report showing 92,000 jobs lost, and notes the weakness persists even after stripping out distortions like the 10,000 federal job drop tied to a partial shutdown. Excluding healthcare, private employment still fell 58,000, with declines across construction, leisure and hospitality, manufacturing, and professional services, plus 69,000 in downward revisions to prior months. (Recruitonomics)

Matt Schwarzer Leaves OpenAI for Anthropic. In the last ERE Weekly, I wrote that Anthropic’s decision to publicly advocate for responsible use of their products by the US government would have profound impact of their employer brand. Note the callout to “values” at the end. (Matt Schwarzer)

How LinkedIn Is Improving the Feed to Show More Relevant, Authentic Professional Content. I’ve been saying for a while now that LinkedIn needs to stop optimizing for engagement and do a better job promoting the best information on the network. I hope this does it. (LinkedIn)

Workday takes partial loss as judge refuses to dismiss claims in AI bias lawsuit. A federal judge handed Workday a partial loss in Mobley v. Workday, refusing to toss the plaintiffs’ disparate-impact claims under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and rejecting Workday’s argument that the law does not cover job applicants. (HR Dive)

Juicebox raises $80 million. CEO David Paffenholz announced the company raised an $80M Series B at an $850M valuation, led by DST Global with participation from Sequoia Capital, NFDG, Verified Capital, and Y Combinator. Paffenholz also shared traction metrics, including 5,000+ customers, tripled ARR, 3M+ candidates engaged, and 500,000+ searches, and has plans to accelerate product development, expand enterprise go-to-market, and open a London office. (Juicebox)

Elly raises $8 million. Elly announced its official launch alongside an $8M raise led by Sorenson Capital, with participation from Atomic and Next Wave NYC. The company is positioned as an AI-native hiring platform that unifies sourcing, interviews, and applicant tracking so teams can capture the context of hiring decisions in real time. (Elly)

ICIMS Unveils New Brand Identity. ICIMS unveiled a new brand identity positioned around “responsible AI” in enterprise recruiting, including a new tagline (“powering exceptional hiring”), and a renamed AI layer called ICIMS Coalesce AI. (ICIMS)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Now that the updated agenda is live, this is your chance to explore the sessions, speakers, and conversations shaping the future of recruiting.

Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live Ask Me Anything office hours with speakers. If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Webinars

Prevent Workplace Threats with Modern Screening

March 24, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

Traditional risk models were built for a different era, and high-risk warnings can show up online long before a traditional background check flags anything. Hung Lee and Fama CEO Ben Mones will share findings from Fama’s new State of Misconduct at Work and outline a simple, compliant screening roadmap focused on where modern threats surface first, why legacy checks miss them, and how to modernize without breaking FCRA and EEOC rules. (ERE)

Outbound is Back: How Lean Teams Win Without Burning Out

March 25, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

We will walk through a repeatable outbound system for lean recruiting teams: build strong lists, use real signals to prioritize who to contact, write relevant messaging, and run a cadence that stays consistent without overwhelming candidates. We’ll also cover guardrails like deliverability basics and frequency caps to protect employer brand, plus what you should be measuring to succeed. (ERE)

Detecting and Defending Against Candidate Misrepresentation

March 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

In this webinar we will tackle the rise of fake applicants, from AI-generated resumes and deepfake interviews to third-party test takers. We’ll cover practical tactics such as screening “traps,” interviewer training, verification tools for technical and non-technical roles, and legally defensible documentation. (ERE)

Employer brand is often discussed as a function of what we in talent acquisition can control: marketing copy, candidate experience, and career pages. But in practice, it is usually an expression of the broader corporate brand, and that brand is shaped at the top. Sometimes a single high-profile decision can do more to define a company than years of employer branding campaigns.

Friday’s clash between Anthropic and the Trump administration is a case in point.

A quick recap: The Pentagon and Anthropic were negotiating a defense contract worth up to $200 million to deploy the company’s AI technology in the U.S. Defense Department’s classified network. The deal very publicly fell apart over Anthropic's reticence to allow the use its products in domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. The administration ordered agencies to stop working with Anthropic, and the Pentagon said it would designate the company a “supply-chain risk” after talks broke down over guardrails on how its AI could be used. This is potentially a huge blow to the company, because the move could threaten Anthropic’s access to the key infrastructure necessary to conduct its business.

Within hours, OpenAI swooped in and announced that it had signed the deal that Anthropic would not. They later amended that agreement to address one of the sticking points that originally cost Anthropic the deal: the technology cannot be used to mass-surveil American citizens, though that assurance is unlikely to satisfy everyone.

So who made the right call? We will not know for a while. But from an employer brand standpoint, both companies just sent very clear signals. Anthropic signaled that it is willing to absorb political and commercial pain rather than risk what it views as misuse of their products. OpenAI signaled that it is pragmatic and willing to do what it takes to close the deal. Everyone likes a winner.

Those are two very different messages to current and future employees. The reaction to OpenAI’s deal was swift: internal dissent and an open letter signed by hundreds of employees opposing the militarization of AI.

We saw the same dynamic last year in Big Law. The Trump administration targeted major firms with executive orders that were widely viewed as retaliation for representing clients and causes Trump opposed, while also attacking diversity policies and political associations the White House disliked. The orders threatened security clearances, access to federal officials and buildings, and other business with the government, putting firms under intense pressure to choose between resistance and accommodation. Some fought the administration in court, while others opted to settle through agreements that included major pro bono commitments.

Months later, the jury is still out on which approach was more effective from a business standpoint. A Bloomberg Law analysis found that the five targeted firms that did not cut deals saw average headcount decline 2.8% from March 1 to September 8, while the nine firms that settled saw average headcount decline 4.9%. It is a useful data point, but far from conclusive given how many factors shape headcount decisions.

Whether they did it for moral or pragmatic reasons, these decisions have changed the way that some potential associates and even partners view the firms as employers.

In a few months’ time, some of these decisions may matter less to the businesses themselves. Companies can adapt, replace lost opportunities, and repair strained relationships. But the impact on their employer brands will last.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

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The Donkey Is Passing: AI and Jobs

Raghav Singh (who will be delivering a session on The Hidden Cost of AI in Hiring at the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit in May) uses a 1925 New York Times lament about donkeys being replaced by machines as a mirror for today’s AI panic, where “white-collar obsolescence” has become the default storyline. He separates task automation from full job elimination, pointing out that past waves of productivity tools shifted work and changed roles more than they erased employment. The bigger question is not whether AI replaces people, but whether institutions, companies, and policymakers can manage the transition so productivity gains translate into real wages and stability instead of a more fragile labor market. (ERE)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Now that the updated agenda is live, this is your chance to explore the sessions, speakers, and conversations shaping the future of recruiting.

Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live Ask Me Anything office hours with speakers. If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Webinars

Detecting and Defending Against Candidate Misrepresentation

March 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

In this webinar we will tackle the rise of fake applicants, from AI-generated resumes and deepfake interviews to third-party test takers. We’ll cover practical tactics such as screening “traps,” interviewer training, verification tools for technical and non-technical roles, and legally defensible documentation. (ERE)

Teach For America is a nonprofit focused on expanding educational opportunity by recruiting and placing teachers in schools and communities that need them most. The organization’s team of approximately 100 field recruiters hires over 2,500 young professionals to teach each year, primarily Gen Z candidates just beginning their own careers.

I’ve been a fan of Teach For America and its mission for a long time, so this week I was excited to get the chance to talk to Erin Walker, the organization’s Vice President of Recruitment Marketing, who will be speaking at the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit in May. We discussed how TFA designed its recruiting process, the role that AI plays in their process, and what motivates Gen Z.

Walker joined TFA with a background in product marketing, and she has applied that mindset directly to recruiting. When the team identified overreliance on cold sourcing as a gap in their early funnel, they pivoted to a homegrown recruiting engine built around a nurture and scoring system to emphasize warm engagement, not just lead volume. 

That system now includes:

• A multi-channel lead engine that brings in 50,000 to 60,000 warm leads per year

• Automated nurture through channels like email and text

• A scoring layer to identify intent and readiness

• Threshold-based handoffs to route candidates to recruiters at critical points in the process

The model works because it is practical: help candidates understand the opportunity well enough to self-qualify, qualify earlier based on intent and actions, and make sure recruiters spend time on higher-intent candidates instead of building the entire journey from scratch.  

Walker also described a measured approach to AI, using it selectively to support sourcing, information gathering, and early outreach while keeping recruiter relationships at the center of the process.

Teach For America primarily recruits college seniors and professionals within five years of graduation, so understanding Gen Z is central to their recruiting strategy. Walker said this audience is highly sensitive to authenticity and strongly shaped by the environment they came of age in. Many were in high school during COVID and saw financial instability firsthand, which is one reason financial stability is such a priority for them today. She also noted that isolation during that period increased the importance of community, belonging, and identity in how they evaluate employers. As a result, many are more risk-averse about their first career move and want clear proof that a mission-driven role will also build long-term career options. They want impact, but they do not want to feel like they have to sacrifice career growth or financial stability to get it.

At the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit, Walker will break down how TFA built this system, from values-based storytelling and warm-lead nurture to scoring and quality-of-hire signals. If you’re planning to attend, it’s also a good time to register: the Summit’s early-bird discount ends this week.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

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Featured Story

Trump Cut Immigration. Native-Born Workers Still Lost.

Matt Charney argues that 2025 delivered a real-world test of the “cut immigration, help native-born workers” myth, and it failed: the foreign-born labor force shrank sharply, yet native-born unemployment rose and labor force participation slipped. He frames the outcome as a basic economics problem, cutting immigration does not “free up” a fixed number of jobs if it also shrinks demand and growth. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Market leverage shifts to employers. The labor market has shifted from worker scarcity to employer leverage: the BLS ratio of job openings per unemployed worker fell to 0.9 in December 2025, the lowest level since mid-2017 outside the pandemic. (Indeed)

How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week. Cloudflare says it used AI to rebuild one of the most popular website frameworks in just one week. The early results it reports are striking: much faster build times and dramatically smaller “payloads” delivered to users’ browsers, and the AI computing cost was only about $1,100. For context, Next.js is an open-source project that took over 3,500 contributors years to build (granted, the AI was just mimicking something that already existed, not actually creating new features or functionality.) (Cloudflare)

Hiring is getting more expensive. New data from the Appcast Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report 2026 shows that both cost-per-click and cost-per application are bth trending upward. As unpaid search results become less and less effective, companies have no choice but to pay more for visibility and distribution. (Appcast)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live “Ask Me Anything” office hours with our speakers.

If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Webinars

Detecting and Defending Against Candidate Misrepresentation

March 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

In this webinar we will tackle the rise of fake applicants, from AI-generated resumes and deepfake interviews to third-party test takers. We’ll cover practical tactics such as screening “traps,” interviewer training, verification tools for technical and non-technical roles, and legally defensible documentation. (ERE)

Matt Shumer’s “Something Big Is Happening” essay has been ricocheting around tech and business circles this week. It’s a warning that the latest frontier models, specificallyOpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, mark a real inflection point in AI capabilities, not another incremental step. He’s arguing that the “future” has already arrived for developers, and that they are the canaries in the coal mine for the rest of us.

OpenAI says that GPT-5.3-Codex was “instrumental in creating itself,” describing how early versions helped debug training and deployment. Anthropic’s CEO has written that AI already writes “much of the code” at Anthropic, accelerating the feedback loop toward models that can build the next generation.

There’s an obvious piece of pushback worth calling out up front: Shumer is the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, so yes, he benefits from all the attention that his essay has been attracting. And obviously OpenAI and Anthropic have a vested interest in hyping the capabilities of their latest models.

Still, I don’t think that we can hand-wave this away as hype marketing. Because we’ve all been feeling a lot of what Shumer lays out in his piece.

Talent acquisition is also knowledge work. Among other things, it is search, pattern recognition, evaluation, process, coordination, persuasion, documentation, and risk management.

We’ve recently published thoughtful pieces like this one by Ravi Subramanian arguing that what humans uniquely bring to talent acquisition is experience, trust, and relationships. I agree with the spirit of that. I also think that all of us in TA need to ask ourselves if these things are actually the moats we think they are in today’s hiring market?

Because candidates don’t think we’re doing a great job.

Greenhouse’s research has found that 72% of U.S. candidates say they’ve experienced a “bait and switch” in the hiring process. An earlier Greenhouse report also found that 61% of job seekers said they’d been ghosted after a job interview. Surveys by The Talent Board show that candidate resentment is at an all time high.

If that’s the “human recruiter” baseline many candidates are experiencing, then “trust” is not a protected asset. It’s a liability we have to earn back.

So when people say, “AI can’t replace relationships,” I get the intent. But if models keep improving at the pace he’s describing, the question isn’t “can AI be empathetic?” It’s “can AI be better than what candidates are getting now?”

That bar is lower than we want to admit.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

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The New Talent Architecture: Building Organizations for the AI Era

This week Ravi Subramanian writes about how AI is forcing the talent function to reimagine how talent models are designed. Organizations need a new “talent architecture” that rebuilds roles, workflows, and development around human plus AI collaboration, skills-based systems, and more fluid teams, while reserving judgment, trust-building, and accountability for people. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Podcast: Unfolding the Eightfold Lawsuit. Kudos to Chad Sowash & Joel Cheesman for landing a big guest on their podcast this week - Rachel Dempsey, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Eightfold class action suit. In it, they discuss what it could mean for AI hiring, including claims about “black box” scoring, enriched candidate profiles, and whether recruiting technology vendors need clearer consent, disclosure, and accountability. (Chad & Cheese)

Kombo raises a $25M Series A. Kombo raised a $25M Series A from their existing investors, bringing total funding to $30M since launching in 2022. The company is positioning itself as the interoperability layer for “people data” across HR, recruiting, payroll, and IT systems, taking advantage of the accelerating tool sprawl with solutions for data integration. (Kombo)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live “Ask Me Anything” office hours with our speakers.

If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Webinars

Tech Demo Tuesday: Discover the Hottest Tools in Recruiting

February 24, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

In this installation of Tech Demo Tuesday, we will get hands-on demonstration of how CoderPad’s job-relevant evaluations that reflect how engineers actually work today — including the use of AI. We’ll also dig in to how the iCIMS Talent Acquisition Suit helps organizations attract, engage, hire, and advance top talent. (ERE)

Detecting and Defending Against Candidate Misrepresentation

March 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

In this webinar we will tackle the rise of fake applicants, from AI-generated resumes and deepfake interviews to third-party test takers. We’ll cover practical tactics such as screening “traps,” interviewer training, verification tools for technical and non-technical roles, and legally defensible documentation. (ERE)

Super Bowl commercials are a cultural barometer for the United States. At $8 million for a 30-second spot, they double as a proxy for what corporate America thinks will capture the country’s imagination.

Historically, the ad slate leaned hard on cars and beer, from Chrysler’s iconic “Imported from Detroit” to Budweiser’s Clydesdales. This year it was all about AI. Roughly a quarter of all the ads during the broadcast were promoting artificial intelligence products.

We haven’t seen a wave of tech ads like this at the Super Bowl since the dot-com boom of 2000.

Two undercurrents ran through the AI spots.

Some leaned into the fantasy of effortless productivity. Ads from companies like Ramp and Genspark leaned into the idea that AI is a force multiplier, the always-on assistant that clears the clutter while you kick back. It’s the story the industry wants us to believe: AI as your tireless co-pilot and your shortcut to brilliance.

Left unsaid in those ads: if AI is doing all the work , why does the company need you any more?

That discomfort was the focus of the second group of ads. These spots played directly to the unease many workers feel about what AI means for their jobs and their data. Anthropic, for example, ran spots that mocked the sunnily obsequious way that ChatGPT answers questions and the idea of ads creeping into AI assistants, and positioned Claude as “ad-free” in contrast.

The weirdest take was Amazon’s Alexa spot, where Chris Hemsworth imagines all the ways Alexa could try to kill him. It was funny, but it is a strange kind of funny when so many people are already anxious about AI’s role in their lives.

There we have it - The promise and threat of AI, all wrapped up in 30 second advertisements.

What was your favorite ad this year?

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Featured Story

When the Recruiter Stops Believing the Culture (and Candidates Can Tell)

Culture drift is an issue that I don’t often hear discussed, but it comes up a lot in private conversations with TA professionals. It’s the subtle gap between what a company says it values and what it actually rewards day to day. When that drift shows up, recruiters are often the first to feel it, and they can start sounding like disclaimers instead of trusted guides. Cassie Roe writes that the fix isn’t coaching people to sound more enthusiastic, but rebuilding integrity with real, current “culture receipts,” clearer internal alignment, and enough capacity to have honest human conversations — because candidates can spot the difference between a lived culture and a performed one. (ERE)

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The US economy added a stronger-than-expected 130,000 jobs last month. Not long ago 130,000 jobs would have seemed anemic job growth, but after revised job growth for 2025 came in at just 181,000 for the entire year, this looks like good news. Everything is relative. (CNN)

Frequent Use of AI in the Workplace Continued to Rise in Q4. Warden’s new guide, written by Martin Redstone, explains how California’s new Automated Decision-Making Technology rules, which went into effect in January 2026, will impact staffing firms. It lays out practical considerations for staffing leaders who need to scope ADMT use, prepare evidence, and operate in a way that is defensible to clients, candidates, and regulators. (Warden)

OpenAI Is Making the Mistakes Facebook Made. I Quit. This piece, by a former researcher at OpenAI. lays out how the incentives at OpenAI are going to inevitably threaten user trust, even if the company promises clear labels and separation from answers. As I mentioned earlier in the Super Bowl ad roundup, Anthropic is using the moment to position Claude as ad-free and less conflicted. (NYT)

UPS, Amazon boost US planned layoffs in January, Challenger survey shows. Planned U.S. layoffs jumped to 108,435 in January, up 205% from December and the highest January total since 2009, driven largely by cuts at UPS (up to 30,000 jobs) and reductions (16,000) at Amazon. (Reuters)

Phenom Acquires Be Applied to Power Skills‑First Hiring at Enterprise Scale. This move adds adaptive cognitive assessments to the Phenom platform so enterprises can validate skills at scale. The deal follows Phenom’s January purchase of Included and embeds evidence-based skills scores directly into hiring workflows for high-volume and specialized roles. (Phenom)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live “Ask Me Anything” office hours with our speakers.

If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Webinars

Tech Demo Tuesday: Discover the Hottest Tools in Recruiting

February 24, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

In this installation of Tech Demo Tuesday, we will get hands-on demonstration of how CoderPad’s job-relevant evaluations that reflect how engineers actually work today — including the use of AI. We’ll also dig in to how the iCIMS Talent Acquisition Suit helps organizations attract, engage, hire, and advance top talent. (ERE)

Only a few months ago, vibe coding was hot.

Instead of coding line by line, vibe coding has AI write the code for you using just a few well-worded chat prompts. The phrase was coined in February 2025 and it took off fast, letting people without deep technical skills spin up impressive-looking projects quickly. For a moment, it felt like developers were on the verge of becoming obsolete.

That’s not what happened.

We’ve seen multiple vibe coded projects collapse under their own weight, or introduce serious security flaws that put users at risk. AI is an essential tool for developers, and it’s meaningfully boosting productivity. Vibe coding, though, is now more often the butt of jokes than the future of software.

Many vibe coded projects follow a predictable pattern:

1. AI generates a system

2. Humans trust it without understanding it

3. Something goes wrong

That dynamic is exactly what we’ve seen in TA tech: blind trust in automated outputs, right up until something forces everyone to look under the hood.

That something is the Eightfold complaint. Last week, I asked how the lawsuit is affecting your willingness to use AI in the screening process. Over two-thirds of the poll respondents said the lawsuit has already made them more cautious.

Some have pointed out that the core of the Eightfold suit is about consumer protection under the FCRA, not a referendum on the use of AI in screening. 

That framing is correct, but it misses the larger point. The lawsuit is significant because it marks the beginning of the end of the black-box era in TA tech, where buyers are expected to rely on AI magic to spit out matches, rankings, and recommendations.

Does this pattern look familiar?

1. AI makes hiring recommendations, some of which function in practice as de facto hiring decisions

2. TA teams rely on those outputs without fully understanding the inputs or logic

3. Something goes wrong (like the Eightfold complaint)

The Eightfold suit has put TA leaders on notice that they need to understand what is happening under the hood, what data is being used, and how decisions are being made.

Going forward, selling the “magic” of AI is not going to work nearly as well. Products that are effective, transparent, and able to document their processes are going to win.

The era of blind trust in AI is coming to an end.

This is going to be a big topic of conversation at the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit this May in Atlanta. You’ll hear how TA leaders are evaluating AI tools, and making the outputs explainable to stakeholders. 

The partial agenda is now live, and we’re adding more sessions daily.

RIS is built to elevate practitioner voices from inside talent acquisition, the leaders who are navigating rapid change and sharing what’s working. This week, we announced more speakers, including:

• Erin Walker, Vice President of Recruitment Marketing at Teach For America

• Jay Olson, Director, Global TA at Medtronic

• Hannah Rodriguez, US Head of TA at Zip

We’ve already sold out our second batch of special pricing. Early-bird pricing runs through March 1, and the best way to lock in your spot is to register now while the remaining discounted tickets are still available.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Featured Story

Why Human Experience Trumps AI in Crisis, Transformation, and Cultural Integration

In this excellent piece, Ravi Subramanian draws from his personal experiences in TA in times of change and crisis to make the argument that AI can’t replace leadership. AI can support those leaders with speed and insight, but the final calls still belong to people who have earned their judgment through real-world complexity. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Frequent Use of AI in the Workplace Continued to Rise in Q4. Gallup’s latest data shows workplace AI use continued to rise in Q4 2025. Frequent use rose to 26% in of US workers, but the use varied widely by seniority, with leaders reporting frequent use of AI nearly twice as much as individual contributors. Industry adoption also varied widely. Tech led the way, with roughly six in ten workers using AI frequently and about three in ten using it daily. (Gallup)

Employment Commission Chair Recasts Workplace Discrimination in Trump’s Image. The EEOC has always been political, but like so many government departments in the Trump administration, their goal seems to be the undoing of all the work that came before. In October, the commission dismissed seven cases it had brought on behalf of transgender and gender-nonconforming people, and is now focused on rooting out DEI practices. (NYT)

The 2025 Work Tech Bifurcation: Why the "Messy Middle" is Disappearing. George LaRocque’s latest analysis says that in 2025 investment in WorkTech rose 10.4% to $6.2 billion even as deal count fell 16%, with the market split between AI-native innovators and category leaders. TA tech investment was $1.2 billion. (WorkTech)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live “Ask Me Anything” office hours with our speakers.

If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

While much of the US spent this week shoveling snow, talent acquisition got hit with its own kind of storm.

A class action lawsuit alleges that Eightfold AI’s platform secretly compiles detailed AI-generated evaluations of job applicants using personal and third-party data without informing candidates, and then uses those scores to screen and rank them — potentially violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) because candidates aren’t notified, aren’t given access to the reports, and can’t correct errors. 

This is already having a more immediate effect than recent cases like Mobley v. Workday. As Sy Islam noted on ERE.net this morning (along with some practical suggestions for companies assessing their own exposure), there is no attempt here to prove bias or discrimination, which can be complicated. It’s a lot simpler — all they need to prove is that this kind of automated screening does in fact violate the FCRA. It’s a much lower bar to clear.

As Heather Bussing has pointed out in a must-read legal analysis of the case, many of the underlying compliance issues raised in the lawsuit will not be hard for the company to remedy. Candidates can expect new disclosures as part of their application process, not unlike the popups that became ubiquitous after GDPR. Also like GDPR, it probably will not change behavior in any meaningful way. Candidates need jobs, and for most this will just mean a few more annoying clicks. Those few who opt out will simply never be considered.

The consequences will extend beyond the courtroom, and beyond Eightfold itself. Legal concerns have always been a part of the due diligence process in selecting TA technology, but if we’re being honest, much of it has always been lip service. Now buyers are on notice that the legal threat is not just theoretical.

Every company in TA tech has spent the last few years building and marketing their AI hiring tools and platforms. Now they are rushing to show that they are not in the same boat as Eightfold. AI screening just got a little harder to sell.

Separately, LinkedIn released its January 2026 Labor Market Report, with interesting data on the broader hiring environment.

The data is drawn entirely from LinkedIn’s internal data, which is not representative of the global labor market as a whole. Still, LinkedIn sits on an enormous dataset, and the directional signals are worth paying attention to.

A few highlights stood out.

• You are not imagining it — applicant volume has been steadily rising for over two years, while number of people who found jobs fell.
  
  

  

  
  

• Businesses in most countries have decreased their hiring since 2019, but large enterprises have pulled back the most.
  
  

  

  
  

• Despite widespread concern, LinkedIn is not seeing evidence that AI is driving the slowdown. They attribute most of the change to interest rates and the aftermath of the pandemic-era “great reshuffle.”
  
  

  

  
  

• LinkedIn’s data shows that the hiring rate for entry-level positions is largely in line with more experienced roles, which is counter to the narrative that AI is destroying these jobs.
  

  

If you want to go deeper on all of this, we will be unpacking these issues and more at the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit in Atlanta on May 5-6. From AI impact on the hiring process to tackling the challenges that rapid change brings to TA teams, these conversations will be front and center on the agenda. 

I hope you will join us!

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Featured Story

The Next Expansion Won’t Fix Hiring

The LinkedIn data shows that hiring is getting harder. In this article, Raghav Singh argues the root cause is structural. We have a skill alignment problem, with fewer new workers from immigration, rising retirements, and chronic vacancies that keep roles open longer even as applications pile up. (Also, great news — Raghav will be joining us on stage in Atlanta at the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit!) (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

The great graduate job drought. In a sign of how confusing the current hiring situation is, the FT looks at NY Federal Reserve data and reaches a conclusion that is very different than LinkedIn’s. There is a “great graduate job drought,” leaving even strong grads struggling to get traction. Employers are pulling back on junior hiring amid uncertainty and AI-driven restructuring, which makes degrees less of a differentiator and keeps the market in a wait-and-see mode. (Financial Times)

More than a quarter of Britons say they fear losing jobs to AI in next five years. A Randstad survey finds 27% of UK workers fear losing their jobs to AI within five years, while 66% of employers invested in AI in the past year and over half of workers say companies are encouraging AI use. The piece highlights a mismatch between employer enthusiasm and worker anxiety, with Gen Z most concerned and job ads seeking “AI agent” skills up sharply. (The Guardian)

Why AI won’t wipe out white-collar jobs. The Economist argues that AI is unlikely to erase white-collar work because it automates tasks rather than whole jobs, which tends to expand roles and raise the value of human judgment. Productivity gains, reorganization, and new tasks are more probable than mass displacement, echoing past waves like spreadsheets that changed office work without wiping it out. (The Economist)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live “Ask Me Anything” office hours with our speakers.

If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

2026 finds talent acquisition departments in the middle of wrenching change. Here are four predictions that will shape what the next year looks like for recruiters, TA leaders, and the technology companies that serve them.

The Recruiting AI Arms Race Will Accelerate

Application volume is going to continue to rise.

Agentic AI is making it easier than ever for candidates to apply at scale. Bots can now identify open positions, tailor resumes, and submit applications across dozens or hundreds of roles automatically.

This carries with it echoes of the rise of the online job boards in the early 2000s. They removed much of the friction of paper-based application processes, and TA departments needed new tools to deal with the increased volume - modern Applicant Tracking Systems.

A similar dynamic is playing out now. As the number of applications rises, and as candidate AI agents tailor them in ways that require more human review, TA departments will be forced to deploy their own AI-based solutions just to keep the system from collapsing under the increased volume.

I’ve heard wishful thinking that when the “bubble bursts”, we will return to “normal”. That’s not going to happen - the genie is out of the bottle.

Candidate Verification Will Become a Core Hiring Layer

Candidate fraud will continue to accelerate, and verification will no longer be optional at the earliest stages of the funnel.

In 2025, verification and trust became one of the fastest growing segments in recruiting technology. Am I talking to a real person? Are their credentials real? Is this the same person who applied, interviewed, and accepted the offer?

In 2026, verification will become a necessary layer across every major recruiting suite. But it is a feature, not a stand-alone business. The startups that prove their verification technology works will get acquired.

LinkedIn Will Have to Pivot Away From Engagement at Any Cost

LinkedIn’s transformation over the past decade has been remarkable. It went from a collection of static profiles to the world’s most important professional network. Conversations happen there. Communities form there. Business gets done there.

Financially, it is working. Revenue keeps climbing. It remains the only major global business social platform, and it is more trusted than Facebook, X, or TikTok.

But LinkedIn has a growing problem in the form of AI-generated posts, automated sales pitches, and fake thought leadership. The noise-to-signal ratio on LinkedIn is becoming unbearable. Real insights are being buried under waves of low-quality content optimized to trigger the algorithm, and users are losing faith in LinkedIn as a place to learn and have real conversations.

In 2026, LinkedIn will be forced to choose. Either it continues to maximize engagement, or it re-centers the platform around trust, relevance, and real expertise. It cannot do both forever.

Recruiting Teams Will Shrink

The labor market is starting the year “frozen”, and companies remain cautious about hiring. This means there is less hiring activity flowing through TA, and our teams will inevitably shrink. I’ve argued that much of this is still the correction from COVID-era overhiring, and I still believe that this is true.

TA teams will also continue to restructure around agentic AI, as it allows them to offload broad categories of repetitive work. Our teams will be smaller, but they will also be more productive and more strategically focused.

I will dig into what that shift looks like in practice in the coming weeks.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

More Recruiting Insights

An A.I. Start-Up Says It Wants to Empower Workers, Not Replace Them. Humans&, a new startup from alumni of Anthropic, xAI, and Google that aims to build “human-centric” AI to coordinate people and AI rather than replace workers. The company has reportedly raised about $480 million at a $4.48 billion valuation. The philosophy is a welcome change and will resonate with many, but the valuation feels very bubble-y. (NYT)

The Judge in the Mobley Case Raises Questions About the Adequacy of Plaintiff’s Counsel. In last week’s ERE Weekly, I noted that there was a new website for the Mobley case. Gerry Crispin emailed me pointing out the shortcomings of the site, which does not mention the companies who use the Workday product (Most candidates have no idea what product is under the hood, only the company that they are applying to work at).

In this most recent court filing, Judge Rita Lin wrote that Workday’s evidence suggests plaintiffs’ counsel have been “asleep at the wheel” on discovery, citing no third-party subpoenas after getting a customer list, months-long delays reviewing produced documents, failure to file requested supplemental briefing, and no motions to compel, which raises concerns about their adequacy to represent the class. (Justia)

Payscale report says that Employers Plan to Increase Salaries by 3.5% in 2026. This matches 2025 salary increases of 3.5%, and is only slightly more than the current 2.7% rate of inflation. Another nugget from the report: 48% of organization plan to give pay raises based on performance, while 16% plan to implement across-the-board raises. (Payscale)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live “Ask Me Anything” office hours with our speakers.

If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Yesterday, I had a great conversation with Serge Boudreau on the HR Morning Show about the impact of AI on talent acquisition, the state of sourcing, and where the recruiting profession is headed.

We also talked about the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit in Atlanta on May 5-6. The first 25 discounted registrations went fast, so we opened one more batch of 25 at $799. These are first-come, first-served, and I expect them to disappear quickly.

Two more Summit announcements:

• Ron Fish will be our emcee. He’s led talent acquisition at multiple companies and has been an important voice expanding the inclusion conversation to include people with disabilities. I’m excited to be working with Ron on the Summit!

• We still have a few speaker slots left. If you are doing interesting, effective work in TA and have a passion for sharing with your peers, I want to hear from you.

Last May, I wrote about the state of AI regulation, particularly as it impacts hiring. Since then, we’ve seen both acceleration and friction. Colorado’s Artificial Intelligence Act has been delayed until August 2026. California’s AB 1018 never passed, but their Civil Rights Department now has explicit rules about the use of automation and AI in the hiring process, which went into effect in October.

At the federal level, the administration has signaled that their priority is to promote AI companies as a strategically important sector of the economy, with economic and national security implications. In December, President Trump issued an Executive Order directing the Attorney General to create a task force specifically to challenge state AI laws, and it explicitly cites Colorado’s law as an example. The order gave 90 days to the FTC and the Department of Commerce to develop specific policies, so expect more developments soon.

A similar dynamic is playing out in the European Union, with caution at the top and member states pushing forward.

After lobbying by the U.S. and tech companies, the EU is delaying their rules for use of high-risk AI (employment decisions are considered high-risk) until August 2027. Meanwhile, individual countries are moving with their own requirements. Italy, for example, has taken a direct approach by hard-wiring transparency duties into any AI or fully automated systems that influence hiring decisions.

On the judicial front, the Mobley v. Workday case continues to build, and the attorneys leading the collective action have launched a site for potential members to join. The action is open to anyone over the age of 40 who applied for a job using Workday’s HiredScore system, was scored by their AI, and was rejected for the position. In 2022, HiredScore claimed to have been used by over 40% of the Fortune 100, so that’s a lot of potential members.

If you are using AI anywhere in talent acquisition, assume you will eventually need to explain how it works, how it is monitored, and how you know it is not creating unfair outcomes. I’ll keep tracking what changes and what it means for TA leaders, and I hope you’ll join us in Atlanta to compare notes in person.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

More Recruiting Insights

What to Expect in HR Tech This Year from Adoption to Accountability. Madeline Laurano at Aptitude Research says the HR tech story is shifting from adoption to accountability. Based on the conversations I’ve had with TA leaders, I agree. The hype around AI has been everywhere, but we need to demonstrate the effectiveness of these tools beyond the carefully curated case studies. (Aptitude Research)

The ZipRecruiter Survey of New Hires. There’s lots of interesting data in this report, but the one that caught my eye was that there was a drop in the use of AI on the job from Q3 to Q4 2025. Is this an outlier? (ZipRecruiter)

Job applicants are winning the AI arms race against recruiters. I’ve written about the escalating AI arms race between candidates and talent acquisition before, but it’s going to be one of the big headaches for recruiters in 2026. One quote from the article I’m not so sure about: “Companies may one day abandon the job application entirely, to the delight of recruiters and candidates alike.” Everyone is frustrated with the way the hiring process works today, but I don’t see how an ecosystem of bots talking to bots makes it better. (The Economist)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live “Ask Me Anything” office hours with our speakers.

If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Webinars

Closing the Loop: Why Feedback Is Your Secret Weapon in Hiring

January 20, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

Rob Lopez, VP of Talent at Thumbtack, will share how structured feedback between recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates strengthens pipelines, boosts brand perception, and turns rejections into future hires. Expect practical tactics for coaching managers, giving legally safe candidate feedback, and capturing qualitative insights so teams actually close the loop. (ERE)

Welcome to 2026, which already looks like another year of incredible change for talent acquisition.

In my last ERE Weekly of 2025, I hinted that we’ve got big plans for the next ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit. Today I can finally share the details.

We are bringing RIS to Atlanta on May 5-6.

It’s been a long time since we’ve run an event in Atlanta, and honestly, it’s overdue. Few cities have a stronger talent acquisition community, and Atlanta is home to so many who’ve helped shape ERE and SourceCon over the years, members of our community like Brian Fink, Jim Stroud, Ronnie Bratcher, Shally Steckerl, Michael Glenn, and so many others.

If you’ve attended RIS before, you know this event has always been different: practitioner-led and focused on real work, not on selling hype. In 2026, we’re leaning even harder into what makes the Summit special: connection, conversation, and practical learning you can actually use.

What’s new for 2026

Office hours with speakers

One of the most common things I hear at our events is, “The most valuable conversations happen in the halls outside the sessions.”

This year, we built those conversations into the core of RIS.

After they present, speakers will head to our Ask Me Anything Lounge for public office hours. Bring your toughest challenge. Ask the follow-up you didn’t get to ask. Pressure-test an idea before you roll it out. The best part of a great session is often the conversation that follows.

Conversation and Community, by Design

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is built around meaningful connection. Whether you’re a long-time TA leader or newer to the profession, RIS is designed to help you meet peers, share experiences, and build relationships that last well beyond the event.

Vendor experiences that actually help

Our sponsors are here to engage, not just exhibit. We redesigned the 2026 show floor to encourage real interaction, including hands-on demos and problem-solving conversations. You’ll meet the people behind the technology and walk away with solutions, not just swag.

Team Retreats

If you’re bringing a remote HR or TA team, RIS is the perfect chance to get face time. Teams can arrive early to host a pre-Summit working session, book private meeting space during the event, or stay afterward to debrief and apply what they’ve learned together.

Early registration: First 25 offer

To kick things off, we’re offering a special registration price for our first 25 attendees.

If you are one of the first to secure your spot at RIS, you will get a special price of just $799, first-come, first-served. Once they’re gone, pricing goes up.

Register now to claim one of the first 25 tickets.

If you care about where talent acquisition is headed and want to be part of the conversations shaping what comes next, I’d love to see you in Atlanta this May.

More details on speakers and the agenda are coming soon.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Featured Story

Recruiters Say They Want Adaptable Talent. Why Do Their Processes Filter It Out?

Recruiters say they want adaptable talent, yet ATS filters and screening criteria still reward linear careers and exact keyword matches, which selects for yesterday’s skills and screens out people who thrive in change. Trond Arne Undheim argues for simple shifts such as treating nonlinear careers as signals of learning agility so teams can hire for a world built on uncertainty. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Anatomy of an ‘AI-first’ HR org. HRE’s piece outlines what an “AI-first” HR org looks like at IBM: CHRO-led strategy, tight HR-IT partnership, and investment in AI fluency, governance, and change management to move from pilots to scaled use. The initIal rollout of the plan was not well-received, before the IBM team turned it around, with a sharp rebound in the NPS score and AI now handling 94% of HR requests. (HR Executive)

LinkedIn’s War Against Bot Scrapers Ramps Up as AI Gets Smarter. LinkedIn has always been protective of their data, and lately they’ve been stepping up enforcement actions against scrapers. (Bloomberg Law)

PwC Global Workforce Survey. PwC’s 2025 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey finds AI optimism outweighs anxiety, yet daily use remains limited. Fifty-four percent of workers used AI in the past year, but only 14% use generative AI tools every day, suggesting big headroom for adoption if leaders build trust, provide support, and clarify how work will change. (PwC)

Job Applicant Fraud Is Rising. This Startup Is Using AI To Stop It. We’re going to be hearing a lot about application fraud in 2026, and there is a whole new crop of startups founded to combat the problem, such as Attesto and Tofu, which just announced a $5 million seed round. (Forbes)

How Zillow uses AI in their Talent Acquisition Process. I first met Roz Harris years ago when she presented at Talent42, and she’s one of the sharpest minds in TA. This article dives into how her team at Zillow rolled out six new recruiter and candidate AI tools, including an interview scheduler that cut coordination from more than a week to about 30 minutes. (HR Brew)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

Atlanta, GA
May 5-6, 2025

The ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit is a practitioner-led event built for talent acquisition leaders who want real answers, not hype. Join us for practical sessions, meaningful peer connection, and live “Ask Me Anything” office hours with our speakers.

If you care about where recruiting is headed and want ideas you can put to work immediately, you belong in this room.

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

Webinars

Closing the Loop: Why Feedback Is Your Secret Weapon in Hiring

January 20, 2026 | 2:00 PM EST | 1 Hour

Rob Lopez, VP of Talent at Thumbtack, will share how structured feedback between recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates strengthens pipelines, boosts brand perception, and turns rejections into future hires. Expect practical tactics for coaching managers, giving legally safe candidate feedback, and capturing qualitative insights so teams actually close the loop. (ERE)

This year has been a wild ride for talent acquisition.

It began with a palpable sense of panic across TA. But over the course of 2025, I’ve seen leaders start to get a handle on AI: how it’s changing work, reshaping hiring, and what it means for their own careers.

Most of us have experimented with AI, personally and professionally. We learned what worked, and then what worked changed again, sometimes in a matter of weeks.

That isn’t going to stop in 2026. If anything, the only constant will be change, and it will be coming faster than ever.

Since taking over ERE Weekly, I’ve worked to make this newsletter a trusted voice for the TA community, a place to make sense of what’s changing in our work.

It’s a privilege to have your attention. My commitment to you is simple: even as AI slop becomes easier and easier to produce, the ideas here will — for better or worse — always be my own. And I’ll keep doing my best to cut through the crush of PR and hype.

This is the last ERE Weekly of 2025. I’m going to be taking a much-needed holiday break, but we’ve got big plans for next year, beginning with the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit.

We received incredible feedback from the last Summit, especially the quality of the sessions — the full videos are on ERE Pro — and the sense of community at the event. Next year we’re doubling down on the intimacy of the Summit, focusing on connection and quality conversations between our attendees and speakers.

As always, we’re going to focus on practitioner voices. If you’re doing something genuinely innovative and are willing to share it on stage, please reach out. We review every speaker proposal, and we’re building what we believe will be the strongest agenda in talent acquisition by curating for quality. We’d love for you to be part of it.

Happy holidays, and thank you for reading.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Featured Story

Would You Hire a UC Grad?

UC San Diego’s admissions review found a nearly 3,000% jump in freshmen with math skills below high-school level, with about one in eight now needing remediation. Raghav Singh argues employers can no longer treat elite degrees as a reliable signal of baseline competence and should pivot to skills-based assessments, tighter onboarding diagnostics, and audits of AI screens that overweight education pedigree. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Unemployment rate hit a four-year high last month. The government shutdown caused the BLS to skip its October report, so this month’s data is particularly important. The November numbers beat expectations, but the bigger picture is not good. Over 100,000 federal jobs were lost in October, while healthcare hiring remains the only consistent sector with growth. (CNN)

DEI Died This Year. Maybe It Was Supposed To. Hands-down the best summary of the current state of DEI that I’ve read, from the corporate lip-service that spawned an industry in the wake of the George Floyd killing to the current cultural backlash. (Wired)

AI is triggering a quiet hiring comeback for some entry-level talent, say public company CEOs. A new Teneo survey cited by Business Insider says 67% of public-company leaders anticipate more entry-level hiring in 2026, suggesting firms will reconfigure teams around AI rather than simply cut headcount. At the same time, 59% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say that they view AI as a threat to their job prospects. (Business Insider)

US bank executives say AI will boost productivity, cut jobs. On the other hand, the productivity increases that companies expect to see from AI and automation has them continuing to predict more efficiency and less jobs. (Reuters)

The top 5 most common ways people say they're using AI in the workplace. According to a new Gallup poll, the percentage of employees that use AI daily has surged by 150% from Q2 to Q3 this year. (Business Insider)

AI, the hangover from COVID-era overhiring, work-from-home, return-to-office mandates, and robotics are restructuring what labor does and how we do it. Jobs that felt stable a few years ago are rapidly changing or vanishing completely.

Amazon has been at the center of nearly every major labor market shift of the last three decades, even as it has gone from scrappy startup to the second-largest private employer in the world.

Last week, I visited Amazon’s fulfillment center known as LGA9 in Edison, New Jersey.

I was not allowed to take photos inside the facility, which is a shame, because it is impressive. Barcodes and QR codes are everywhere. They are on individual items, on the boxes those items are packed into, and even on the floor, guiding robots along prescribed paths as they move containers around the warehouse.

We are heading into the peak holiday season in the United States, so the place was buzzing. Hundreds of employees were working on the warehouse floor. Conveyor belts hummed overhead while robots glided across the floor, bringing carts full of knickknacks and doodads to human workers.

The system is incredibly efficient. Here is what work looks like at one station - the “picker” role.

A robot brings a cart to the worker. On a screen, the worker sees an image of the item, along with a cue showing which compartment of the cart it sits in. A light highlights that compartment. The worker reaches in, grabs the item, and another green light shows which tote to place it in. Then they push the button above the tote, and it is whisked away on a conveyor belt to the next step in the process.

It all takes seconds.

The job already feels robotic, even though a human is doing it. What goes into the box and where it goes next are determined by an algorithm. The worker just follows the screen’s directions and has to be accurate and fast with their hands.

If you were looking for an example of a job that is ripe for automation, this is it. The workflow is already broken down into small, tightly scripted steps. The system already “knows” what needs to happen. Replacing the person at the cart with a robotic arm feels less like science fiction and more like a straightforward engineering problem.

LGA9 is not Amazon’s most cutting-edge warehouse, having been in operation since 2017. The newest buildings, like Amazon’s Shreveport, Louisiana facility, are the true templates for the future, and even more of the work is being done by robots.

The picker-like jobs are among those that face extinction in the newer facilities. If a job can be broken into a series of predictable actions prompted by a screen and a blinking light, it is exactly the kind of work that machines are getting better at every year.

There are areas of job growth here too. Things break. Robots jam. Sensors fail. The machines cannot fix themselves. They need people with the training to diagnose what went wrong, improvise solutions, and keep the system running. Those “thinking jobs” are fewer in number, but they are going to continue to grow in importance.

There are far more automateable jobs than there are “safe” jobs in the fulfillment center. The New York Times reports that Amazon plans to have around 40 facilities built on the new template by the end of 2027, and has already begun overhauling some existing locations to match that model. Amazon’s automation team expects that these changes will allow the company to avoid hiring about 160,000 people in the United States by 2027.

Recently, there have been reports that Amazon is considering cutting ties with the U.S. Postal Service and building out its own shipping network. It is easy to imagine what that might look like: a logistics system that applies Amazon’s playbook to the last mile from an Amazon warehouse to your front door, more efficient and with less human jobs throughout.

Amazon is a leader in automation, but similar stories are playing out in factories and warehouses around the world. White-collar work, once safe from all of this, is now facing similar pressures from AI.

If a job is so repeatable that it can be automated, it will be.

For talent acquisition leaders, the real question is: how many of the roles that we hire for are being reshaped by these dynamics, including the jobs on our own recruiting teams?

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Sponsored Content

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Most TA leaders face low applicant volume, but the real question is where your metrics actually stand compared to industry benchmarks. This free tool shows how your applicant-to-hire rate, candidate-to-hire rate, and offer acceptance stack up across industries. Plus, you'll get a bonus report on the 5 key metrics for hiring efficiency.

Featured Story

Beyond Amazon: The Coming Recalibration of Work, Education, Skills, and Careers

If Amazon’s robotics push has you wondering what’s next, you’re not alone. Ron Thomas digs into the big picture, and what these moves mean for education, governments, and the relationship that we all have with work. (ERE)

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SHRM has been hit with an $11.5 million verdict in a racial discrimination lawsuit. The drama at SHRM never seems to end. In this week’s edition, Rehab Mohamed, an instructional designer employed by SHRM, was awarded $11.5 million in damages for racial discrimination and retaliation. Two other discrimination cases were filed in recent years against the organization - one was was settled in 2018, and the second is still pending. (Business Insider)

What SHRM’s Own Tax Filings Reveal About Their internal HR practices. Karen Ehrenberg dug into SHRMs public filings and found that from 2018 to 2025 revenue increased by 60% while employee headcount grew by only 3%. CEO Johnny Taylor’s compensation skyrocketed by 420%, while signs point to increased turnover at the non-profit. Great work here. (Karen Ehrenberg)

US planned job cuts fall 53% in November, Challenger says. This headline is misleading, as they were still 24% more layoffs than same period a year ago. Year to date, announced layoffs total about 1.17 million, up 54% from 2024, while hiring plans have dropped to the lowest level since 2010. (Reuters)

Remote Work Statistics and Trends for 2025. Hybrid work is here to stay, growing as a share of all job postings analyzed by Robert Half, while the share of fully on-site job postings declined. (Robert Half)

Webinars

The Great Tech Interview Playbook

December 11, 2025 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Tech interviews are evolving fast — and for good reason. The best teams know that outdated white-boarding or vague algorithm questions often fail to reflect the way engineers actually work. Today, great interviews are collaborative, contextual, and designed to reveal not just what candidates know, but how they solve problems in the real world.

Learn how to design interviews that feel less like a trap and more like a conversation — and how to create a hiring experience that reflects the work and culture your team is proud of. (ERE)