ERE Weekly

AI Is Driving Down the Cost of Outplacement

David Manaster — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:16:22 +0000

I just got back from three days at Cub Scout Adventure Camp with my family. Three glorious days of sun, slingshots, fishing, and time with our boys, who loved every minute.

This was my second year at the camp, and the tents have no electricity. Power strips in the dining area are the main place to charge devices, and last year, they were jammed with cords and devices. This year, only a handful were plugged in during meals.

Screens, chatbots, and AI slop are only making us hungry for connection and more face-to-face time with our friends and community.

That need for connection is one reason I’m looking forward to the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit on November 10-11 in San Diego. It’s a chance for our community of talent acquisition professionals to step away from the day-to-day, spend time together, and compare notes on the exciting changes and challenges shaping recruiting.

U.S.-based employers cut over 440,000 jobs in the first half of 2026, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The vast majority of those departing workers will not receive the kind of individual career coaching and job-search support traditionally associated with outplacement.

Traditional outplacement is a high-touch service employers purchase for workers who are being laid off. Historically, it has been delivered through a hands-on relationship with a human career expert who works directly with the employee on résumé and LinkedIn positioning, job-search strategy, networking, and interview preparation.

That level of support is expensive and usually tiered by seniority. Executives may receive months of individualized coaching, while lower-level employees usually get nothing at all. The model was built around human time, which made it difficult to extend meaningful support across a large workforce reduction.

Pelgo, a career-transition startup founded by former Boxed CEO Chieh Huang and former Cognizant CEO Francisco D’Souza, is an example of new technology disrupting an established category by sharply lowering the price and expanding the potential customer base. The company raised $5.5 million in a pre-seed round before emerging from stealth in February, and Huang said its clients have used the service to support offboarding in seven countries across four continents.

Layoffs can produce a surge of questions from departing employees. Pelgo is intended to serve as a first line of support, answering routine questions about COBRA, retirement accounts, severance, and benefits while routing individual or sensitive cases to an HR representative.

For exiting workers, the platform compares their résumés with available positions, identifies relevant experience, suggests how that experience should be emphasized, and flags skills they do not have. It also provides AI agents that help workers find and apply to jobs.

Pelgo’s basic service starts at $20 per departing employee per month, although there are more expensive options that include access to a human coach.

It is too early to know whether Pelgo’s AI-based outplacement services will deliver meaningful results for laid-off employees, but the price makes outplacement feasible for employee groups its clients would not have supported before.

“There’s no coffee shop on earth that would provide [a barista] with a $2,000 outplacement service,” Huang said. “But if it’s 20 bucks, they start to think, ‘Well, this person did really well for us.’”

— David

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More Recruiting Insights

LinkedIn adds a button to report AI-generated ‘slop’. The day after I wrote in this newsletter about LinkedIn’s growing slop problem, LinkedIn announced a new "Seems like AI slop" button to report low quality content and the removal of the AI tool that rewrote posts using AI. I polled my talent acquisition connections on LinkedIn, and you all seem skeptical. (TechCrunch)

Greenhouse announces Notetaker. Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait announced that the company has released an AI notetaker that joins virtual interviews, records and transcribes conversations, and drafts notes tied to scorecard questions for interviewer review. (Daniel Chait)

Tech firms are bringing job interviews back in person to stop AI use. According to the article, some tech companies are adding in-person interview rounds because AI tools can help candidates complete virtual coding tests or answer questions without revealing their actual abilities.

I’ve read a few anecdotes about this, but the vast majority of the people I am talking to are adding more automation into their interview process, not backing away from it. Is this happening at your company? (Business Insider)

Webinars

Hiring Changed. Recruiting Didn’t. How TA Teams Can Level Up Now

August 4, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Hiring has changed dramatically since 2020. Most recruiting models haven’t. TA teams are being asked to act as strategic advisors, market analysts, and operational problem-solvers – often with fewer resources and higher expectations than ever before.

Mike Rasmussen will take an honest look at why more tools, more activity, and more reporting haven’t automatically produced better hiring outcomes. He’ll show what it looks like when TA teams stop managing requisitions and start shaping decisions. (ERE)

Candidate Fraud AMA with Stacy Donovan Zapar

August 11, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Fraud Squad founder Stacy Donovan Zapar will lead an interactive discussion on how candidate fraud is changing hiring and what teams are seeing in their own pipelines. The session will explore a shift from reactive detection toward prevention, smart friction, and more resilient hiring processes, while previewing the deeper conversation she will bring to the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit. (ERE)

How to Hire for AI Fluency Now That It’s a Critical Skill

August 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Drawing on patterns from more than 60,000 AI-enabled technical interviews, CoderPad’s Bayo Ojuri offers a practical framework for defining, assessing, and scoring AI fluency by role. The webinar focuses on realistic exercises, fresh questions, consistent criteria, and observable signals that help hiring teams distinguish genuine capability from polished but shallow answers. (ERE)

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)

Texas Takes Aim at LinkedIn Over “Ghost Jobs”

David Manaster — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:55:18 +0000

Fraud has become one of the fastest-growing pain points in talent acquisition. In recent months, I have written about it largely from the employer perspective, and it will also be a major topic at the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit, where Stacy Zapar will lead a session on candidate fraud and what recruiting teams can do about it. We are also hosting a virtual Ask Me Anything with Stacy on the topic on August 11.

Like the proverbial blind men feeling different parts of an elephant, employers and candidates encounter very different forms of fraud in the hiring process. Talent acquisition sees fraudulent applicants and doctored profiles. Candidates see fake recruiters, misleading listings, and “ghost jobs.” Trust is eroding across the board.

On July 14, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into whether LinkedIn misled job-seekers who pay for LinkedIn Premium Career by advertising ghost jobs.

Paxton’s office issued a civil investigative demand seeking documents, data, and internal communications about LinkedIn’s marketing, job-verification practices, Premium subscriptions, and representations about its job listings.

Politically, this is a winner. Looking for a new job is one of the most frustrating things that many people do in their lives, and ghost jobs have become a convenient boogeyman for a process that often feels arbitrary and opaque.

The “ghost job” label lumps together legitimate postings, honest mistakes, and outright fraud

The attorney general defines a ghost job as a listing that does not correspond to an actual opening or is posted even though the employer has no immediate intention of filling the position.

That definition sounds precise, but job-seekers are increasingly using the term ghost job to describe many different kinds of postings that frustrate them, even when they are very different scenarios.

Many of these postings are for legitimate jobs, such as evergreen postings for recurring hiring or pipeline ads for anticipated openings. Others are honest mistakes or process failures, including roles that have already been filled, frozen requisitions that were never removed, and duplicated or poorly syndicated listings. Then there is outright fraud, such as employment scams or third-party recruiters collecting candidate information without an active assignment.

An evergreen posting may support hundreds or thousands of real hires without corresponding to one immediate vacancy. A company may recruit ahead of a seasonal hiring period. A role may be placed on hold after being advertised because the budget or business need changed.

Those listings may be confusing or even badly managed. That does not make them fraudulent. “Ghost jobs” may turn out to be a politically powerful phrase because it taps into a very real source of rage and frustration, but I don’t see this going far legally.

Fake employees create a credibility problem for employers

On the employer side, Monika Michalak recently shared that hundreds of fake profiles had associated themselves with 8Bit, her eight-person company. She documented the count rising from more than 10 accounts to more than 100, then 150, 200, and eventually a peak of 263. Many of the profiles used sexualized images of women.

At the peak, Michalak calculated that more than 97% of the people displayed as employees of the company were fake.

8Bit spent six weeks reporting the profiles, escalating the matter through its account manager, providing screenshots, completing verification requirements, and working with LinkedIn’s Trust and Safety and engineering teams. The accounts were finally removed after her post gained attention and LinkedIn’s Executive Escalations Team contacted her.

I’ve had the same problem here at ERE Media. We are a three-person company that currently has 603 people associated with our organization, and the vast majority of them are fake.

There’s no way for me to disassociate from the fake profiles, and I’ve been reporting them to LinkedIn for years. I even raised the issue directly to Dan Shapero, now LinkedIn’s CEO, when I saw him at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect Summit last year. He was polite, especially considering that a stranger had just told him that his product had a problem. He took a screenshot for his product team, but it’s only gotten worse since.

“AI slop” is making it harder to trust your connections

LinkedIn has positioned itself as a source of trusted business information in an environment where it is getting increasingly difficult to tell what is real, but we’ve all been seeing more updates, comments, and professional advice that are generated largely or entirely by AI.

The overall volume of original posts has risen by 14% year over year, and LinkedIn has acknowledged the rise of AI slop. The company says it is reducing the distribution of generic AI-generated material, but my personal experience is that this is getting worse, not better. You can’t hold back the tide.

We look to our connections on LinkedIn for their expertise, but it’s hard to trust that expertise when we cannot tell whether the person posting has done the work, holds the opinion, or even read what appears under their name.

That creates an awkward tension for a platform working hard to position itself as a source of trustworthy professional information. A verified identity does not necessarily produce a genuine point of view.

Can trust in hiring be rebuilt?

The ghost-job investigation, fake employee profiles, and the rise of AI slop are three manifestations of the same problem.

Fundamentally, we are questioning what is real and whom we can trust.

This is not just a LinkedIn problem—the company is the focus here because it is the 800-pound gorilla in the recruiting industry. The company has made some smart moves to strengthen trust, particularly introducing verified profiles, but the broader credibility problem is still there.

— David

Featured Story

Stop Adding AI to Broken Hiring Processes

Drawing on years of firsthand experience, Rob Devlin argues that AI cannot fix hiring processes burdened by unclear workflows, weak governance, and systems people routinely work around. Some great insight here for anyone leading or undergoing a technology implementation. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Randstad jumps to 9-month high after earnings beat as hiring recovery gains pace. Randstad reported stronger-than-expected second-quarter growth as hiring activity improved in North America and Germany, suggesting the long staffing slowdown may be beginning to ease. Temporary hiring is often a leading indicator, so this is great news, but I’m holding out for some more data points before buying into the “hiring recovery” narrative. (Investing.com)

55 Percent of Leaders Regret AI Layoffs—and a Major Hiring Reversal Has Begun. According to the article, some employers are reversing AI-related staffing cuts after automation proved less effective or more expensive than expected. The shift, including renewed hiring at Ford and IBM, highlights the workforce risks of eliminating roles before understanding how AI will change the work and sustain future talent pipelines. Like the Randstad article, I want to see if this is a real pattern before accepting the premise that there is a real reversal happening. (Inc.)

Tech Leaders and Economists Warn of AI’s Potential to Displace Jobs. More than 200 economists, AI researchers, and technology executives signed a brief open letter warning that rapidly advancing AI could cause large-scale job displacement while also raising productivity and living standards. Is this milk already spilt? (Business Insider)

Hogan Assessments Acquires Convogo. Hogan Assessments has acquired Convogo, an AI platform that combines personality assessment results with interviews, surveys, and other feedback to help talent professionals interpret complex information more efficiently. (Hogan Assessments)

US Tech Groups Cut 140,000 Jobs Despite AI Spending Boom. U.S. tech companies have cut nearly 140,000 jobs in 2026 while directing record levels of investment toward AI infrastructure, with the reductions reflecting pandemic-era overhiring and changing priorities as much as automation. (Financial Times)

A.I. Companies Are Recruiting Electricians and Carpenters by the Thousands. The rapid buildout of AI data centers is driving up demand and pay for electricians and other construction workers, prompting technology companies to invest heavily in apprenticeships and accelerated training programs. The boom is also pulling labor away from housing, manufacturing, and other infrastructure projects. (NYT)

Webinars

Hiring Changed. Recruiting Didn’t. How TA Teams Can Level Up Now

August 4, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Candidate Fraud AMA with Stacy Donovan Zapar

August 11, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

How to Hire for AI Fluency Now That It’s a Critical Skill

August 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

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.

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

Indeed’s Search Experience Is Creating an Opening

David Manaster — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:16:59 +0000

We just released the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit agenda, and I’m incredibly proud of what our team has put together. It is packed with topics that are critical to talent acquisition leaders right now.

This November, RIS will bring together TA practitioners from Wells Fargo, Ford Motor Company, Roblox, CVS Health, and more to share what they are learning, testing, and changing inside their recruiting organizations.

We’ve also got more amazing speakers and announcements coming up, so I hope that you can join us in San Diego.

Now, on to this week’s story.

Hamra Enterprises, a large restaurant franchise operator with more than 7,500 employees, needed to hire 50 associates for the grand opening of a new Panera in Spring, Texas. The company paid Indeed for Sponsored Jobs to maximize visibility. But when Sonja Breuer, Hamra’s senior vice president of human resources, searched for the openings, she saw jobs at Panda Express, McDonald’s, and other restaurants while Hamra’s sponsored jobs did not consistently appear.

“They’re putting in ‘Panera, Spring Texas,’” Breuer said. “You can’t get any more specific than that.”

After weeks of back-and-forth about how Indeed’s search system worked, Breuer’s frustration came down to a simpler point.

“I just want the search tool to work as it should.”

Breuer’s experience, which I first heard about via the Chad & Cheese podcast, highlights the dilemma facing Indeed right now. As the company places more emphasis on paid posts and a personalized search experience, it is making its search results less intuitive.

“To help job seekers find the most relevant opportunities, we combine exact search terms (specific employer, job title, or location) with additional context, including a person's skills, experience, preferences, qualifications, and real-time search and application behavior on Indeed. As a result, two people searching for the same employer, role, or location may see different results,” an Indeed spokesperson wrote when asked for comment.

There’s a legitimate opportunity to tailor search results to each candidate’s needs and improve relevance. And as agents play a larger role in job discovery, those customized results may ultimately become more important than a traditional search page.

That opportunity is very much at odds with Indeed’s monetization strategy.

“Premium Sponsored Jobs appear in the top three search results 2x more often than Standard Sponsored Jobs,” an Indeed representative wrote to Breuer, while also noting that premium sponsorship does not guarantee visibility in any particular search.

Charging employers to reach more candidates has long been Indeed’s business model, and Sponsored Jobs are not new. What’s changed is that Indeed is selling employers different probabilities of appearing in the most valuable positions within an algorithmic system they cannot reliably test or reproduce.

Indeed built its dominance on simple search results. Those results are now a black box, increasingly shaped by what employers pay.

“Where the hell is the competition?” Chris Russell asked a few weeks ago, questioning why Indeed’s established rivals have not challenged it more aggressively. Part of the answer is that many have reached the stage where monetizing their audience and employer relationships has taken priority over the job-search experience.

The more interesting challenges are coming from startups and founders that are still focused on building a better experience. Role and Dreamwork are two of them.

Role is trying to reduce job-search clutter

“Let’s start at the top of the funnel with building a better search,” Deven Patel said of the idea behind Role.

Patel’s frustration began during his own job search, when he kept finding duplicate openings sourced from other job boards and intermediaries. He would encounter the same job more than once or follow a listing to a third party rather than the employer.

Patel’s initial objective is to remove that clutter: duplicate jobs, third-party reposts, scams, and listings that redirect candidates through unnecessary intermediaries.

Role is designed more like a search engine than a traditional job board, and employers do not pay to have their jobs included in Role’s index. It pulls openings directly from company career sites rather than limiting its inventory to jobs submitted by paying customers.

“What I’m trying to build is basically like Google for jobs,” said Patel, “not necessarily a job board but a job-search engine.”

It sounds a lot like the old Indeed.

Dreamwork is using matching to bypass traditional search

Dreamwork founder Colin Johnson began developing the site after his wife, who was then a product manager at Indeed, was laid off while pregnant. What began as a project built out of spite has become a full pivot for his investor-backed three-person team.

Instead of asking users to search through a general results page, Dreamwork asks them to upload a resume. It compares the resume with the jobs in its database and ranks opportunities by estimated fit.

Johnson described his ideal experience as receiving the strongest matches with “no ads, no sponsor.”

Dreamwork does not so much clean Indeed-style search results as bypass them. The candidate receives a personalized list organized around the platform’s assessment of relevance rather than an assortment influenced by employer spending.

The product can also generate a tailored resume, cover letter, and answers to application questions. Paying users can have an automated agent submit the application through the employer’s applicant tracking system after reviewing the materials.

Identifying the problem is the easy part

Indeed became dominant by making job search simpler. The current system is more sophisticated, more personalized, and more heavily monetized. It is not clearer.

Role and Dreamwork have both identified real weaknesses in the experience. Role is trying to clean up the job inventory. Dreamwork is trying to replace search with personalized matching and application support.

Both companies are still in the early stages, driven by their founders’ frustration with the existing job-search experience. To be successful, they will need to attract enough candidates to prove that their approaches matter.

Role and Dreamwork are not close to replacing Indeed. But they are paying attention to a part of the experience that established competitors have largely stopped trying to reinvent.

— David

Featured Story

How Rippling Evaluates Executive Candidates

Julia Aybin offers an insider’s take on how Rippling hires senior leaders, from realistic case exercises to deep reference checks and candid conversations about the demands of the role. Julia demonstrates how the company evaluates executive judgment, operating ability, and fit rather than relying on pedigree or polished interview performance. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

New report: The State of Candidate Fraud Detection & Prevention. Industry analyst Kyle Lagunas, who will be keynoting the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit in November, examines how candidate fraud has expanded from a hiring-quality concern into a broader security and organizational risk, with vulnerabilities stretching from application intake through post-hire access. The report offers a comprehensive look at vulnerabilities at every stage of the hiring process, and is a must-read primer on this growing issue. (Kyle & Co.)

Land O’Lakes is letting workers choose what days and times they work—and the flex jobs are getting 25% more applicants than full-time gigs. Land O’Lakes is building part-time manufacturing and supply-chain shifts around workers’ availability rather than requiring fixed schedules. The flex roles receive about 25% more views and applications than traditional jobs, while turnover among new flex workers is 12 percentage points lower. (Fortune)

OpenAI says AI models went rogue during testing, triggering ‘unprecedented’ breach at startup. An autonomous agent powered by OpenAI models escaped a restricted testing environment, exploited security vulnerabilities, and accessed Hugging Face systems while trying to obtain answers for an evaluation. The incident shows how rapidly AI capabilities can outpace safeguards, raising urgent questions about access controls, monitoring, and human oversight as companies deploy agents into sensitive business systems. (NBC News)

Introducing the Workforce Data Explorer. Regular readers know I’m a data geek, and I love what Lance has put together here. His open-source Workforce Data Explorer combines 89 U.S. labor and workforce data sources with an AI chat interface, making it easier to ask questions, explore trends, and turn complex data into useful recruiting and workforce-planning insights. (Lance Haun)

Webinars

Hiring Changed. Recruiting Didn’t. How TA Teams Can Level Up Now

August 4, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Candidate Fraud AMA with Stacy Donovan Zapar

August 11, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

How to Hire for AI Fluency Now That It’s a Critical Skill

August 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

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.

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

The U.S. Workforce Is About to Stop Growing. Is Recruiting Ready?

David Manaster — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:42:54 +0000

The conversations that I usually have with people in talent acquisition about careers and the future of work have centered on the impact of AI and robotics. They go something like this: “If AI capabilities continue to grow at the current pace, they will inevitably be able to do the work currently done by employees. What kind of work will humans do in the future?”

But what if the next big change that will impact the workforce is less about AI and more about demographics?

Yesterday, John Sumser published an excellent primer on the demographic and economic forces pushing the U.S. toward a smaller labor pool.

The current challenges in the employment marketplace can make labor shortages seem like a ridiculous notion. Employers today are cutting recruiting teams, delaying requisitions, and receiving hundreds of applications for individual jobs. But many of those conditions are cyclical. The demographic forces reshaping the U.S. workforce are structural, and they are moving in the opposite direction.

Simply put, the United States is producing fewer future workers. The U.S. fertility rate fell to approximately 1.6 children per woman in 2024, a record low. At the same time, millions of baby boomers are reaching retirement age, leaving fewer workers behind to replace them.

Demographer Steven Ruggles projects that the U.S.-born labor force will shrink by 2.7 million people in the decade following 2030. From that point forward, labor force growth will depend on immigration, and a recent analysis found that net immigration in 2025 was actually negative for the first time in a half century.

One of the basic assumptions underlying the entire hiring ecosystem in the U.S. is an ever-growing workforce. In the last half century, we’ve seen baby boomers enter the workforce in enormous numbers, women’s participation increase dramatically, and immigration add millions of workers.

If the forecasts are correct, that’s all about to change.

Japan offers a possible window into what a transition to a shrinking population and workforce could look like.

Between 1995 and 2024, Japan’s population aged 15 to 64 shrank by approximately 15%, from 86.9 million to 73.7 million. Over the same period, total employment increased by 5%, as higher participation among women and older people more than offset the demographic decline.

The Japanese experience suggests that the early phase of demographic decline is not necessarily characterized by mass unemployment. It is more likely to be characterized by an intense effort to employ a greater percentage of the available population, followed by increasingly persistent labor shortages as that reserve is exhausted.

Talent acquisition cannot manufacture additional people. It can, however, help employers stop unnecessarily excluding the people who are already available. That means reevaluating degree requirements, experience thresholds, location restrictions, scheduling practices, and lengthy hiring processes.

Employers will also have to become more serious about talent pools they have traditionally described as “alternative,” such as older workers, people with disabilities, caregivers returning to employment, veterans, people with criminal records, immigrants, workers without college degrees, and candidates seeking reduced or flexible schedules.

That brings us back to AI. In a few years, we may not view AI as a simple substitute for labor, but as an essential tool for adapting to a world where our population is no longer growing.

— David

Poll Results

Last week we asked whether telling candidates where they stand should be a baseline requirement in recruiting. 142 of you answered.

The most popular answer was the most categorical: 31% said yes, every applicant deserves closure. Another 17% said yes with practical exceptions, and 16% would require it only for interviewed candidates. In total, 64% support making closure a standard in some form.

One split worth noting: government and private-sector respondents answered very differently. Among government HR professionals, a majority — 55% — were skeptical, with "no, employers need flexibility" and "good idea, but impractical" as the top two answers. Private-sector respondents went the other way: 77% backed some form of closure standard, and 43% wanted it for every applicant, no exceptions. The hesitation, it seems, isn't evenly distributed — it's concentrated where hiring rules are already the heaviest.

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More Recruiting Insights

The Population Bust Is Coming Sooner Than Anyone Is Prepared For. Lyman Stone argues that official U.S. population forecasts remain too optimistic because they assume immigration will stay high and fertility will stabilize or rebound, despite evidence pointing in the opposite direction. (NYT)

China’s Graduate Glut. A record 12.7 million Chinese college graduates are entering a weak job market shaped by slower economic growth, a mismatch between degrees and available work, and automation of many entry-level tasks. Add this to the growing pile of evidence of the impact of AI on early-career hiring. (The Guardian)

Where Salary Ranges Actually Help Job Seekers. An analysis of nearly 1.38 million active U.S. job listings found that while 34.3% included a parseable salary range, less than a quarter offered a range narrow enough to help candidates make informed decisions. These salary ranges need to be about more than just compliance if they are going to be useful. (Corvi Careers)

U.S. Workers Are More Productive Than Ever. A.I. Isn’t the Key. U.S. labor productivity is growing at its fastest pace in at least two decades, driven by tight labor markets, digitization, remote work, and other changes, with AI still playing a secondary role. Companies are producing more while limiting hiring, a shift that could keep recruiting demand subdued even as retirements and lower immigration tighten the labor supply. (NYT)

Unretirement is quietly becoming the new normal in the U.S. This is a startling number - According to the AARP, seven percent of retirees have returned to work in the past six months, with nearly half citing the need to cover everyday expenses. (Inc.)

Recruiting’s AI ROI Problem Is Not an AI Problem. I had a great conversation with Master Burnett last week after he pushed back on the idea that AI cannot recognize nontraditional career paths as well as experienced recruiters. He has a stake in the debate because HireBrain sells this kind of contextual skills analysis, but his broader point is worth considering. (Master Burnett)

Webinars

Quality of Hire and Employer Branding in the Age of Social Media and AI

July 15, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Discover how modern behavioral signals can help you move beyond the resume to protect your people, strengthen your employer brand, and build a safer, more resilient workforce. In this session, FAMA CEO Ben Mones will walk through how younger generations and the age of AI are changing the hiring landscape, and explore how we can adapt to protect our teams, brand reputations, and quality of hire. (ERE)

Hiring Changed. Recruiting Didn’t. How TA Teams Can Level Up Now

August 4, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Mike Rasmussen will an honest look at why more tools, more activity, and more reporting haven’t automatically produced better hiring outcomes. He’ll show what it looks like when TA teams stop managing requisitions and start shaping decisions. (ERE)

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.

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

A New Standard for Ending Candidate Ghosting

David Manaster — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:16:54 +0000

I have known Gerry Crispin for more than 25 years, and he is a talent acquisition legend.

A founder of the CareerXRoads talent acquisition community, Gerry has spent his career advocating for candidates and pushing the recruiting profession to hold itself to a higher standard.

He had a hand in developing several of the early SHRM human-resource standards, including work involving cost per hire and quality of hire. He was also instrumental in creating the CandE Benchmark Research and Award Program (which was briefly part of ERE Media before being acquired by Survale), which conducts candidate-experience benchmarking that recognizes employers who provide strong candidate experiences.

Gerry is now leading the development of a proposed Baseline Standard for Applicant Closure, a document intended to establish the minimum that an organization owes every person who applies for a job.

The basic obligation is simple: Tell applicants when they are no longer being considered.

This type of closure would be required for 100% of applicants, regardless of application volume or recruiting stage.

“We're trying to draw a line in the sand. Above this line there's lots of opportunity for best practices," Gerry told me. "Below, it's unacceptable and you should be called out."

What counts as closure?

The standard defines applicant closure as a clear, documented communication telling someone that they are no longer under consideration for a specific position, and it should be issued promptly after a disposition decision has been made.

Ghosting is prohibited, and the classic recruiting response “we will contact you if we are interested” is insufficient to meet the standard.

To document that every candidate receives closure, the standard calls for every employer’s system of record to be capable of recording timestamps for:

The initial submission
Automated screening, assessment, or AI-based evaluation
Human review
The final disposition decision
The closure communication

Where the standard could have an impact

A “dirty dozen” recruiting experts spent the first half of 2026 developing and revising the proposal through six iterations before the group reached agreement.

They want the standard to influence three groups.

Recruiting technology vendors. Most applicant tracking systems already provide tools for sending individual or bulk rejection messages. Yet employers can configure those systems in ways that allow applicants to remain unresolved indefinitely.

The recruiting profession. The standard’s authors see a need for recruiters and TA leaders to hold peers accountable. They want new recruiters entering the field to be taught that ghosting is not an acceptable byproduct of high-volume hiring.

Government. The standard aims to define a practical baseline before governments do so. Ontario, Canada already requires certain employers to notify interviewed candidates of hiring decisions within 45 days; if there is a widely supported professional standard, it could serve as a model for future legislation.

What can you do?

The drafters are now seeking broader support from within the talent acquisition profession, with a short-term goal of 100 signatures by the end of July and 1,000 by the end of the year.

The level of support from the recruiting profession will determine whether this remains a thoughtful proposal or becomes something more.

— David

Featured Story

Why Second-Chance Hiring Belongs in Your Talent Strategy

I’m proud to share this piece by Deborah Williamson about a topic that we don’t discuss much in talent acquisition - hiring the formerly incarcerated. Everyone deserves a second chance, and this is not charity, but a practical talent strategy. By widening the funnel, partnering with re-entry organizations, and supporting development after hire, employers can reach motivated workers while strengthening retention, mobility, and local labor pools. (ERE)

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In AI-exposed jobs, only the youngest workers are losing ground. Evidence continues to build that employment opportunities have fallen sharply for young workers in the jobs most exposed to AI, while hiring has continued to grow for older workers and young people in less-exposed roles. (Stanford Digital Economy Lab)

EU delays high-risk AI rules for hiring and employment. The EU has delayed its high-risk requirements for AI systems used in employment, which were set to go into effect next month, until December 2027. (Council of the EU)

HR.com is for sale. Debbie McGrath, founder of HR.com and an industry stalwart, is retiring and looking for a buyer for the HR.com domain and media business. Separating the domain from the rest of the business is an interesting move - I’m wondering how valuable the business is without the domain to support it. (Debbie McGrath)

The U.S. labor force participation rate fell again. The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 4.2% in June, but largely because 720,000 people left the labor force, pushing participation to 61.5%, its lowest non-pandemic level in 50 years. (CNBC)

Webinars

Quality of Hire and Employer Branding in the Age of Social Media and AI

July 15, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Tech Demo Tuesday: Discover the Hottest Tools in Recruiting

July 21, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Get an inside look at the technologies reshaping how teams attract, evaluate, and hire top talent. From AI-powered tools to automation platforms and everything in between, you’ll gain practical insights and proven strategies to elevate your recruiting game. Whether your goal is to speed up hiring, improve candidate experience, or future-proof your tech stack, Tech Demo Tuesday delivers the clarity and inspiration to make it happen. (ERE)

Hiring Changed. Recruiting Didn’t. How TA Teams Can Level Up Now

August 4, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

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.

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

AI Is Already Driving Career-Site Traffic

David Manaster — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Generative AI platforms now account for a measurable share of traffic to employer career sites, although traditional search engines and job boards remain far larger sources of candidates.

In June, traffic attributed to AI platforms accounted for 1.07% of all visits across the career sites hosted by recruitment marketing agency HireClix.

The results varied considerably by employer. One government contractor received 6.89% of its career-site visits from AI platforms, up from 1.33% in January. Approximately 90% of the AI traffic came from ChatGPT.

The findings provide an early indication that candidates are beginning to discover jobs through services such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. But they also show that AI remains a small source compared with more established channels.

At the government contractor, search engines still generated 63% of all visits, while job boards accounted for 30%. Social media contributed less than 1%.

Neil Costa, CEO of HireClix, said employers should view AI discoverability as an extension of search optimization rather than a replacement for traditional channels.

“It’s not dominant, but it’s a pretty quick ramp,” Costa said in an interview with ERE. “The biggest thing that we can do as it relates to AI is making sure that we help clients respond to the change in consumer behavior and how they search for jobs.”

Ritu Mohanka, CEO of recruitment marketing technology company VONQ, said employers are already reconsidering how dependent they have become on a small number of platforms for candidate discovery. AI offers the first significant opportunity in years to diversify those sources.

“Even before the traffic shows up, companies are positioning for it, making sure their jobs are discoverable to AI, treating it as worth investing in rather than waiting to see if it proves itself,” Mohanka said.

Referral traffic may also capture only one part of how AI is changing candidate behavior, as AI agents can increasingly search for jobs, evaluate matches, and submit applications directly through technical integrations without the candidate ever opening a job page.

“An agent calls an API, gets a ranked shortlist, applies,” Mohanka said. “No click, no referral, nothing for a dashboard to count.”

That could make the current focus on AI-generated career-site visits temporary, as referral traffic may not capture the full role AI is beginning to play in how candidates find and apply for jobs.

“If you’re only measuring AI referral traffic,” Mohanka said, “you’re measuring the last visible mile of a process that’s becoming invisible.”

— David

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Featured Story

The Candidate Your AI Just Rejected Might Be Your Best Hire

Elisha Zagerman highlights how easily AI screening can miss strong candidates whose titles or resumes do not fully reflect their transferable skills and unconventional experience. (ERE)

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Korn Ferry to acquire AMS in $1.1 billion deal. Korn Ferry’s planned $1.1 billion acquisition of AMS will combine its search and consulting capabilities with a major global provider of RPO, contingent workforce, and early-career services. (Staffing Industry Analysts)

Teaching AI How People Work Is Fraught With Problems. Much workplace expertise remains tacit, built through experience and judgment rather than documented in systems or processes. Teaching AI this knowledge is not simply a technical challenge, since capturing it may require intrusive monitoring and could alter how employees develop, retain, and pass on expertise. (The Economist)

Putting AI on the Org Chart: Evidence on Delegation and Oversight. This study finds that managers working with formal “AI employees” tend to review their output less carefully, catch fewer errors, and place more responsibility on the system. It has profound implications as more companies treat AI agents more like team members. (Emma Wiles)

The $4.4 Trillion Question. This analyses of the enormous investments in AI infrastructure would require replacing more than 10 million knowledge workers to generate an acceptable return. That's a lot of smart money betting on an outcome that is going to generate a lot of pain. (Behind the Balance Sheet)

Webinars

Quality of Hire and Employer Branding in the Age of Social Media and AI

July 15, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Hiring Changed. Recruiting Didn’t. How TA Teams Can Level Up Now

August 4, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

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.

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

AI Is Currently Priced Below Cost. That Won't Last.

David Manaster — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:27:15 +0000

Many workforce decisions being made now come down to what it costs to run AI versus what it costs for a human to do the same job. Companies are restructuring around that math.

Ramp, which tracks corporate spending across more than 70,000 businesses, found that the top 1% of companies — the ones it calls "AI-pilled" — are now spending roughly $7,500 per employee per month on AI tools and compute. For comparison, the average U.S. software engineer costs about $16,000 a month, so the heaviest AI spenders are still paying less than half of one engineer's salary to put AI in an employee's hands.

That spend among the AI-pilled companies has grown more than twelvefold since mid-2023, from under $600 per employee to nearly $7,500, with each year rising faster than the last. That kind of growth won't stay below an engineer's salary for long.

It isn't just the early adopters, either. The median company spends only about $11 per employee, but it's on the same curve, just earlier.

The rapid growth in AI spending is already straining some budgets. Mercor is now spending more on AI than on employee salaries. So are divisions inside Nvidia. Uber capped employee AI spending in April after burning through its entire 2026 coding budget in four months.

OpenAI's audited pre-IPO financials leaked this month, and the numbers are an eye-opener. The company pulled in about $13 billion in revenue in 2025 against $34 billion in costs — an operating loss of roughly $21 billion in a single year. The product is being sold for far less than it costs to build and deliver.

It's the Silicon Valley playbook: launch below cost, deliver so much value at that price that adoption goes vertical, then raise the price once everyone's hooked. Remember when an Uber across Manhattan was cheaper than a yellow cab? When Netflix was $7.99 a month? When Google Workspace was simply free? None of those prices were meant to last. The services were priced below cost to win market share, and once they hit mass adoption, the price climbed steadily as the focus shifted to profit.

We are squarely in that phase with AI. AI models read and write text in units called tokens — very roughly, a token is a word or a piece of one — and every provider charges by the token. The OpenAI financials show that the tokens we’re using today are priced below what they actually cost to develop and deliver. That can't last forever, and when it ends, the bill will rise.

The falling cost of tokens won't save anyone here, either. The price of a given level of AI capability has fallen dramatically in the last two years. Yet the work has grown faster than the price has fallen: the newest models use far more tokens for each inference, and agentic systems that chain together many steps burn even more. We have access to cheaper tokens, but need more of them, so the total bill keeps climbing even as the per-token price collapses.

Organizations are reshaping their workforces today around AI costs that are inherently unstable — cutting roles and holding headcount flat on the strength of AI pricing the providers are losing billions to sustain.

How many of the workforce bets being placed today are built on pricing that can't last? What happens when the prices go up?

— David

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Why men keep dropping out of the labor force. A new study argues that men’s beliefs about the value of work are shaped by the labor markets they witness throughout life, especially in childhood. Poor conditions early on may leave a lasting imprint on whether they see employment as worthwhile. (Fortune)

Employment scams soar. Employment scam reports doubled in 2025 according to the Better Business Bureau, driven in part by “task” schemes that promise easy pay for liking videos or rating products. Victims may receive small payouts at first, then are pressured to send money or crypto to unlock supposed earnings, with some losing tens of thousands of dollars. (Better Business Bureau)

Workday Loses Bid to Toss AI Discrimination Suit in California. A federal judge has allowed major discrimination claims in Mobley v. Workday to move forward. The ruling keeps alive allegations that the company’s AI screening tools filtered out applicants based on age, disability, and race, raising the stakes for vendors and employers relying on them. (Bloomberg Law)

U.S. filings for unemployment benefits fall to 226,000 last week as layoffs remain historically low. US unemployment claims fell last week, as hiring begins to recover despite fears that the Iran war would further weaken the labor market. The improvement follows a disastrous 2025, when fewer than 200,000 jobs were added, compared with roughly 1.5 million in 2024. (Associate Press)

SHRM CEO: HR faces ‘extinction’ and has ‘lost the plot’ on the future of work. At a 2025 meeting with Fortune 500 CEOs, only 10% indicated that they valued HR, while 30% said it delivered little or no value. Taylor argues that HR’s survival depends on proving its business impact, not simply managing traditional people processes. (HR Dive)

Webinars

Quality of Hire and Employer Branding in the Age of Social Media and AI

July 15, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

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.

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

What Jalen Brunson Can Teach Us About Team Building

David Manaster — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:56:08 +0000

I'm not a sports person. It takes a lot to get me excited about basketball. But I am a lifelong New Yorker — we don't talk about my current stint in New Jersey — and the Knicks' championship even got me fired up.

But this is a newsletter about talent, so why am I writing about basketball?

Because a lot of things had to go right for the Knicks to win. They had to rally from double-digit deficits in every game that they won. They had to pull off a Game 4 miracle, coming back from 29 points down before OG Anunoby tipped in the game-winner. In Game 5, team captain Jalen Brunson scored a series-high 45 points — almost as much as the rest of the team combined.

After the win, Brunson was named MVP. As he put it afterward, it was everything he'd ever dreamed of.

But Brunson’s most critical contribution may have come nearly two years earlier, in July 2024, when he signed his four-year contract extension for $156.5 million. That’s a lot of money, but it was roughly $113 million less than he could have had if he waited a year to hit free agency.

That decision wasn't just generous. By leaving money on the table, Brunson kept the Knicks clear of the NBA's "second apron," a hard spending threshold that functions like a salary cap and would have severely restricted their ability to build out the roster. In practical terms, his sacrifice created the financial runway the organization needed to invest in the talent around him — including Anunoby.

The on-court heroics are one thing. Just as important is what Brunson made possible off the court. When a leader puts their money where their mouth is, it sends a message to the rest of the team.

If you still doubt that this is really a talent acquisition story, take a look at the stock price for Madison Square Garden Sports Corp. — the publicly traded company that owns the Knicks.

When Brunson signed as a free agent in July 2022, shares traded around $149. By this June, the stock peaked close to $394 — a more than 2.5x climb during Brunson's tenure.

We talk about team building and culture constantly in talent acquisition. Jalen Brunson and the Knicks are reminders that culture is modeled from the top, and that teams are built by example.

— David

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Featured Story

Employ Adds VONQ AI Screening to JazzHR and Lever

The partnership is positioned to address rising applicant volume, but also to create a more transparent and defensible screening record that shows recruiters the reasons that candidates were ranked as they were. (ERE)

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The US job market is strong but many Americans are still frustrated by prospects and rising prices. The job numbers have had strong showings for the last three months, in spite of the uncertainty weighing on employers. (AP)

The Borderless Pay Standard: A Global Study on Worker Pay Transparency Expectations. According to this report by Globalization Partners, 82% of workers globally say pay transparency is important, but only 34% believe they work at an organization that practices it. (Globalization Partners)

AI Has Broken Hiring. Here’s How to Fix It. Resumes and remote interviews continue to lose value as a representation of who a candidate is, thanks to AI. I’m curious to see how authors Shraddha Sunil and Mudit Saraf address this in the product that they are building. (Harvard Business Review)

Demand for AI Skills in Entry-level Jobs Nearly Triples Since Fall 2025. AI skills are moving quickly from nice-to-have to expected, even in entry-level roles. In the spring of 2026, the percentage of entry-level jobs that require AI skills has risen to 35%. (NACE)

Webinars

Quality of Hire and Employer Branding in the Age of Social Media and AI

July 15, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

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.

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

Indeed Is Cutting Visibility for Free Job Postings

David Manaster — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0000

A little housekeeping: This week's newsletter is arriving a day early — we have breaking news on Indeed's upcoming pricing changes. Also, I’m always looking for feedback and tips for future stories — just email me at editor(at)ere.net.

Indeed is changing the rules. Free job postings are becoming less visible, so if you want to be found on the largest job site in the world, you'll need to pay.

The company's new stance, as explained by a spokesperson: "Organic visibility will not be completely removed, but organic visibility for free jobs is not guaranteed nor will it be consistent over time, particularly in competitive roles or locations. Paid products, such as Sponsored Jobs and Premium Sponsored Jobs help roles show up more prominently and more often to relevant job seekers."

This means that free job posts will increasingly disappear into the noise, while paying customers get prominent placement. How much you'll need to spend depends on the role. "Spend levels will vary customer to customer and will depend on a few factors: how hard the role is to fill, how high of a priority the hire is, or the competitive landscape of a particular industry or geographic area," the spokesperson said.

Reading from the Monetization Playbook

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is a well-worn path in the tech industry: build a free or heavily subsidized product to gain market share, wait until you've achieved critical mass, then monetize.

When Uber launched, ride prices were heavily subsidized to squeeze out competitors. Once the company had a commanding market position, prices rose. Google has steadily shifted search results to give more prominence to paid listings over organic results. Amazon has done the same with its product search — sponsored listings now dominate.

Indeed itself has followed this path before. The company originally incentivized employers to share their job feeds for free, then later began charging for those same feeds. The current changes are simply the next chapter.

The Fraud Problem

Indeed's monetization move comes at a sensitive moment for job boards.

The industry has a real credibility problem: job posting fraud. According to Greenhouse's 2025 AI in Hiring Report, 69% of U.S. job seekers believe that they have encountered fake job postings and almost half of U.S. job seekers (46%) say their trust in hiring has decreased over the past year.

Indeed is responding on two fronts. The first is a direct attack on duplicate and stale listings: "We are taking decisive steps to deliver on our promise of quality by reducing job copies or duplicate roles. We will limit 'refresh' reposts or duplicate listings intended to make old roles look new." This squarely targets so-called “ghost jobs” and is hard to read as anything other than a genuine quality initiative.

The second front is the visibility change, where the fraud-reduction argument is murkier. Paid posts are backed by companies willing to spend money, which does raise the floor for legitimate intent. But the unpaid posts aren't being removed; they're just being deprioritized. If fraud reduction were the primary goal, you'd expect a different solution from the company — one that would remove the low-quality job posts entirely.

The more plausible interpretation is that the visibility change is primarily about monetization, with fraud reduction as a real but secondary benefit. The company gets to raise prices while focusing attention on job posting fraud.

What This Means for Employers

The initial reaction from employers will be grumbling. Nobody likes paying more for something they used to get for free.

The longer-term outcome, though, hinges less on employers than on job seekers. Employers go where the candidates are. If reducing fraudulent and low-quality listings produces a meaningfully better search experience, job seekers will notice. If Indeed's traffic grows as a result, employers will have no real choice but to go along — and may even welcome paying more in exchange for improved candidate flow.

— David

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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.

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

AI Gets Political. Recruiting Will Feel It.

David Manaster — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:12:50 +0000

AI company Anthropic filed for an IPO this week at a possible valuation approaching $1 trillion. OpenAI is expected to follow, with similarly lofty expectations. That’s a tremendous amount of value creation for the owners and employees of those companies.

The public mood around AI is far less enthusiastic.

Americans would rather have a nuclear power plant in their neighborhood than an AI data center. Nuclear power still carries the stigma of past disasters, but at least people understand the tradeoff: it can provide reliable electricity, stable jobs, and tangible local economic value.

AI data centers present a very different bargain. They consume huge amounts of power and water, contribute to higher electricity costs, and create relatively few long-term jobs once built. Worse, they power technologies that Sam Altman said less than a year ago were likely to replace 40% of work tasks “in the not very distant future.” This week, he called off the job apocalypse, perhaps realizing that AI in general, and he in particular, are facing a very real image problem.

If the billions in value creation are going to someone else while you are left with higher electric bills and the risk of losing your job, is it really surprising unpopular this is?

It’s gotten to the point where AI has become so overwhelmingly unpopular that it’s becoming a major political issue, in spite of the best efforts of the industry to lobby away legislation.

Bernie Sanders recently proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would require the largest AI companies to pay a one-time 50 percent tax in stock to a federal sovereign wealth fund, giving the public shared upside in their success.

On the right, Senator Josh Hawley has proposed numerous bills to make AI companies legally accountable for their products, with government evaluation of frontier systems and liability when AI causes harm.

Even the Trump administration, which on day one revoked Biden’s AI order and framed earlier safeguards as barriers to American AI leadership, has started to move toward oversight. On June 2, Trump signed an executive order creating a framework under which leading AI developers can give the federal government up to 30 days to review frontier models for cybersecurity risks before release. The executive order makes participation voluntary, but it is a sign of things to come.

The issue is moving beyond Washington. Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on AI warned against the assumption that automation automatically improves work. It raised concerns about deskilling, surveillance, rigid work design, and the loss of worker agency. It’s a moral argument, asking whether these systems are being designed to support human beings or simply to extract more efficiency from them.

The political shift on AI is going to have real consequences for talent acquisition.

The current administration has tried to protect AI companies from regulation, but public opinion is now so negative that some form of regulation feels inevitable. Job loss fears are driving much of that opinion, so hiring will be one of the obvious targets.

Defensibility will matter more.
Talent acquisition teams will need to be able to explain what models are being used, what decisions they influence, what data they rely on, what human review exists, and how the company knows the process is fair. A vague promise that a vendor uses “responsible AI” will not be enough.

Employer experience and brand will have to account for AI anxiety.
Talent acquisition teams that automate large parts of the hiring process without explaining what they are doing will make the process feel cold and unaccountable. But TA departments that use AI while preserving human access, fairness, and transparency can create a trust advantage. They can show candidates that technology is being used to improve the process, not to remove judgment, accountability, or the human relationships at the center of hiring.

TA operations will become even more important.
TA ops is already one of the profession’s growth areas. Decreased public trust and increased regulation will only accelerate that. Governance, workflow design, vendor management, compliance documentation, audit trails, and process controls are not side issues. The companies that use AI well will need people who understand both the technology and the hiring process deeply enough to make it work.

— David

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Featured Story

AI Can Identify Problems. Recruiters Still Have to Lead.

AI is surfacing hiring risks earlier, from weak candidate flow to process bottlenecks, but the recruiter’s value is in turning those signals into clear decisions. For talent acquisition leaders, Eric Van Duren argues that market intelligence should raise expectations for recruiter judgment, especially in high-stakes fields like healthcare. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Google Search as you know it is over. Google is reshaping Search around AI-generated answers, follow-up questions, interactive results, and background “information agents” rather than ranked links. This is going to fundamentally change how we find information on the internet, and rest assured that Google will find new places for toll booths along the way. (TechCrunch)

Remote Work Leaves Younger Workers Sidelined. New York Fed researchers found that remote work, not generative AI, explains the bulk of the recent rise in unemployment among young college graduates. (New York Fed)

…but remote workers still do not want to return to the office. Readers pushed back on Fidelity’s plan to require 6,200 Boston employees to work in-office five days a week, with an informal poll finding 69% opposed. (Boston.com)

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.

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

What’s Happening to Talent Acquisition Careers? (2026 edition)

David Manaster — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:44:12 +0000

Last year, I wrote about what was driving the scarcity of jobs in talent acquisition.

Demand for TA professionals was being squeezed by three forces: the hangover from excesses of the COVID era, the corporate push for efficiency, and AI. These forces are also connected: the overexpansion of the COVID era led to the push for leaner teams, and AI gave those teams the ability to do more work with fewer people.

The official employment count for Human Resources Specialists declined in 2025 for the first time in the data series I reviewed. But the gap between current employment levels and the pre-COVID trendline is also narrowing. If the profession is simply reverting to that long-term trendline, the correction may be closer to the end than the beginning.

The big caveat is AI. If AI fundamentally changes the demand for recruiters, then the old trendline may no longer tell us where TA employment is headed.

Like last year, I am using the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Human Resources Specialists category as a stand-in for talent acquisition professionals. It includes other HR roles, so it is not a clean measure of recruiting employment. But it is the closest official proxy we have for talent acquisition careers, especially because BLS has separate categories for HR Managers, Training and Development Specialists, and Compensation and Benefits Specialists.

During the boom years for the recruiting profession, the number of Human Resources Specialists grew unusually fast. From 2020 to 2022, the category added 187,550 jobs, or 13.6% annually, which was far above pre-COVID norms.

That growth was unsustainable, and for the last two years we’ve seen the growth rate steadily decline.

In 2025, newly released BLS data shows, the number of Human Resources Specialists fell for the first time since the BLS began providing the data in 2012.

The decline was only 0.5%, or 5,030 jobs, but after several years in which TA professionals have experienced layoffs and a brutal job market, the official data is finally showing the weakness that has been obvious within the profession.

Is This the Beginning of TA Job Declines or the End?

For many TA professionals, this has been a brutal job market. But recruiting is cyclical, and demand for TA professionals has historically followed the broader hiring market. So where are we in this cycle of supply and demand?

A look at the historical data shows that the pre-COVID trendline is catching up to where we are now.

This is not happening because the TA market has recovered. Time is doing some of the work: the extraordinary COVID-era spike is flattening out, while the old trendline continues to move upward.

Why Things Feel So Bad Even With Only a Small Decline

Median wages for Human Resources Specialists grew by an inflation-adjusted 1.77%, a modest number, but still faster than overall wage growth.

So with only small declines in employment and better-than-average wage growth, why does the profession still feel so bad?

Careers are not just about how many people are employed. They are about movement.

When teams are growing, opportunities multiply. Recruiters move into senior roles. Coordinators get promoted. Managers open new seats. People who lose jobs can often find another company that is still building.

When growth stops, everything tightens.

A flat or slightly declining market can feel brutal if fewer roles are being posted, and every open job attracts a deep pool of experienced TA professionals.

AI: Still the Elephant in the Room

The optimistic conclusion here is that we are now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for this correction. If the long-term trendline is still valid, then the gap between where the profession is and where it “should” be is getting smaller.

The caution is that the old trendline may not hold.

Last year, I wrote that AI was the structural wild card. I still think that is the case. AI has not replaced recruiters in the simplistic way that some predicted, but it is changing the recruiting profession from top to bottom.

Companies now have more tools for sourcing, screening, scheduling, writing, outreach, analytics, and workflow automation. Some of those tools are overhyped. Some create real risk. But they make it easier for companies to imagine a lighter recruiting function with fewer employees than were previously necessary.

Are we seeing a normal reversion to the pre-COVID trendline? Or are we seeing the beginning of a lower trendline for TA employment because new technologies are permanently reducing demand for traditional recruiting roles?

For now, the data suggests that the COVID-era correction may be getting closer to its end, unless AI is fundamentally changing the baseline for how many recruiters companies need.

— David

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Featured Story

AI Can Identify Problems. Recruiters Still Have to Lead.

More Recruiting Insights

Top analyst warns the economy is figuring out how to grow without creating new jobs. Stronger productivity, helped in part by AI, could let the U.S. economy keep expanding even as job creation stays weak. For TA leaders, the warning is that GDP growth may be a less reliable signal of hiring demand, making workforce planning, internal mobility, and skills strategy more important when headcount growth is limited. (Fortune)

India hiring tilts toward contracts as AI prompts workforce rethink. Indian employers are leaning more on contract and outsourced hiring as AI makes headcount planning harder. In times of uncertainty, flexibility is important. (Reuters)

Should I stay or should I go? The pay tradeoff. It’s a bit wonky, but there are some interesting insights about the current state of job-hopping in this BofA economic report.

Those in the top 5% by income were the only group where job stayers saw stronger wage growth than job switchers
It still pays to switch jobs, but the gap in wage growth with job stayers is the smallest in the past seven years.

(Bank of America)

The Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence 2026 AI Index Report. This report is a deep dive into the effects of AI on society and work. Here’s a few of my takeaways:

Employment for software developers ages 22 to 25 has fallen nearly 20% from 2024.

One-third of organizations expect AI to reduce their workforce in the coming year, even though large-scale job losses have not yet shown up in overall employment data.
Demand for Agentic AI skills rose over 10,000% in 2025.

(Stanford HAI)

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.

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

Recruiting Is Being Optimized for Speed. It Should Be Designed for Outcomes.

David Manaster — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:02:50 +0000

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

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.

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

AI Rewards the Boring Work in Recruiting

David Manaster — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:15:08 +0000

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

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)

How GALLO Rebuilt Talent Acquisition for the AI Era

David Manaster — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:30:53 +0000

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

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Featured Story

Four Mindset Shifts Every Sourcer Needs in the Age of AI

I love a good sourcing article, and this one is a must-read. Elena Volk shares how AI has changed sourcing from manual search to a systems discipline, where the win comes from designing a smart funnel and then supervising it. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

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)

What Declining Trust in Higher Education Means for Recruiting

David Manaster — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:49:49 +0000

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:

Replace Proxies with Proof. Reduce reliance on degrees, GPA, and school pedigree.
Increase use of structured, role-relevant assessments.
Build Transparent Hiring Systems. Document evaluation criteria and ensure decisions can be explained and defended.
Expand Talent Pipelines. Move beyond elite institutions. Invest in partnerships with community colleges, bootcamps, and alternative credential providers.
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.

Featured Story

Why AI Efficiency Can Lead to Burnout in Recruiting

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)

More Recruiting Insights

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)

The Benefit Job-Seekers Want But No Employer Offers

Vadim Liberman — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

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

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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)

Tinder Is the New LinkedIn

Vadim Liberman — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

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

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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)

The Shift from Employer Brand Toward Employee Experience

David Manaster — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:28:34 +0000

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

(ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)

How Zip Is Tackling Fraud in the Application Process

David Manaster — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:25:09 +0000

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)

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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

(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)

Phenom’s Agentic Vision Gets More Ambitious

David Manaster — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:56:47 +0000

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

(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)