HR Brain Pickings

🔗 ResumeTemplates.com — Nearly Half of Hiring Managers Will Train AI Instead of Hiring 2026 College Grads

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[New Webinar] HR Legal AMA: How to Address Workplace Discrimination & Harassment

In this AMA (ask me anything) session, employment attorney Heather Bussing will answer your questions about:

Dealing with discrimination and harassment claims
How to approach complaints
Running fair and effective investigations
Avoiding common missteps that can escalate issues

Please submit your questions in the sign up form. The focus is on clear, and honest answers you can use.

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🪜 The career ladder has a missing bottom rung

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Hey HR folks! 👋

Today we're talking about entry-level jobs. Specifically, where they went and what it costs when they don't come back.

The numbers are new. The problem they're describing has been building for a while.

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IN TODAY’S EDITION

🪜 The career ladder has a missing bottom rung

☕ The Break Room: how is your org approaching early-career hiring as AI takes on more entry-level work?

📚 Additional Reading: Amazon's tokenmaxxing crackdown, Netflix's Ladies First and what the data says about women at work, and the court case that shows why your own deadlines can be used against you.

OPENING THOUGHTS

🪜 The career ladder has a missing bottom rung

A ResumeTemplates.com survey published in May 2026 puts a number on what many HR leaders have been sensing:

48% say their company would rather invest in AI tools than hire and train a class of 2026 college graduate. '
55% have already shifted some or all of their entry-level hiring budget to AI tools.

And it's not just hiring freezes. 45% of companies have also restructured entry-level work so that one senior employee plus AI now does what previously required multiple junior hires.

The entry-level role is……….being removed.

What doesn’t show up in a cost model: the entry-level job was never just about the work, but rather the learning environment where future senior employees were built.

LET’S UNPICK

The ResumeTemplates data is worth sitting with. When hiring managers explain why they prefer AI over a recent grad, the top reasons are practical:

faster onboarding (61%),
more reliable output (55%),
24/7 availability (52%), and
lower cost (48%)

74% of tech companies and 73% of finance companies have already moved entry-level hiring budget to AI. The sectors where young workers have historically built careers fastest are now the fastest to close the door.

🔴 1 in 3 hiring managers (35%) won't hire the class of 2026 at the same volume as the prior year. 5% won't hire any 2026 grads at all.
🔴 45% of companies have restructured so that one senior employee plus AI does the work of two or more entry-level positions.
🔴 Among companies that shifted budget, more than 1 in 3 have moved at least 25% of their entry-level dollars into AI tools.

None of that is surprising in isolation. But let’s not forget what the entry-level role was actually for.

Matt Beane, author of "The Skill Code" and an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, told CNBC that the expert-novice model of skill-building has existed for roughly 160,000 years. Junior employees do low-stakes work alongside more experienced colleagues. They absorb judgment, context, and the texture of how decisions get made. That's how experts are produced. The model works because the learning is embedded in the doing.

When AI takes over the doing, the learning doesn't happen.

Junior analyst, junior banker, junior educator doesn't get a shot at participating in the work anymore because they are optional.
~Matt Beane

The cost of this is already measurable. When AI can perform most tasks for a specific role, the share of people in that role at a company falls by about 14%, according to a 2025 study co-authored by researchers at MIT, Northwestern University, and Yale. That's a full structural headcount reduction.

Zoom out and the downstream problem becomes visible. The pipeline that feeds senior roles and leadership has always depended on a steady flow of people who started at the bottom, did the work, and grew into it. When companies across industries stop making that hire, the supply of promotable talent shrinks.

Gen Z isn't waiting around. Research from The Conversation shows 85% of Gen Z workers already bring AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot into the workplace on their own initiative, and LinkedIn and Microsoft data shows a 160% surge in AI literacy learning courses.

This generation is adapting faster than the hiring market is giving them credit for. The problem is that the roles where that capability would have developed are being removed before they even get to prove it.

🔗 CNBC — Why AI may kill career advancement for many young workers

🔗 The Conversation — A robot stole my internship: How Gen Z's entry into the workplace is being affected by AI

TAKEAWAY AND TRY

📊 Frame the entry-level hiring decision as a pipeline risk, not a headcount question. When finance asks why you need junior hires when AI can do the task work, the answer is about where your senior talent in five years comes from. Map your current leadership team back to their starting roles and bring that data to the conversation.
🔍 Audit what moved when entry-level budget shifted to AI. If your org is among the 55% that reallocated entry-level hiring budget, track what changed in promotion rates, internal mobility, and time-to-fill for senior roles. The cost saving is visible immediately. The loss shows up later.
🤝 Redesign the learning model alongside any role restructuring. If AI is absorbing task work, the question becomes how to preserve the expert-novice dynamic in what remains. Apprenticeship tracks, structured mentorship, and rotational programs can recreate the learning conditions even as the traditional entry-level role shifts.
🎯 Make Gen Z's AI fluency a hiring asset, not a liability offset. 85% of Gen Z workers already bring AI tools into the workplace on their own. If entry-level roles are evolving to require human-AI collaboration, your job descriptions should reflect that rather than eliminating the role because AI is available.
📋 Get HR into the AI deployment conversation before restructuring decisions are made. The 45% of companies that reorganized entry-level work around AI likely didn't run that through a workforce planning lens first. Succession, talent supply, and pipeline health need to be part of the conversation when AI tooling decisions are made, not after the roles are already gone.

TLDR;

48% of hiring managers would rather invest in AI than hire a 2026 grad. The short-term cost math is clean. But the entry-level role was the training ground that built your senior talent pipeline. When AI takes over the task work, the learning that came with it disappears too.

HR's job right now is to reframe entry-level hiring as a pipeline investment before the C-suite discovers the same thing with nobody left to promote.

THE HR BREAK ROOM

ADDITIONAL READING

🤖 Amazon cautions employees against 'tokenmaxxing' as AI costs balloon — HR Brew. Amazon shut down an internal leaderboard where employees competed for highest AI token usage, after the metric started rewarding volume over value. The lesson for HR: AI adoption metrics that measure the wrong thing will drive exactly the wrong behavior.
🎬 Netflix's Ladies First drowns out its own message on workplace inequality — The HR Digest. A gender-flipped workplace comedy with Rosamund Pike and Sacha Baron Cohen tries to make the case for pay equity and representation. McKinsey's latest data is the sobering backdrop: for the 11th consecutive year, women hold only 29% of C-suite roles.
⚖️ Employer fires worker before its own corrective deadline and loses the unemployment case — HCA Mag. A Hawaiʻi court ruled against a tour company that terminated an employee two weeks before the compliance deadline it had set in writing. The ruling is a clean reminder: if your own paperwork sets a deadline, you have to honor it.

That’s It For Today!

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition sparked some new ideas for your workplace! 🧠

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The friday 5: AI budgets, papal encyclical, sick leave

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

Uber's engineers were told to go all-in on AI coding tools. They did. So enthusiastically, in fact, that the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April.

There's a lesson in there somewhere about what happens when you tell people to adopt a technology without putting guardrails around it first, and this week's edition has a few more of those lessons too.

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[New Webinar] Leveling Up: What It Takes to Move from HR Pro to HR Leader

A lot of HR professionals are exceptional at the work. But stepping into a leadership role isn't just about doing more of the same. It requires a real shift in how you think, how you show up, and how you work with the business.

In this free webinar, panelists get into what that transition actually looks like in practice: where most people get stuck, what changes when you move from execution to leadership, and how to start making the shift.

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IN TODAY’S EDITION

🙏 Pope Leo XIV issued a stern warning about AI at work. HR may be fielding accommodation requests next.
💸 Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months and just hit the brakes
🏦 Wells Fargo's CEO says AI's impact on jobs is "complicated" — and he's not wrong
🏆 How PwC is using $5K awards and pop-up coaching hubs to drive real AI adoption
📋 Virginia just passed a paid sick leave law — here's what employers need to know now

THE FRIDAY 5

AI hit the Vatican, the earnings call, and the expense report, all in the same week

🙏 When the Pope calls AI "an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death," employment attorneys start paying close attention.

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, landed last week with a direct warning about AI's expansion in the world of work. Some employees, particularly Catholics, may now have a theological road map for filing religious accommodation requests under Title VII to limit or avoid AI use at work. The practical advice: engage in interactive dialogue, evaluate how essential AI actually is to the role, and don't confuse accommodation with accepting lower performance standards.

🔗 Read more — HR Brew

———————————————————————————

💸 Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months and responded with a $1,500 monthly cap per employee per tool.

President and COO Andrew Macdonald raised the alarm publicly, noting that heavy use of agentic tools like Claude Code and Cursor needed a clearer line to actual business value. Microsoft has also reportedly begun canceling most of its direct Claude Code licenses, pushing engineers back to GitHub Copilot CLI. The lesson for HR and finance leaders: AI adoption programs need budget guardrails built in from the start.

🔗 Read more — The HR Digest

———————————————————————————

🏦 The Wells Fargo CEO: AI will both create and destroy jobs, and those things won't happen to the same people at the same time.

Wells Fargo has cut headcount from roughly 275,000 to 201,000 since Charlie Scharf joined in 2019, and analysts estimate about one-third of banking jobs could eventually be affected by AI. His message to HR leaders is to get ahead of the mismatch between who gets displaced and who benefits by investing in retraining now, not after the fact.

🔗 Read more — HR Dive

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🏆 PwC is handing out $5,000 to employees who can prove they used AI in ways that actually moved the needle.

The firm's Chief People and Inclusion Officer, Yolanda Seals-Coffield, is steering an adoption strategy built around closing the gap between access and actual use. With nearly 900 nominations already in for PwC's new [A]mplifying [I]mpact Awards, the firm is surfacing real use cases and spreading them across all 80,000 employees. It also deployed pop-up "genius bar" coaching hubs in cities across the US, where employees bring real work problems and get hands-on support building custom agents. The pilot returned 100% positive feedback.

🔗 Read more — Human Resources Director

———————————————————————————

📋 Virginia employers just got a new compliance deadline on their calendars, and the clock is already ticking.

The Virginia General Assembly signed a new paid sick leave law on May 20, 2026, requiring employers to offer one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked, starting from an employee's first day. Accrued hours carry over year to year, with an optional employer cap of 40 hours annually. Businesses with 50 or more employees must comply by July 1, 2027, with smaller employers phased in through 2029. HR teams in Virginia should be reviewing policies and updating tracking systems now — not next summer.

🔗 Read more — The HR Digest

Book a Call with Your HR Software Advisor

That’s it for today!

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Have a great weekend!

💸 Gen Z is your most financially stressed generation

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Hey HR folks! 👋

Today we're looking at financial stress. The numbers are hard to sidestep and the generation carrying the most of this weight just became the majority of your workforce.

Let's get into it.

Together, millennials and Gen Z now make up more than half of all employed Americans. Gen Z is no longer the future. They're already here — and Morgan Stanley's data shows 73% of Gen Z employees say financial stress negatively impacts their work and personal life, compared to 58% of millennials, 49% of Gen Xers, and 41% of baby boomers. 📊

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Over 15,000 HR teams have used the service. Rated 4.7/5. No fees, no commitments.

IN TODAY’S EDITION

💸 financial stress doesn't clock out when your employees do

☕ The Break Room: where does financial wellness actually sit in your org's priorities?

📚 Additional Reading: EEOC votes on Biden-era enforcement plan, 6 in 10 workers say their boss is toxic, and workers over 55 now make up nearly a quarter of the workforce.

OPENING THOUGHTS

💸 financial stress is a productivity problem labeled as a benefits problem.

Two major studies landed this spring and they tell the same story from different angles. PwC's 2026 Employee Financial Wellness Survey of nearly 3,500 US employees found that 59% are stressed about their finances right now.

Morgan Stanley's 2026 State of the Workplace found that 56% say financial stress negatively impacts their work and personal life — and that 80% of HR managers worry it's hurting productivity. Both studies point in the same direction.

Here's the part that should stop you: this stress is not evenly distributed. Gen Z, the generation absorbing the most of it, is also the one HR is actively building its future workforce around.

LET’S UNPICK

The Gen Z financial picture is more urgent than your benefits stack suggests.

PwC's data sharpens the Morgan Stanley numbers considerably. 85% of Gen Z say financial stress affects their mental health. And 71% report it is reducing their productivity at work. That's not a wellbeing metric. That's nearly three in four of your youngest employees running below capacity because of money stress.

The financial picture underneath this is practical, not abstract. Employees aren't struggling because they haven't opened a Roth IRA.

🔴 49% of employees say their compensation isn't keeping up with costs. Wages have not matched what people are actually paying for rent, groceries, and utilities.

🔴 53% have less than $5,000 saved for emergencies, and 30% have less than $1,000. There is no buffer when something goes wrong. 44% are using credit cards for basic necessities and 39% have used payday loans or advances to get through the month.

🔴 84% of employees encountered a financial issue in the past year — most often with budgeting (39%), financial goal-setting (35%), or retirement planning (34%).

🔴 61% are actively reducing their contributions to workplace benefits overall — meaning they're pulling back from the very tools designed to help them, because they need cash now more than they need long-term savings.

This is the condition your workforce is operating in. When financial stress is this structural and this widespread, individual coping tools, such as an EAP hotline or a one-time financial wellness webinar, don't reach the root problem. PwC found that 52% don't feel capable of planning for long-term financial goals, and 41% say their background never gave them the foundation to manage their finances in the first place.

The gap isn't motivation. 48% of employees say they're highly motivated to learn financial planning skills. The gap is confidence, stigma, and a sense that the situation is too overwhelming to start.

So why does this land on HR's desk as a strategic issue?

Because Morgan Stanley's data shows the direct line from financial stress to talent outcomes. 91% of employees would consider switching jobs for benefits that help them reach their financial goals. 85% would feel more invested in their company if it offered financial benefits tailored to their needs. And Gen Z — your highest-stress, fastest-growing cohort — is also your most program-hungry cohort: 83% of Gen Z employees whose employers offer financial wellness services report using them (PwC).

The argument HR leaders need to bring to the C-suite isn't "our employees are stressed." It's: "financial stress is reducing productivity, accelerating attrition, and undermining the benefits investment we've already made.

Sources:

🔗 PwC 2026 Employee Financial Wellness Survey

🔗 Morgan Stanley 2026 State of the Workplace

🔗 Gen Z now outpaces baby boomers in the workforce, DOL data shows — HR Dive

TAKEAWAY AND TRY

💬 Lead with the productivity data, not the wellbeing data. When you take financial wellness to leadership, the frame that lands is output, not empathy. Morgan Stanley found 80% of HR managers already connect financial stress to productivity loss. Bring that stat alongside your own attrition and absenteeism trends. Finance understands revenue per employee. Connect the dots for them.
🔍 Audit what your current program actually covers. List every financial wellness offering and ask: does it help employees survive the month, or only plan for retirement? If it skews heavily toward long-term planning, you're addressing the wrong floor first. PwC is clear: stability has to come before optimization. Start with budgeting, emergency savings, and debt.
🎯 Build something specifically for Gen Z, not just for everyone. They are your highest-need group and your highest-utilization group when programs exist. 83% use financial wellness programs when their employer offers them. That ROI argument is unusually strong for a benefits investment. Design entry points that start where they actually are: cash flow, not retirement.
📣 Lower the barrier before you add more content. PwC found that employees who feel embarrassed to ask for financial help are significantly more likely to say they're overwhelmed by the information required to manage their finances. The fix isn't more resources. It's anonymous, low-pressure access — digital tools for people who aren't ready to talk to a person, with a coaching option when they are.
📋 Run a benefits communication audit before you build anything new. Morgan Stanley found 79% of employees believe their company needs to do a better job helping them maximize the financial benefits already on offer. Most organizations have underused programs that employees don't know exist. Start by telling people what they already have — then measure uptake before deciding what to add.

TLDR;

PwC and Morgan Stanley both confirm that financial stress is widespread, generationally unequal, and directly hitting productivity.

Gen Z carries the heaviest load. 73% say it impacts their work and personal life, 85% their mental health, and 71% their output.

91% of all employees would switch jobs for better financial benefits. HR's move is to reframe this as a business performance variable, not a wellbeing checkbox, and take the case to leadership with the data already in hand.

THE HR BREAK ROOM

ADDITIONAL READING

⚖️ EEOC to debate tossing Biden-era strategic enforcement plan. The commission votes June 4 on whether to rescind the 2024-2028 Strategic Enforcement Plan, which prioritized protections for vulnerable workers including LGBTQ+ employees and those with disabilities.
😤 6 in 10 workers say their boss is toxic. 71% blame systemic failures (not character flaws) citing economic pressure and underinvestment in management coaching. One in three said they've lost money through missed bonuses or stalled promotions as a direct result.
👴 Share of workers over 55 is only increasing, study shows Combined with Gen Z and millennials also growing as a cohort, HR is managing more generational breadth simultaneously than at any prior point in US labor history.

That’s It For Today!

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The friday 5: AI readiness, great flattening, career currency

Fri, 29 May 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

This week's stories share a theme that's hard to ignore: the gap between what organizations are announcing and what's actually landing on the ground.

Leaders are bullish on AI. Workers are confused. Orgs are flattening for efficiency. The hidden costs are stacking up. Tech is rolling out. It's giving people headaches. The ambition is real. The execution? Still catching up.

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

Your next HR software decision will probably take months of research. But it doesn’t have to.

If you’re using old methods, like Google search, peer recommendations, and blind demos, you’ll end up with a shortlist you're not confident in, and a purchase that will follow your team for the next five years, whether it was the right solution for your organization or not.

Luckily, there is an easier and faster way to find and buy HR technology. And HR Brain Pickers can access it for free.

SSR's free HR software matching service shortens the process. Tell them your team size, budget, and what you actually need, and they put together a vetted shortlist tailored to your requirements. Their advisors cover HRIS, ATS, payroll, performance management, LMS, EOR, and PEO. Over 15,000 HR teams have used the service. Rated 4.7/5 on average. No fees, no sales pressure, no vendor commitments required.

IN TODAY’S EDITION

🧠 Adecco sounds the alarm on the AI readiness gap most leaders aren't measuring
💼 Gartner says AI will be a net job creator — but not yet
🚀 Randstad reveals the new career currency (hint: it's not tenure)
📉 The great flattening is costing more than the org chart savings suggest
🤕 HR tech is officially out of its honeymoon phase

THE FRIDAY 5

🧠 Your AI roadmap is moving faster than your people trust it.

🤖Adecco Group surveyed 2,000 C-suite executives across 13 countries and found that AI ambition is significantly outpacing workforce alignment.

Forty-five percent of leaders expect AI agents integrated into workflows within 12 months, but only 30% of workers expect the same timeline. That perception gap is compounding a deeper problem:

The Adecco CEO put it plainly: AI moves at software speed, but organizational trust moves at human speed. Leaders who ignore that gap will struggle to turn pilots into performance.

🔗 Read more — Adecco Group

———————————————————————————

💼 Good news for the "AI is coming for our jobs" crowd — but patience required.

Gartner's latest HR research finds that AI will create more jobs than it eliminates, but the inflection point is 2028. The firm's analysis suggests that while displacement is real and ongoing now, the net job creation story kicks in later in the decade as new roles emerge around AI oversight, integration, and governance. For HR leaders managing workforce anxiety today, this is useful context, but it's also a reminder that "it'll be fine eventually" is cold comfort for workers navigating uncertainty right now. The more immediate question is whether organizations are building the bridge between here and 2028, or just hoping their people hang on.

🔗 Read more — Gartner

———————————————————————————

🚀 The fastest path to a promotion now runs through an AI certification.

Randstad analyzed over 35 million job postings and found that AI fluency has become the new career currency. Professionals who acquire advanced AI credentials are getting promoted 3.5x faster than their peers, and entry-level workers with AI skills are commanding salary premiums of 25% in the US. But the data shows this isn't just about knowing the tools. Demand for emotional intelligence has surged 173% over the past year, with creativity up 168% and critical thinking up too, as companies need humans who can do what AI cannot.

🔗 Read more — Randstad

———————————————————————————

📉 Cutting middle management to save money? The hidden invoice is arriving.

Manager headcount at public companies fell 6.1% between 2022 and 2025 as organizations from Meta to Amazon flattened their hierarchies in pursuit of faster decisions and lower costs. Deputy SVP Star Levandowski says the efficiency math looks clean until you account for what those managers were actually doing. The average manager now oversees 12.1 direct reports — up from 10.9 in 2024 and a 50% increase from 2013. Meanwhile, 37% of employees say the reduction in management has left them feeling directionless.

A new behavior called "doomjobbing" — passively job-searching while still showing up — is spreading as a symptom.

🔗 Read more — HCA Mag

———————————————————————————

🤕 One in four HR pros say technology is their biggest challenge. Let that sink in.

The culprit is usually not the technology itself, but the way it gets deployed. One HRIS rollout profiled in the piece resulted in widespread payroll errors in week two after implementation teams managed payroll, benefits, and performance in silos xfwith no central project manager. AI tools are entering what Betterworks VP Jamie Aitken calls "the messy reality" phase — the post-honeymoon moment when integrating new capabilities with legacy systems turns out to be much harder than the demo suggested. The fix, experts say, starts with HR getting a seat at the table before technology decisions are made, not after.

🔗 Read more — HR Dive

That’s it for today!

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition helped saved you a few hours in scouring the web for the latest news! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and as ever, we really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

Have a great weekend!

The friday 5: people ops, AI layoffs, DEI retreat

Fri, 22 May 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

This week delivered a masterclass in what companies do with their people when the pressure is on. 🔥

A CEO fired his entire HR team and called it progress. A tech giant laid off 8,000 workers while forcing the survivors to train the AI agents meant to replace them. And corporate DEI commitments continued their unraveling.

How organizations act when it costs something says a lot more than how they talk when it's easy.

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

HR software selection takes longer than it should.

Picking the right HR tool the traditional way means months of work: building a long list, scheduling demos with vendors who may not fit, and second-guessing the final call.

IN TODAY’S EDITION

🔥 Bolt's CEO axed HR and built "People Ops" instead
👋 Zuckerberg fires 8,000 and promises no more (for now)
📈 Indeed hits record users, powered by AI
🚜 Bezos says workers should be "so happy" about AI
✊ Bernice King on what DEI retreats reveal about who companies really are

THE FRIDAY 5

😲 When firing the HR team becomes the strategy

🔥 Bolt's CEO fired his entire HR department for "creating problems that didn't exist", and the HR world hasn't stopped talking about it. Fintech CEO Ryan Breslow revealed at Fortune's Workforce Innovation Summit that he let go of Bolt's full HR team last year, replacing them with a leaner "People Ops" function he describes as "more focused on efficiency, less focused on fluff." His reasoning: HR was surfacing problems that, in his view, didn't need to exist. The move sits alongside a 30% workforce reduction and a stated return to "wartime" startup mode. The HR community is rightly asking: who holds leadership accountable when the people keeping them in check are the ones who got let go?

🔗 Read more — The HR Digest

———————————————————————————

👋 Zuckerberg fired 8,000 people and then issued the world's least reassuring reassurance: no more layoffs for at least seven months. Meta cut roughly 10% of its global workforce this week and reassigned 7,000 more employees to AI projects, many of whom are now actively training the agents designed to replace their own roles. As morale craters, surveillance software installed on company devices tracks every keystroke and mouse movement to feed those same models. In his announcement memo, Zuckerberg called AI "the most consequential technology of our lifetimes."

🔗 Read more — Futurism

———————————————————————————

📈 While everyone worried AI would kill job boards, Indeed hit record user numbers, because of AI. Recruit Holdings, parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor, reported record-high active users in March, up 18% year over year, with 70% of applications on the platform now coming through AI-powered recommendations. CEO Hisayuki Idekoba called it an "AI-driven virtuous cycle." The twist: this growth is happening against a backdrop of weak global job demand, where seekers are having a harder time actually landing roles. AI is making the platform more useful, it's just not making the job hunt any easier.

🔗 Read more — HR Dive

———————————————————————————

🚜 Jeff Bezos wants workers worried about AI to see it as a bulldozer, not a threat, which is easy to say when you're not the one being replaced. In a CNBC interview this week at Blue Origin's Florida launch site, the Amazon founder compared equipping workers with AI to handing someone digging a basement by hand a bulldozer, workers should "be so happy," he said. He predicts AI will drive massive productivity gains and lower consumer prices across the board.

🔗 Read more — Entrepreneur

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✊ Dr. Bernice King has a simple read on companies that retreated from DEI: they were never really in. Speaking at Fortune's Workplace Innovation Summit in Atlanta, the CEO of The King Center and daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. said the speed of corporate DEI retreats tells you everything about whether those commitments were ever real. "If you retreat that quick, that reveals who you really are," she said. Companies like Costco, Delta, and Patagonia have held firm. A 2025 Catalyst/NYU study found 86% of Gen Z workers are more likely to stay with employers that support DEI, and 61% would never apply to one that doesn't, a talent consequence HR leaders should be building the business case around right now.

🔗 Read more — Fortune

Book a Call with Your HR Software Advisor

That’s it for today!

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition helped saved you a few hours in scouring the web for the latest news! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and as ever, we really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

Have a great weekend!

🧘 The meditation app won't fix 39% of your workforce being understaffed

Tue, 19 May 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Hey HR folks! 👋

Quick question before we get into it:

It's Mental Health Awareness Month. The EAP reminder emails are going out, wellness vendors are having a great quarter, and burnout statistics are being shared across LinkedIn by the very companies generating them. 🤐

Here's the number that should stop everything: 59% of workers say their job negatively impacts their mental health at least monthly. Nearly half report burnout. Seven in ten feel pressure to appear "okay" at work even when they're not. These numbers are from Monster's 2026 State of Workplace Mental Health Report, and they are not getting better. Yet the response, year after year, looks largely the same.

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The fastest way I've seen HR teams pick software

The fastest way to find the right HR software is a conversation with someone who has already done the research. SSR's HR software advisors have reviewed 100+ HR tools and match you with 2–4 vendors suited to your team size, budget, and goals. Free service. Warm introductions to the right contacts at each vendor.

IN TODAY’S EDITION

🧘 The meditation app won't fix 39% of your workforce being understaffed

🛋️ The HR Break Room: What does your org's mental health investment actually prioritize?

📚 Additional Reading: Revamped Colorado AI law, AI use for employee monitoring raises some questions, Boss asked what would "mentally break" her

OPENING THOUGHTS

🧘 The meditation app won't fix 39% of your workforce being understaffed

Monster surveyed 1,000 employed U.S. workers in April 2026 and asked them directly: what's driving your mental health challenges at work? The answer at the top of the list was not loneliness, not financial stress, and not a lack of therapy access.

It was workload. Increased workload and understaffing was cited by 39% of workers as the primary cause of mental health harm on the job. Poor management came in second at 33%. Work-life balance third at 30%.

These are organizational problems. The tools HR typically deploys to address them: EAPs, wellness apps, mental health days, mindfulness sessions, wellbeing surveys, are designed for individuals. Your employees are living with the consequences of that mismatch every single week.

LET’S UNPICK

The numbers from Monster’s report capture a workforce that is dealing with sustained, structural overload. Here's what the data shows when you look at it all together.

🔴 39% cite increased workload or understaffing as the primary driver of their mental health challenges at work, ahead of management, ahead of work-life balance, ahead of everything else.
🔴 46% report burnout from work-related stress. For many, this is a baseline condition tied to how roles are designed and how many people are doing them.
🔴 The physical toll is already showing up: 39% experience anxiety or panic symptoms, 37% report trouble sleeping, 34% report headaches or physical pain, and 25% report symptoms of depression. These are health outcomes, not attitude problems.

The same picture shows up in a separate dataset. A Modern Health survey of 1,000 workers at companies with 250+ employees found that 51% of U.S. employees cried at work in the past month. Panic attacks and substance use on the job are rising. Employees describe feeling deeply unsupported even as workplace expectations continue to climb. When expectations climb and headcount stays flat or shrinks, that is a workload equation, not a resilience one. 🙎

And workload isn't just about the volume of tasks. It includes the friction embedded in every task. A separate report found that nearly half of U.S. workers lose more than 5 hours every week to inefficient tools and notification overload, with 21% losing more than 10 hours. That time disappears before anyone's actual workload has even started. 🫥

So you have employees who are overwhelmed by the volume of real work, and also losing the equivalent of a full workday every week to broken systems and constant context-switching. Neither of those problems responds to a mindfulness webinar.

Here's the harder thing HR needs to sit with:

Your people already know the intervention they need, and they don't believe they'll get it. Monster found that 44% of workers don't believe leadership is held accountable for the conditions causing harm, and 70% feel they have to appear "okay" regardless of how they're actually doing. When employees conclude that surfacing mental health concerns won't lead to structural change, they stop surfacing them. Your survey data will look cleaner than your actual attrition and sick leave data. 📊

The reframe HR needs to bring to the C-suite is straightforward, even if the conversation is difficult: workload is a health variable. Headcount decisions, role design, manager span of control, meeting load, tool complexity, all of these are mental health decisions. They just don't get labeled that way, which means they don't get measured that way, which means the damage compounds quietly until it shows up as turnover or absenteeism that nobody can explain!

Wellness programs are built to sit alongside existing work conditions. Very few are designed to change those conditions. That's not a criticism of the people running them, but rather a description of the brief they were given. The brief is what needs to change.

Sources:

🔗 Monster 2026 State of Workplace Mental Health Report

🔗 Modern Health 2026 Survey — 51% of employees cried at work last month, via Fast Company

🔗 HR Dive — workers are losing 5+ hours a week to broken systems and notification overload

TAKEAWAY AND TRY

🔍 Audit your mental health investment for structural vs. individual solutions. List every initiative in your current wellbeing program and categorize each one: does it change working conditions, or help people cope with them? If the list skews heavily toward coping, that's worth bringing to leadership with data.
📊 Bring workload data into your wellbeing conversations. Track sick leave trends, time-off patterns, and manager span-of-control data alongside your engagement and wellbeing scores. When workload spikes show up in one dataset, they show up in the others. That correlation is your leverage.
🏗️ Reframe unfilled roles as a mental health risk. When a position goes vacant for 3 to 6 months, someone else is absorbing that work. Quantify the redistribution. Connect it explicitly to wellbeing data. That framing lands with finance leaders in a way that "our people are stressed" rarely does.
🧑‍💼 Give managers permission to escalate workload concerns without consequences. A manager who has been told to do more with less cannot credibly champion psychological safety at the same time. If you want honest workload data, managers need to know they can surface it.
📋 Be honest in your EAP and wellness communications about what those tools cover. Positioning individual support as a solution to a structural problem erodes trust over time. Tell employees clearly what your benefits offer, what HR is actively working to address at the organizational level, and what you're still figuring out.

TLDR;

Monster's 2026 data identifies increased workload and understaffing as the #1 driver of workplace mental health harm, ahead of poor management and work-life balance. HR's standard response, built around individual coping tools, is solving for the wrong variable. The conversation HR leaders need to have is about headcount, role design, and capacity, because those are mental health decisions, whether or not they're labeled that way.

THE HR BREAK ROOM

ADDITIONAL READING

Revamped Colorado AI law targets ‘consequential’ HR decisions, takes effect in 2027
CEO Marc Benioff’s AI use for employee monitoring raises some questions
LG researcher sues, says boss asked what would "mentally break" her

That’s It For Today!

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition sparked some new ideas for your workplace! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

The friday 5: burnout crisis, RTO wars, wage algorithms

Fri, 15 May 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

This week's stories share a common undertow: workers are getting squeezed from every direction, and the systems meant to support them: leadership, workplace policy, even pay-setting; keep falling short. From mental health data that's hard to look away from, to states stepping in to rein in AI, the gap between what employees need and what they're getting has never felt wider. ↔️

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IN TODAY’S EDITION

🧠 Most workers say their job is hurting their mental health, and the numbers are bleak
🏢 PNC and Fidelity go all-in on RTO while Cisco takes a smarter road
✂️ LinkedIn joins the tech layoff wave, cutting 5% of its workforce
🤖 Colorado moves to ban AI-powered wage surveillance
📉 Iran war inflation is putting the brakes on hiring plans

THE FRIDAY 5

✂️ Even the job-hunting app is laying people off

🧠 When 59% of your workforce says the job is making them sick, it's a management crisis.

Monster's 2026 State of Workplace Mental Health Report landed this week with uncomfortable numbers: 59% of workers say their job harms their mental health monthly, nearly half report burnout daily or weekly, and 7 in 10 feel pressure to appear "okay" at work. The top culprits are increased workload, poor management, and elusive work-life balance - are all squarely in leadership's control.

🏢 Using RTO to signal control while deploying AI is, according to Cisco's CPO, "a trust-destroying sequence."

This week, PNC Bank went full-time in-office, and Fidelity announced over 21,000 employees will be back five days a week from September. Cisco CPO Kelly Jones offered a different playbook: AI and return-to-office are "two sides of the same cultural challenge," and organizations treating them as separate conversations are making a costly mistake. Her take - use AI to absorb transactional work so in-person time becomes genuinely purposeful, rather than mandating presence for its own sake.

✂️ LinkedIn, a platform built on professional ambition, is cutting 5% of the people who work there.

Reuters reported Wednesday that LinkedIn is planning to lay off roughly 5% of its workforce, the latest in a string of tech sector cuts where AI is reshaping headcounts even when companies won't say so directly. LinkedIn is profitable and growing, which makes the cuts feel more strategic than crisis-driven.

🤖 Colorado just passed a bill making it illegal to set wages using AI that feeds on employee surveillance data.

Colorado's Senate passed HB26-1210 with a 19-15 vote, targeting what lawmakers call "surveillance pricing" - the use of AI and algorithmic models to gather personal data and set differentiated wages or prices based on it. In practice, employers in Colorado would be barred from using surveillance data to determine what to offer a job candidate. As AI creeps further into compensation decisions, this is the kind of legislation HR leaders everywhere should watch closely.

📉 Nearly half of US businesses say the Iran war has already hurt them, and hiring plans are the first thing getting cut.

A National Association for Business Economics survey found 48% of business leaders say the Iran war has harmed their operations, with 44% reporting higher input costs and 24% already downgrading investment and hiring plans. For HR leaders in industries with direct energy or supply chain exposure, this is the macro context that will define headcount conversations for the rest of the year, and it's worth getting ahead of with finance partners now.

🔗 HR Digest: Is There a Shortage of AI-Ready Graduates?

That’s it for today!

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition helped saved you a few hours in scouring the web for the latest news! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and as ever, we really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

Have a great weekend!

🚪 Your AI hiring process is filtering out high quality candidates

Tue, 05 May 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Hey HR folks! 👋

Quick question before we get into it:

This week we're talking about the AI hiring wall: who built it, how candidates are already learning to work around it, and what that's doing to the quality of talent making it through to your team.

The hiring process has a new gatekeeper, and it's the algorithm. It's great at managing volume, but not so great at finding the people you'd actually want to hire. 😬

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IN TODAY’S EDITION

🧠 AI screening tools are filtering out the wrong candidates

🛋️ The HR Break Room: How much do you trust your ATS to surface the right people?

📚 Additional Reading: the DOJ and AI hiring regulation, the women's starting pay gap, and a Chinese court ruling on AI-motivated layoffs

OPENING THOUGHTS

🤖 AI screening tools are filtering out the wrong candidates

Robert Half's 2026 Job Search Guide opens with a line that should stop every hiring manager cold: "Five hundred people just applied for that job you want." That's the current reality for most entry-level and mid-level roles. AI tools have made it trivially easy to generate a polished resume and apply to dozens of jobs in an afternoon, which means recruiting teams are drowning in volume and very logically, reaching for automation to handle it.

ATS tools, keyword screeners, and AI interview platforms now decide who makes the cut before a human ever sees a name. But the same logic that made bulk applying easy also made bulk screening flawed: when the bot looks for pattern matches, it finds them, and misses everything that doesn't fit the pattern.

ZipRecruiter's 2026 Grad Report confirms the entry-level squeeze is real: fewer of the available jobs are entry-level, while more candidates are competing for each one. The grads who are getting through, 77.2% of recent graduates landed roles within three months, got there by learning to work the system.

Tailoring keywords.
Reformatting layouts.
Practicing with AI interview simulators.

They're getting through because they're good at navigating your hiring process, not necessarily because they're the best fit for the role.

LET’S UNPICK

AI tools made applying easier ➡️

so more people applied ➡️

so companies needed AI to manage volume ➡️

so candidates learned to optimize for AI ➡️

so applications started looking more alike ➡️

so tools became more keyword-dependent ➡️

you're now running a process that selects for people who are good at gaming your filter.

Robert Half describes ATS and AI tools as "the career club's bouncer", deciding who gets recommended and who gets a first interview, sometimes even analyzing tone, language, and facial expressions in early-round AI interviews. The guide is written for candidates, but the implication for HR leaders is uncomfortable: 50% of hiring managers say AI has already changed the skills they look for in candidates, yet many of the tools deciding who gets seen were built to find the old signals.

What's getting filtered out:

Candidates with non-traditional paths: people who moved between industries, took contract work, or built their experience through freelance and gig roles rather than a clean linear track
People whose best work shows in context: apprenticeships, project contributions, community roles, rather than in standard bullet points
Candidates from less-resourced backgrounds who didn't have access to career centers or coaches that teach you to beat the bot

ZipRecruiter's data makes this concrete.

🔴 Working during college more than doubles a grad's odds of being employed. 81.6% with college work experience are currently employed, versus 40.7% of those without it. But access to that experience is not evenly distributed.

🔴 66.8% of recent grads cite lack of experience as their biggest obstacle to landing their ideal role. But many of them do have experience, just not the kind that reads cleanly to an algorithm.

🔴 18.3% of employed recent grads say they intentionally applied below their qualification level just to get a foothold. Your tools may be screening out overqualified candidates who would have been excellent.

🔴 The bigger irony: the single most predictive of actual job success is exactly the one your ATS cannot see. 87.8% of employed recent grads say networking was important in securing their first role. Referrals, warm intros, campus connections, none of that shows up in a keyword scan.

Meanwhile, employers are already feeling the downstream effects , 53% say their primary challenge is finding graduates with the right skills, but tightening the AI filter further is not the solution.

The fix here requires being honest about what you’re optimizing for, and adding the human judgment layer back in for the candidates your tools are most likely to undervalue.

Sources:

🔗 ZipRecruiter 2026 Graduate Report

🔗 Robert Half Job Search Strategies Guide 2026

TAKEAWAY AND TRY

🤖 Audit what your ATS is actually filtering for. Pull a sample of rejected applications from the last quarter and manually review 15-20. If strong candidates didn't make it past screening, your criteria likely needs recalibrating.
🧑‍💼 Add a human review stage just below the cut-off threshold. The candidates most likely to have been unfairly filtered sit just under your score threshold. A recruiter spot-check at that tier costs a small amount of time and can surface real talent.
📝 Rewrite job postings with the candidate's algorithm problem in mind. Vague requirements default your ATS to pattern-matching on irrelevant signals. Precise, skills-focused postings attract more relevant applications and make screening more accurate from the start.
💻️ Evaluate your AI interview tools separately from your ATS. Tools that analyze tone, pacing, or facial expressions carry their own bias risks. Ask vendors directly how they tested for demographic fairness, and if they can't answer that, take it seriously.
📈 Track where your best performers actually came from. If your top hires came through referrals or non-traditional paths, make sure your screening process isn't systematically filtering out the channel producing your best people.

TLDR;

AI hiring tools solved the volume problem and created a new one: a filter that rewards candidates who are good at gaming systems, not candidates who are good at the job. Non-traditional paths, non-linear experience, and real-world skills that don't translate neatly into keywords are getting screened out at scale. HR built this wall and HR is the one who can redesign it.

THE HR BREAK ROOM

the ATS, probably

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ADDITIONAL READING

🏢 Texas AG Claims Employers Ran "Ghost Offices" to Sponsor H-1B Visa Workers Texas AG Ken Paxton has issued Civil Investigative Demands to nearly 30 North Texas businesses accused of registering single-family homes and empty buildings as office addresses to fraudulently sponsor H-1B visas.
📉 Microsoft CFO Flags Workforce Cuts as AI Spending Surges Microsoft's CFO said total headcount will continue declining into the next fiscal year, even as the company's AI business hits a $37 billion annual revenue run rate and capital expenditures are set to exceed $40 billion this quarter.
🤖 Oracle Layoffs and the Rise of Leaner, AI-Driven Teams A 30-year Oracle technical writer found out she was being laid off via a call from her manager — on her way to the hospital for back surgery.

That’s It For Today!

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition sparked some new ideas for your workplace! 🧠

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The friday 5: ghostworking, workplace tears, AI headcount

Fri, 01 May 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

This week's stories share an undercurrent of workplace strain. Employees are checking out entirely or breaking down at their desks, HR leaders are drowning in data they can't actually use, and a major retailer's CEO just told analysts point-blank that AI is coming for a significant chunk of jobs.

The employment deal is under pressure from every direction, and HR is right in the middle of it.

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IN TODAY’S EDITION

👻 The employee who stopped working for a year, and nobody noticed
😢 Half of U.S. workers cried at the office last month. Half.
🤖 A CEO just told investors AI will bring a "significant reduction in head count"
⚖️ The EU's pay transparency deadline is June 7, is your org ready?
📊 71% of HR leaders are ignoring their data and going with their gut instead

THE FRIDAY 5

🫥 When the boss isn't watching and the benefits are disappearing

👻 The employee who stopped working for a year, and her boss never noticed.

A viral Substack post by Leyla Kazim, a London-based corporate worker, has HR circles buzzing this week. Kazim describes suspecting her role was "irrelevant and futile" and resolving to stop doing any real work.

The story is landing right as layoff anxiety rises and RTO mandates tighten, and it's prompting real questions for HR: Is ghostworking a management failure, a disengagement signal, or a preview of what happens when employees stop believing their work matters?

🔗 Read more — HR Executive

😢 Half of U.S. employees cried at work last month. Half.

A new report from mental health platform Modern Health (surveying 1,000 workers at companies with 250+ employees) found that 51% had cried at work in the past month, with rising rates of panic attacks and substance use on the job as well.

Employees report feeling deeply unsupported even as expectations climb.

🔗 Read more — Fast Company

🤖 A major retailer just told investors AI will bring a "significant reduction in head count."

Bed Bath & Beyond CEO Marcus Lemonis didn't bury the lede. In first-quarter earnings remarks this week, he told analysts plainly that as the company integrates AI across supply chain, IT, accounting, marketing, and merchandising, job cuts are coming. "I have to be brutally clear and honest with everybody," Lemonis said.

It's one of the more candid executive statements yet on AI's workforce impact, and a preview of what more leaders may start saying out loud as AI moves from pilot to operations.

🔗 Read more — HR Dive

⚖️ The EU's most significant pay equity law in decades has a hard deadline of June 7.

Companies operating anywhere in the EU have under six weeks to comply with the EU Pay Transparency Directive, one of the most comprehensive pay equity laws in decades. Requirements include demonstrating equal pay for equal work, giving job applicants clear access to pay ranges and progression criteria, and meeting regular reporting obligations. HR leaders outside Europe who haven't been tracking this should start now.

🔗 Read more — HR Executive

📊 71% of HR leaders are ignoring their data and going with gut instinct instead.

Here's an uncomfortable finding from Korn Ferry: despite massive investment in people analytics platforms, 71% of the 1,600 C-suite and senior HR leaders surveyed say the sheer volume of data has pushed them to rely on gut instinct rather than the numbers.

The irony is sharp: HR has been pushing for a seat at the data table for years, and now that the data is there, it's too overwhelming to act on.

🔗 Read more — HR Dive

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That’s it for today!

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Have a great weekend!

The friday 5: Microsoft exits, AI blame game, culture lawsuits

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Happy Friday, HR friends! 💃

This week's stories have a common thread: companies making big workforce bets, and not all of them aging well. From a historic buyout program to AI-justified mass cuts to a lawsuit that reads like a case study, it has been a full week.

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The company is growing, which means manual processing is eating up time, introducing errors, and increasing risk.
Your current HRIS is creating more work than it's saving, with workarounds, missing features, and spending hours with customer support.
Your needs have evolved, and the HRIS you started with no longer fits the organization's operational requirements.

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IN TODAY’S EDITION

🤖 Microsoft just did something it has never done before: offered to pay employees to leave
👟 Nike is cutting 1,400 jobs globally as its "Win Now" strategy enters its final phase
🔥 Companies are using AI to justify layoffs. Investors are rewarding them for it
🧠 Walmart wants all 2.1 million of its employees to have AI skills. Yes, all of them
🎥 MrBeast is being sued for FMLA retaliation and a workplace culture that HR nightmares are made of

THE FRIDAY 5

🤖 Microsoft to their employees: what if you just… didn't work here anymore?

🤖 Microsoft just did something it has never done before: offered to pay employees to leave

In a first for the company, Microsoft launched a voluntary retirement program offering buyouts to roughly 8,750 US employees, about 7% of its American workforce. To qualify, employees must be senior director level or below, with age plus years of service adding up to at least 70. Basically, Microsoft is making room for AI-tuned talent. Voluntary separation programs are about to become a mainstream workforce transformation tool worth having in your playbook.

🔗 Read more — Human Resources Director

👟 Nike is cutting 1,400 jobs and calling it strategy. The jobs are mostly in tech.

COO Venkatesh Alagirisamy announced the reductions as the final phase of Nike's "Win Now" turnaround under CEO Elliott Hill. The cuts will reshape the technology team and move resources closer to factory partners and supply chain teams. The company is being transparent about the reasoning, which matters, but 1,400 roles is still 1,400 roles. This is a reminder that restructuring always needs a people communications plan that matches its ambition.

🔗 Read more — Human Resources Director

🔥 Companies are framing mass layoffs as AI investments. Investors are cheering. HR is doing the cleanup.

Meta's plan to cut 8,000 workers joins a growing list of companies making sweeping cuts and seeing stock prices rise for it. Economists say many of these are "anticipatory layoffs", cutting now for what AI is expected to replace later. This creates a real tension: how do you protect culture, talent pipelines, and trust when the C-suite is getting rewarded for headcount reduction?

🔗 Read more — Human Resources Director

🧠 Walmart is training 2.1 million employees on AI. Every single one of them.

Chief People Officer Donna Morris announced plans to equip the entire Walmart workforce with some level of AI skills, from the tech team to in-store greeters. The retailer has been building toward this since 2022 and describes its approach as "people-led, tech powered." For HR and L&D leaders, this is a striking counterpoint to the layoff trend: a bet that upskilling at scale beats cutting your way to an AI-ready workforce.

🔗 Read more — HR Dive

🎥 The MrBeast lawsuit is a textbook FMLA retaliation case, and it has HR written all over it.

A former employee alleges she was fired three weeks after returning from maternity leave, following years of sexual harassment. The suit was filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina and includes FMLA violations alongside gender-based harassment claims. The story is less about MrBeast and more about a classic failure pattern: no HR infrastructure, no reporting process, and a post-leave termination with a timeline that is very hard to explain away.

🔗 Read more — HR Dive

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That’s it for today!

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We know you’re super busy and as ever, we really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

Have a great weekend!

📉 The real reason your engagement scores won't budge

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Hi all!

Hope this week is off to a great start! Anyone else on their third cup of coffee?

Today we're looking at something that's been sitting in your engagement data for a while, but Gallup's latest numbers make it impossible to sidestep anymore.

Global employee engagement just hit a five-year low. And when you dig into why, the answer keeps pointing to the same place: managers.

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IN TODAY’S EDITION

😶 Let’s Unpick: Your engagement strategy has a manager problem

🛋️ The HR Break Room: Where does your organization stand on manager engagement right now?

📚 Additional Reading: NY bans credit checks in hiring, Meta's AI salary floors go public, and workers losing hours to broken systems every week.

OPENING THOUGHTS

😶 Your engagement strategy has a manager problem

Gallup just dropped their latest engagement numbers and global engagement is sitting at 20%. One in five employees. Engaged. Worldwide.

The other four? Physically present. Spiritually... elsewhere. 👀

But what makes this data different from the usual "engagement is declining" headline: this time, Gallup points squarely at managers as the primary driver. 😬 And when you look at the numbers behind that, the picture gets uncomfortable, fast.

Only 27% of managers are themselves engaged.

The people your entire engagement strategy runs through are three times more likely to be disengaged than engaged.

LET’S UNPICK

Right, so…

You have built a very thoughtful engagement strategy. You have surveys. You have pulse checks. You have action plans from those pulse checks. You have follow-up sessions about the action plans. You have possibly a dashboard.

And you have handed all of it to your managers to deliver.

Gallup's research shows that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement scores. Seventy percent. That means everything else you're investing in, your culture initiatives, your benefits, your wellbeing programs, your all-hands, is competing for influence over the remaining 30%.

So what happens when the 70% lever is broken?

🔵 Managers skip development conversations, not because they don't care, but because nobody is having those conversations with them.

🔵 They set unclear expectations because they themselves aren't clear on what's expected of them.

🔵 They offer little recognition because, well, when did someone last recognize them for something?

🔵 Their teams disengage. HR notices the falling scores. Designs a new engagement program. Hands it to the managers.

You see where this is going. 🔄

The uncomfortable truth is that most engagement interventions are designed for individual contributors and delivered through managers, without anyone stopping to ask whether the delivery mechanism is actually okay.

✅ We survey employees about their managers.
✅ We train managers on how to engage their teams.
❓️ But the question is "what does a disengaged manager actually need, and who is responsible for giving it to them?"

Gallup's data suggests manager disengagement looks almost identical to employee disengagement: unclear expectations, not enough development, not feeling heard, too much on their plate. Which makes sense. Managers are employees too. They just also happen to be the single biggest influence on everyone else's experience.

HR's job here isn't to add another initiative to an already overloaded manager's plate. Rather look at the conditions managers are actually working in and ask honestly: have we made engagement even possible for them?

🔗 Vibe Check: Global Employee Engagement Drops to 5-Year Low (The HR Digest)

🔗 U.S. Employee Engagement Declines From 2020 Peak (Gallup)

TAKEAWAY AND TRY

🔍 Run a manager-specific pulse, separate from your employee survey. Ask managers directly about their own clarity, workload, development, and support. You genuinely cannot fix what you are not measuring at the right level.
📊 Bring the 70/27 data to your leadership team and make the case plainly. Your engagement ROI depends almost entirely on the state of your manager population.
🛑 Audit your current engagement program and ask: are managers the audience here, or just the delivery mechanism?
🧑‍💼 Build a support structure specifically for managers. Peer cohorts, skip-level check-ins, protected development time. Managers need someone in their corner. Most of them currently don't have that.
📋 Make manager wellbeing part of their own performance conversations. If managers aren't being asked about their engagement and development, you're holding them accountable for something they themselves aren't receiving. That's not a great look. 😬

TLDR;

Global engagement is at a 5-year low of 20%, and disengaged managers are the primary driver. With only 27% of managers engaged themselves, HR needs to stop routing engagement programs through a population that's running on empty, and start fixing the conditions managers are actually operating in.

THE HR BREAK ROOM

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

Attend live for a chance to win a $100 gift card!

Join this session to unpack Deputy’s Big Shift workforce data, with labor economist Dr. Shashi Karunanethy. The data reveals a surprising divide in frontline worker sentiment, with stress rising in some sectors while engagement improves in others.

For HR leaders navigating tighter labor markets, the central challenge is shifting from constant recruitment to sustainable retention — and learning how to keep the people you already have.

ADDITIONAL READING

📋 NY Bans Credit Checks in Hiring (Yonkers Times) — Most New York employers can no longer factor credit history into hiring, pay, or promotion decisions as of April 18. If your screening process hasn't been updated, now would be the time.
💸 Meta's AI Salary Floors Go Public Via Visa Filings (HR Executive) — Base pay up to $650k for an AI VP. That's the legally disclosed floor, not the ceiling. Your employees can see this too, by the way.
🔔 Workers Losing 5+ Hours a Week to Broken Systems (HR Dive) — Nearly half of US employees lose more than 5 hours every week to inefficient tools and notification overload. 21% lose more than 10. It's not quiet quitting. It's just exhaustion wearing a productivity costume.

That’s It For Today!

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition sparked some new ideas for your workplace! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

The friday 🖐️ : Disengagement, transparency, dehumanisation

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:00:00 +0000

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

Time for the Friday 🖐️ ! Five articles, five takeaways. Five minutes away from the chaos to grab a coffee and get caught up on everything that’s been happening in HR this week!

This week's stories have one thing in common: the gap between how organizations talk about their people and how they actually treat them. We've got salary floors that double as benchmarks, engagement numbers that should be keeping leaders up at night, and a whole country asking whether the words we use to describe workers are doing more damage than we realize.

The good news? Awareness is the first step - and there's no shortage of it this week. The question is what HR leaders decide to do with it.

New: Download The 2026 HRIS Pricing Guide

HRIS pricing is a pain to figure out and eats up way too much time. You shortlist a tool, get excited, then the pricing shows up and it’s not even in your budget.

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Inside, you’ll find pricing comparisons for UKG, Rippling, ADP, Paylocity, Deel, and HiBob, plus tips to negotiate better rates and cut down your research time.

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IN TODAY’S EDITION

💸 Meta's AI salary bills will make your eyes water,

😶 Global employee engagement just hit a depressing new low,

🚫 Mexico wants to legally ban the phrase "Human Resources,"

🔔 American workers are being slowly killed by inefficient systems and endless pings,

📋 New York State just made credit checks in hiring a thing of the past

THE FRIDAY 🖐️

One in five employees is engaged. The other four are just waiting for 5pm.

💸 Meta's visa filings accidentally became the most revealing salary benchmark in tech. Base pay up to $650k for an AI VP — and remember, that's the legally disclosed floor, not the ceiling. 🔗 Read more — HR Executive

😶 Only 1 in 5 employees worldwide is actually engaged at work. Gallup's latest report puts global engagement at a five-year low of 20% — and disengaged managers are being fingered as a key culprit. 🔗 Read more — The HR Digest

🚫 "Human Resources" could soon be illegal — at least in Mexico. A senator has proposed formally banning HR, "human capital" and similar terms, arguing they reduce people to profit-generating units. 🔗 Read more — HR Executive

🔔 Workers are haemorrhaging time to systems that simply don't work. Nearly half of US employees lose 5+ hours a week to broken processes — and 21% lose more than 10. They're not quiet quitting; they're just quietly exhausted. 🔗 Read more — HR Dive

📋 New York just banned credit checks in hiring — and employers have until tomorrow to comply. Effective April 18, 2026, most NY employers can no longer factor credit history into hiring, pay, or promotion decisions. 🔗 Read more — Yonkers Times

You don’t want to miss this: The People Ops Huddle by SSR

Across practical sessions and candid conversations, you’ll explore how HR teams are navigating an increasingly complex hiring landscape.

That’s it for today!

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition helped saved you a few hours in scouring the web for the latest news! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and as ever, we really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

Have a great weekend!

the friday 🖐️ : algorithms, transparency, trust

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Howdy HR friends!👋

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

Time for the Friday 🖐️ ! Five articles, five takeaways. Five minutes away from the chaos to grab a coffee and get caught up on everything that’s been happening in HR this week!

This week's stories have one thing in common: the systems meant to make work fairer are pretty much doing the opposite. Algorithms are being used to lowball your salary, HR best practices are showing up as courtroom evidence, and a 6am email is apparently now an acceptable way to end someone's career.

Well at least the more visible these practices become, the harder they are to ignore, and that's where HR leaders have a real opportunity to do things differently.

Today’s edition is presented by SelectSoftware Reviews

Trying to figure out HR software can suck the soul out of even the most patient HR pro. Endless sales demos, “custom” pricing, and features that all sound the same.

That’s why I always recommend SSR’s free HR software matching service. They’ll ask what you need, sort through the clutter, and hand you a shortlist that helps you make a confident decision.

The best part? Rated 4.5/5 by 15,000+ HR professionals!

👇️ Coming up

In today’s edition

🕵️ Bosses are using your data to pay you as little as possible

💼 A resume startup is suing over a secret industry monopoly

🎓 Zapier wants to teach one million people AI for free

📧 Oracle wrote the playbook on how not to do layoffs

⚖️ Amazon's own HR systems are now front and center in a gender pay lawsuit

💭The Friday Five

Your employer has done more research on you than you did on them

🕵️ Your desperation is now a data point. Employers are feeding payday loan history, social media and credit scores into AI to calculate the lowest salary you'll accept — without you ever knowing. 🔗 Read more - MarketWatch

💼 Your resume builder has a secret landlord. Bold Limited allegedly hides ownership of 20+ brands — including Monster and CareerBuilder — controlling 80% of the market while rivals can't match its ad spend. 🔗 Read more - HR Dive

🎓 Zapier wants to make you an AI person. The automation giant is pledging free AI education to one million people via live workshops, bootcamps and self-paced courses — no tech background required. 🔗 Read more - HR Dive

📧 Oracle wrote the layoff horror story. 30,000 workers got a 6am email from "Oracle Leadership," were locked out instantly, and offered four weeks' pay — while Block gave 20 weeks plus a $5k stipend. 🔗 Read more - HR Executive

⚖️ Amazon's HR best practices are its legal worst nightmare. A class action claims Amazon's own job codes, pay algorithms and promotion cycles systematically slot women into lower-paid roles — even doing identical work to male colleagues. 🔗 Read more - HCA Mag

For easy reading..

Today’s edition is presented by SelectSoftware Reviews

HR Webinars Coming Up:

P.S. Register now and join live to get the chance to win exciting giveaways!

That’s it for today.

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition helped saved you a few hours in scouring the web for the latest news! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and as ever, we really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

Have a great weekend!

🗓️ Your team doesn’t need another meeting

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Hey HR folks!👋

Hope your coffee showed up stronger than your meeting agenda today ☕️

Today we’re talking about something we all feel but don’t always call out: work meetings. Not the useful ones, the endless, recurring, “why am I here” ones that somehow just keep… multiplying.

The numbers are… not great. People are spending around 31 hours a month in meetings that go nowhere, focus time is down to a sad 2–3 hours a day, and most of these meetings aren’t even doing what they’re supposed to.

But calendars continue to stay packed.

Today’s edition is presented by SelectSoftware Reviews

Looking for a simpler way to navigate HR software solutions? SSR’s HR software advisors have helped HR leaders do exactly that. Here’s one example 👇

Get Your Free HR Software Matches

👇️ Coming up

In today’s edition

🧑‍💼 Are your employees working, or just meeting all day?

🛋️ The Break Room: What's your organization actually doing about meeting overload right now?

📰 Human Readsources: Starbucks rolls out a new barista bonus program, a look inside Meta's executive pay packages, and a Popeyes fingerprint lawsuit gets dismissed.

💭 Opening thoughts

🧑‍💼 Are your employees working, or just meeting all day?

.. said no one EVER!

Employees spend an average of 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings, that's nearly four full workdays lost to conversations that often could have been an email.

For organizations, this is more than just a time management inconvenience. It's a strategic liability that erodes productivity, stalls decision-making, and chips away at employee engagement at scale.

HR is uniquely positioned to address this, not just by cutting calendar clutter, but by improving the cultural norms and policies that determine how, when, and why teams gather in the first place.

For easy reading

🔗 Leaders Must Protect Focus Time to Win in 2026 (Hubstaff)

🧠 Let’s unpick

We've all sat through a meeting that could've been an email. Or a Slack message. Or honestly, nothing at all. But what if it's not just the occasional pointless standup draining your team? What if meetings have become one of the biggest productivity killers in your organization?

The data says yes, and it's kind of alarming. 📊

If you're in HR right now, you're probably fielding two very different complaints simultaneously.

➡️ Leaders want more collaboration, more alignment, more face time.

➡️ Employees want their time back, their mornings protected, and their Wednesdays free from back-to-back calls that leave them scrambling to do their actual jobs after hours.

And the thing is, both sides are right.

🔵 Meetings have doubled per person and increased sixfold per organization, and the average worker is now attending roughly 25 meetings a month, 70% of which are recurring.

🔵 Focus time has collapsed to just 2-3 hours per day for most workers, and half of all meetings are happening during peak cognitive performance windows: the 9-11 am and 1-3 pm slots when people do their best thinking.

🔵 Meanwhile, meetings after 8 pm are up 16% year over year, and nearly 30% of workers are checking email by 10 pm. The workday is bleeding into every corner of people's lives.

🔵 If you think hybrid work is the answer? Think again. Hybrid workers achieve only 31% focus time compared to 45% for office workers, making them the most productivity-challenged group despite being the most common workstyle right now.

🔵 Oh, and 72% of meetings are considered ineffective, yet they keep multiplying.

This is a a retention and burnout story in disguise. 🥸

When focus time disappears, when evenings and weekends get colonized by catch-up work, and when people feel like they're always busy but never actually getting anywhere, that's when disengagement sets in before it shows up in your attrition numbers.

You can read more at...

🔗 AI Is Transforming Work, But the Infinite Workday Must End (Work Trend Index)

🔗 CEOs Declare War on Meetings to Reclaim Productive Work Time (Fortune)"

🎬 Lights, camera, action!

Takeaway (and try this 👇)

🗓️ Start a meeting audit with recurring calendar items that have no clear owner, no agenda, and no decision to make - those are the low-hanging fruit, and cancelling even a handful can give your team back hours every week.
🛡️ Work with leadership to establish protected focus windows (like no meetings before 10 am or on Friday afternoons) and position it as a company-wide norm.
📊 Make the burnout math visible to your managers by sharing the data directly, when they can see that hybrid workers hit only 31% focus time and that output flatlines past 55 hours a week.
🤖 If your organization has AI tools that people downloaded and mostly forgot about, that's a change management problem HR can actually solve, teams using AI effectively report 23% less unproductive work, so closing the gap between "we have the tool" and "we actually use it" is worth prioritizing now.
📣 Give employees both the language and the cultural permission to push back on unnecessary meetings. A simple meeting checklist or a clear norm around what qualifies as "meeting-worthy" can make it feel safe to say no.

👀 Too long didn’t read

TLDR

Meetings have doubled, focus time has collapsed to 2-3 hours a day, and 72% of meetings are considered ineffective, yet somehow the calendar keeps filling up. HR, this is our problem to solve. 🗓️

☕The break room

What’s your take?

Register For: Scaling HR | Moving off Spreadsheets, PEOs, and Wing-It PeopleOps as Your Company Grows

In this session, we’ll unpack the signals that it’s time to evolve your HR operating model, how to assess whether staying with a PEO still makes financial and strategic sense, and what it really takes to build internal systems that scale.

🪴 Join live to win one of two desk plants to make your workspace a little bit brighter!

📚 Additional reading

Human Readsources

☕ Starbucks Offers Baristas Up To $1,200 Annual Bonus (The HR Digest) - Starbucks offers baristas up to $1,200 yearly performance-based bonuses.
🚀 Meta Offers Executives $1B Stock For $9T Valuation (HR Brew) - Meta offers executives $1B stock packages tied to $9T valuation.
👆 Illinois Court Dismisses Popeyes Fingerprint Privacy Lawsuit (HR Dive) - Court dismisses Popeyes BIPA fingerprint lawsuit over franchise control.

That’s it for today.

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition sparked some new ideas for your workplace! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

the friday 🖐️ : hiring freeze, AI anxiety, layoff emails

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Howdy HR friends!👋

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

Time for the Friday 🖐️ ! Five articles, five takeaways. Five minutes away from the chaos to grab a coffee and get caught up on everything that’s been happening in HR this week!

The world of work is having a rough one. Between mass layoffs delivered via cold morning emails, a hiring market frozen at its lowest point in over a decade, and a workforce sprinting towards AI tools it barely trusts, the signals are hard to ignore.

This week's stories are a reminder that strategy means nothing without humanity. How organizations treat people on the way out says just as much about them as how they bring people in, and right now, a lot of companies have some serious explaining to do.

Today’s edition is presented by HR Technologies UK

Registrations are open for HR Technologies UK, the UK's only event for HR & People professionals that focuses entirely on workplace tech. Free to attend for everyone in HR & Talent, this exhibition and conference tackles the most prominent challenges and opportunities in 2026's world of work.

While the exhibition floor is full of tech providers like Oracle, Workday and Sage, people leaders from brands like Google, Ipsos and Unilever will be sharing insights on the Keynote stages. Register to attend today and join us on the 29th & 30th of April at Excel London for this unmissable event.

Learn More

👇️ Coming up

In today’s edition

🔪 Oracle axes thousands via early morning email

📉 Big Tech's H-1B visa applications are in freefall

🧊 US hiring just hit its coldest pace since 2011

💔 Epic Games CEO issues grovelling apology after layoff strips cancer patient of life insurance

🤖 Americans are using AI at record rates, but barely trust a word it says

💭The Friday Five

🤖 The AI adoption story nobody in the C-suite wants to talk about

💻 Dell lost 36,000 employees in three years — and barely made a sound. No dramatic layoff announcements, just hiring freezes, RTO pressure, and good old-fashioned attrition doing the heavy lifting. 🔗 Read more [Entrepreneur]

🌎 Nearly two-thirds of businesses say Trump's immigration policies are already hitting them where it hurts. Staffing shortages are biting hardest in tech and hospitality, with smaller firms least able to absorb the shock. 🔗 Read more [HR Brew]

💰 SharkNinja is handing out $1 million for employees to experiment with AI, no permission needed. The "Jailbreak" challenge is open to every function and region, with a $100K prize for the best application of the year. 🔗 Read more [The HR Digest]

🕵️ A Disney exec says HR secretly pumped his executive coach for information, then cut his bonus when he complained. The lawsuit alleges racial discrimination, retaliation, and a pretty spectacular breach of trust. 🔗 Read more [HR Dive]

⛪ A Sam's Club cashier says supervisors literally laughed when she reported faith-based harassment — and fired her exactly one year after she was hired. The suit claims the company never investigated and failed to follow its own disciplinary process. 🔗 Read more [HCA Mag]

For easy reading..

Today’s edition is presented by SelectSoftware Reviews

HR Webinars Coming Up:

P.S. Register now and join live to get the chance to win exciting giveaways!

Learn more about Workable's AI Recruiting Agent

That’s it for today.

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition helped saved you a few hours in scouring the web for the latest news! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and as ever, we really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

Have a great weekend!

👀 Are you watching your employees too closely?

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Hey HR folks!👋

Hope your coffee kicked in before your first meeting did! ☕️

Today we are diving into something that’s becoming part of everyday work, and yeah, it’s not exactly subtle anymore. Employee surveillance isn’t new, but it’s getting sharper, smarter, and a lot harder to ignore.

We’re getting into what this actually looks like on the ground, from productivity tracking to full-on “bossware,” why companies say it’s about safety and transparency, and why employees aren’t fully buying that story.

Because somewhere between “we’re just trying to help” and “why is my keyboard being judged,” things are getting a little… tense. 😨

Today’s edition is presented by Workable

Workable Introduces Agentic AI for Hiring

Workable has spent more than a decade helping thousands of companies make better hiring decisions. Now, it’s introducing Workable Agent, an AI recruiting agent built directly into the ATS.

Workable Agent brings agency capability directly inside your hiring platform, coordinating key recruiting workflows—from defining job requirements and sourcing candidates to engaging talent and delivering qualified candidates ready for interview.

By working alongside hiring teams within their existing processes, it helps organizations scale recruiting efforts, move faster to qualified shortlists, and reduce manual work.

👇️ Coming up

In today’s edition

👁️ The uncomfortable reality of being watched at work

🛋️ The Break Room: How far is your org going with employee monitoring right now?

📚 Human Readsources: AI reshaping the workforce at Meta, Medicaid coverage losses on the horizon, and a religious accommodation lawsuit over workplace cameras."

💭 Opening thoughts

👁️ The uncomfortable reality of being watched at work

Over 80% of employers use some form of employee monitoring software, and most employees have no idea how much data is actually being collected on them.

What started as a productivity solution has evolved into a strategic liability, with surveillance practices increasingly linked to declining trust, higher turnover, and damaged employer brand.

HR sits at the center of this tension. Most are responsible for both implementing these tools and protecting the employee experience they can so easily undermine.

Today we will look at what the research actually says about workplace surveillance, where the real risks lie, and how HR leaders can make smarter, more human-centered decisions about monitoring in their organizations.

For easy reading

🔗 Workplace Digital Surveillance: Benefits, Risks, and Federal Oversight (**U.S. Government Accountability Office** (GAO))

🧠 Let’s unpick

Workplace surveillance never started with bad intentions. When remote work exploded, a lot of organizations genuinely needed ways to stay connected to their workforce and keep operations running. But somewhere between "let's make sure our teams are supported" and "let's track every keystroke, badge swipe, and bathroom break," things got…. complicated. 😬

Now HR is sitting in the middle of a growing tension between what employers want to know and what employees are willing to tolerate, and the gap keeps getting wider. ↔️

As the power shifts back toward employers, monitoring tools are expanding. Which means the decisions you make about surveillance right now? They're going to define your workplace culture for years to come.

Here's where it gets really uncomfortable.

The data isn't flattering. Surveillance tools that are supposed to protect workers are often doing the opposite, and the harm isn't even distributed equally.

🔴 Workers of color, women, older employees, and people with disabilities are disproportionately flagged or penalized by flawed productivity algorithms, turning what looks like neutral monitoring into a systemic fairness problem.

🔴 The tech is getting more invasive, not less. Employers can now extract work-related data from personal devices without wiping them entirely, a capability most employees have no idea exists.

🔴 Meanwhile, even high-profile "well-being focused" systems like JPMorgan's new junior banker monitoring program - framed explicitly as a tool to prevent overwork, are drawing skepticism from experts who say the scrutiny itself creates pressure, not relief.

Good intentions, messy outcomes. 🫠

So what does this mean for you as an HR leader?

🟢 Surveillance strategy can't live in a silo with just IT or Legal anymore, it has to be an HR conversation, front and center. The regulatory landscape is a patchwork mess (federal agencies don't even have dedicated systems to track surveillance-related complaints yet), and the legal exposure around personal device monitoring is real and growing.

🟢 More importantly, the trust damage from getting this wrong is incredibly hard to undo. Employees who feel surveilled rather than supported don't stay quiet, they disengage, they leave, and sometimes they talk.

Before your organization adds another monitoring layer, ask yourself: are we using this data to help our people, or to catch them? The answer to that question tells you everything about where your culture is actually headed.

You can read more at...

🔗 Workplace Surveillance Tech Raises Privacy Concerns for Employees (Business Insider)

🔗 JPMorgan's New System Monitors Junior Bankers' Working Hours (The HR Digest)"

🎬 Lights, camera, action!

Takeaway (and try this 👇)

🔍 Pull IT, Legal, and HR into the same room to map exactly what's being monitored, on which devices, and whether employees actually know about it — if you can't answer those questions clearly, you're already behind.
⚖️ Before any performance decision gets made using surveillance data, run a quick fairness check to see whether your productivity metrics could be disproportionately flagging women, workers of color, older employees, or people with disabilities — unaudited benchmarks are a liability waiting to surface.
📱 If your BYOD policy hasn't been updated in the last two years, it almost certainly doesn't reflect what employers can now technically extract from personal devices, so close that gap before an employee finds out the hard way.
🪞 Next time surveillance tools come up in a leadership meeting, push the room to answer one question honestly: are we using this data to support our people or to catch them? The answer will tell you more about your culture than any engagement survey ever could.
📣 If you're rolling out or expanding any monitoring tools, build in a real feedback channel where employees can flag concerns about accuracy or fairness — and make sure someone is actually acting on what comes through, because transparency without accountability is just theater."

👀 Too long didn’t read

TLDR

👀 Workplace surveillance is expanding fast, and the gap between "we're monitoring you for your own good" and actual harm (especially for marginalized workers) is wider than most employers want to admit. Before your org adds another layer of bossware, HR needs to be the one asking the hard question: are we using this data to support our people, or to catch them?

☕The break room

What’s your take?

Register For: Scaling HR | Moving off Spreadsheets, PEOs, and Wing-It PeopleOps as Your Company Grows

📚 Additional reading

Human Readsources

🤖 Meta Layoffs Signal End of Social Media Era (**The HR Digest**) - Meta shifts from social media to AI infrastructure through massive layoffs.
🏥 Millions Could Lose Medicaid Under New Work Requirements (HR Dive) - Millions could lose Medicaid under work requirements, eligibility changes.
⚖️ Allstate Sued Over Religious Camera-Off Firing** (**HRD America - Ex-Allstate employee sues over religious camera-off accommodation denial

That’s it for today.

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition sparked some new ideas for your workplace! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

From AI layoffs to AI resignations

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Hey HR folks!👋

Happy Tuesday! Hope your week’s off to a decent start!

This edition is diving into something that’s starting to creep up across teams, and not in a subtle way. AI isn’t just “changing how we work” anymore, it’s kind of frying people’s brains a little. 🧠 There’s even a name for it now: AI brain fry.

We’re getting into what that actually looks like day to day, why employees are getting overwhelmed trying to keep up with all these tools, and how the narrative is shifting in a pretty ironic way. Not long ago, everyone was worried AI would take their jobs.

Now some people are just… opting out before that even happens.

Today’s edition is presented by Noota Talent

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👇️ Coming up

In today’s edition

🚶 AI stress is making people walk away

🛋️ The Break Room: Are you actually bringing your people along for the AI ride, or just mandating tools and crossing your fingers?

📚 Human Readsources: AI hiring bias lawsuits, a national AI regulation framework, and Virginia's new paid family leave law.

💭 Opening thoughts

🚶 AI stress is making people walk away

"What if your AI transformation strategy is also driving away your best employees?” While leadership celebrates adoption metrics and declares themselves "future-ready," a silent exodus is already underway.

The real risk of AI rollouts isn't resistance, it's the burnout and disillusionment that follow forced implementation. Employees are faking AI usage just to survive mandatory adoption, and the ones with options are already looking for the door. 🚪

HR teams are uniquely positioned to catch this crisis before it becomes a retention emergency, yet most are focused on training completion rates rather than the human cost beneath the surface. 🙎

For easy reading

🔗 AI Overload: How Agent Oversight Is Frying Worker Brains (Harvard Business Review)

🧠 Let’s unpick

Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud in the leadership meeting: your AI strategy might be ruining your retention numbers. 🧑‍💼

We're living through this weird moment where organizations are racing to adopt AI, measuring success by how many tools they've rolled out and how many employees are "using" them, while completely missing the fact that the people doing the actual work are hitting a wall. 😮‍💨

Not the old-school burnout wall we've been talking about for years.

Something new.

Something that didn't even have a name until recently. The data is pretty hard to ignore once you see it.

A Harvard Business Review study of nearly 1,500 workers found that 14% of AI users are experiencing "AI brain fry” - a measurable cognitive overload specifically linked to monitoring and managing AI systems, not just general workplace stress. We're talking -

a 39% increase in major errors,
33% more decision fatigue, and
heavy AI users who are 39% more likely to intend to quit.

But here's the stat that should make every HR leader put down their coffee: nearly 22% of workers say they'd consider leaving over forced AI adoption, yet only 4% of employers even recognize employee resistance as a problem.

And it gets worse - employees are literally lying about their AI usage to meet mandatory requirements, which tells you everything you need to know about how performative this whole rollout has become.

So what does this mean for you, the HR professional trying to hold everything together while leadership keeps adding tools to the stack?

The next wave of attrition might not look like a layoff announcement or a dramatic resignation. It will likely be quiet, it's going to hit your highest performers first (because they're the ones actually using these tools the most), and by the time the exit interviews roll around, it'll be too late to course correct.

The organizations that get ahead of this are the ones treating AI adoption as a change management challenge, rather than a technology checkbox.

You can read more at...

🔗 Forced AI Adoption at Work Is Driving Employees to Quit (HRD America)

🔗 Mandatory AI Adoption Is Quietly Driving Employees to Quit (HR Spotlight)

🎬 Lights, camera, action!

Takeaway (and try this 👇)

🔍 Run a quick pulse check on how many AI tools your teams are actively juggling — if the answer is more than three, you've got a wellbeing problem in the making before it ever shows up in your attrition data.
📣 Set up an anonymous feedback channel specifically for AI frustrations, because people won't tell their manager the tools aren't working, but they will tell an exit interviewer — and by then it's too late.
📊 Audit what you're actually measuring when it comes to AI adoption; login frequency and usage rates are compliance theater, not success, and those vanity metrics could be masking a quiet retention crisis building underneath.
🗣️ Brief your managers on "AI brain fry"- most of them have never heard of it, and simply giving employees space to ask questions about AI in a 1:1 has been shown to reduce mental fatigue scores by 15%.
📋 Update your onboarding materials now to include clear AI expectations, what's required versus optional, and what support is available, so new hires aren't left to figure out your AI culture the hard way on day one.

👀 Too long didn’t read

TLDR

Your AI rollout might be your next retention crisis - 22% of workers would quit over forced adoption, but only 4% of leaders even see it coming. 🚨 The resignations are already starting, and they're hitting your highest performers first.

☕The break room

What’s your take?

Free Webinar | Scaling HR: Moving off Spreadsheets, PEOs, and Wing-It PeopleOps as Your Company Grows

We're hosting this practical session for founders, HR leaders, and PeopleOps teams navigating that inflection point. We’ll unpack the signals that it’s time to evolve your HR operating model, how to assess whether staying with a PEO still makes financial and strategic sense, and what it really takes to build internal systems that scale.

📚 Additional reading

Human Readsources

"⚖️ Court Ruling Signals AI Hiring Bias Legal Reckoning (HR Executive) - Court rules age bias law applies to AI hiring tools
🤖 White House Pushes National AI Framework, Urging State Law Preemption (HR Dive) - White House proposes light-touch national AI regulatory framework, preempting state laws.
👶 Virginia Enacts Paid Family Leave, Joining 13 States (HR Brew) - Virginia passes paid family leave, joining 13 other states."

That’s it for today.

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition sparked some new ideas for your workplace! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

the friday 🖐️ : layoffs, lawsuits, and a $1M AI prize

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Howdy HR friends!👋

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

Time for the Friday 🖐️ ! Five articles, five takeaways. Five minutes away from the chaos to grab a coffee and get caught up on everything that’s been happening in HR this week!

The employer-employee relationship has never been under more pressure. Between shifting immigration rules, headcount reductions, and workplace misconduct that too often goes unchecked, trust between companies and their people is being tested at every level.

This week's stories are a reminder that how organisations treat people, not just their AI strategy or their bottom line, is what will define them in the years ahead.

Today’s edition is presented by SelectSoftware Reviews

Friday 5 Fix: Your HR software search

If your HR software search currently looks like 20+ tabs and confusing comparison tables… we might have a fix for you.

SSR’s free HR software matching service takes what you actually need and narrows it down to 2–3 best-fit options from thousands out there. Instead of starting broad and figuring it out as you go, you start with options that are already relevant.

They cover HRIS, ATS, Payroll, LMS, Performance Management, EOR, and PEO.

Rated 4.7/5 by 15,000+ HR professionals, and it’s free, so you have nothing to lose except some good HR tech advice.

🤝 Get Your Free HR Software Matches

👇️ Coming up

In today’s edition

💻 Dell's workforce quietly shrinks for the third year straight

🌎 Trump's immigration crackdown leaves 65% of businesses feeling the pinch

💰 SharkNinja drops $1M for employees to go wild with AI

🕵️ Disney exec claims HR used his coaching sessions as a spying tool

⛪ Sam's Club cashier says she was mocked for her faith, then fired on her work anniversary

💭The Friday Five

🫢 Layoffs, lawsuits, and a $1M AI prize walk into a newsletter...

For easy reading..

Today’s edition is presented by SelectSoftware Reviews

New Webinar | Moving off Spreadsheets, PEOs, and Wing-It PeopleOps as Your Company Grows

We're hosting this practical session where we’ll unpack the signals that it’s time to evolve your HR operating model, how to assess whether staying with a PEO still makes financial and strategic sense, and what it really takes to build internal systems that scale.

P.S. Get the chance to win a desk plant, to make your workspace slightly less… corporate survival mode. Join live for more details! 😮‍💨

That’s it for today.

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition helped saved you a few hours in scouring the web for the latest news! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and as ever, we really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

Have a great weekend!

🧠 Should therapy be part of the workplace?

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Hey HR folks!👋

Hope your week is going fantastic!

Let’s talk about something HR has been trying to solve for years… and still hasn’t quite cracked 🧠

Employees are stressed, burned out, and not really using the mental health benefits you already offer. So now some companies are trying a bold fix.

They’re bringing therapy directly into the workplace. In today’s edition, we’re getting into what happens when mental health support moves from a benefits portal into the office, and whether this actually solves the real problem or just changes where it shows up.

Today’s edition is presented by SelectSoftware Reviews

How I Found the Right HR Tech as an HR Team of One

A few years ago, as the company started growing, I realized it was time to invest in proper HR software. I began looking into the basics like an HRIS to manage employee data, payroll software to run payroll, and an ATS to speed up hiring. But...

🙍‍♀️ Every category had dozens of vendors.
🤦‍♀️ Every platform claimed to do everything.
🤷‍♀️ Every “top tools” list online looked completely different.

And when you’re an HR team of one, you don’t exactly have time to sit through calls with different vendors.

Around that time, someone recommended SSR’s HR software matching service to me. The interesting part was that it was completely free, so I figured there was no harm in trying it. 🤷

I shared a few details about the company, what I needed help with, and the budget. Soon after, I received personalized HR software matches and introductions to those vendors.

Just like that, my options went from hundreds of tools to 2–3 that actually made sense for the situation. Reviewing them and making a decision suddenly felt so much more manageable! 😮‍💨

Honestly, I now recommend it to any HR team of one facing the same challenge of finding the right software. Even if your team is a bit larger, it can save you a lot of time. And since it’s free, there’s really not much to lose.

👇️ Coming up

In today’s edition

🧠 So we’re doing therapy at work now?

🛋️ The break room: Would employees use onsite therapy if it were offered?

📚 Human readsources: Atlassian, Ford, and Meta face fresh workplace controversies around conduct, culture, and AI-driven change

💭 Opening thoughts

🧠 So we’re doing therapy at work now?

Here’s the real uncomfortable question: If employees already have access to mental health support… why aren’t they using it? 🤔

Because access on paper and access in real life are two very different things.

Between wait times, cost, stigma, and plain old inertia, a lot of employees never make it to that first session. Meanwhile, stress keeps showing up in performance reviews, missed deadlines, and disengaged teams.

So HR teams are starting to rethink the model.

Instead of asking employees to go find help, what if help showed up where they already are?

That’s where onsite therapy enters the chat 🛋️

For easy reading