Happy Friday, HR friends!

We have some news to share.

First, thank you for reading HR Brain Pickings. Whether you've been with us since the beginning or joined recently, we're grateful to have you as part of our community.

We're excited to share that HR Brain Pickings is joining SelectSoftware Reviews (SSR).

If you've been reading us for a while, you'll probably recognize SSR, they've been a long-time sponsor of this newsletter, and we're excited to become part of the SSR family. Together, we'll be able to bring you even more practical insights, resources, and research for HR professionals.

Starting next week, from August 3, HR Brain Pickings will no longer be published as a standalone newsletter. Instead, you'll receive the SSR newsletter every Tuesday and Thursday. Your subscription will continue automatically using the same email address, there's nothing you need to do, and it will remain completely free.

Here's what you can expect from the SSR newsletter:

• Practical, data-backed HR insights

• Independent software research and buying guides

• Free resources, templates, and ebooks

• Invitations to webinars and community events

• The latest news and trends shaping HR

Want a preview? Check out recent editions here: https://ssr-newsletter.beehiiv.com/

If the SSR newsletter isn't for you, you can unsubscribe at any time using the link below.

Thank you again for being part of HR Brain Pickings. We truly appreciate your support and hope you'll continue with us as we begin this exciting new chapter with SSR.

Best,
The HR Brain Pickings Team

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

Mark Zuckerberg told employees at an internal town hall this week that the AI agents he restructured Meta around haven't progressed the way he expected, and that the reorg wasn't as "clean" as planned.

A notable admission from a CEO who laid off 10% of his workforce and reassigned 7,000 people to AI teams just two months ago on the promise that it would pay off.

Turns out the AI receipts don't always match the AI pitch deck.

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

[Free eBook] 2026 ATS Comparison Guide

SSR recently released a 2026 ATS Comparison Guide to help HR and recruiting teams quickly compare top applicant tracking systems like Greenhouse, Pinpoint, Teamtailor, Workable, ClearCo, and more.

Inside, you’ll find:

• Side-by-side ATS feature comparisons

• Pros, cons, and expert product reviews

• Best-fit recommendations by company size and hiring needs

Whether you’re scaling hiring, replacing a clunky system, or simply trying to understand what’s out there, this guide gives you a clearer way to evaluate your options.

IN TODAY’S EDITION

• 🔪 Oracle cut 21,000 jobs and warned in its own filing that more could be coming

• 💰 Microsoft's new layoff playbook: pay people to leave before you make them leave

• 🤖 Zuckerberg admits Meta's AI agent bet hasn't come together yet

• 🛠️ Citi let 180 HR staffers run a hackathon instead of a risk review

• ⚖️ Edward Jones pokes a hole in a reverse discrimination plaintiff's own math

THE FRIDAY 5

Everyone's betting on AI and nobody's cashing in yet

🔪 Oracle cut 21,000 jobs, then told investors don't get comfortable.

Oracle's headcount dropped from 162,000 to 141,000 in fiscal 2026, and severance costs jumped to $1.84 billion from $374 million the year before.

The company's annual filing says AI adoption "has resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce," which turns one round of cuts into a standing threat instead of a one-time event.

🔗 Read more — The HR Digest

———————————————————————————

💰 Microsoft figured out how to soften a layoff: pay people to leave first.

Before cutting about 2.5% of its roughly 220,000-person workforce this week, Microsoft ran a voluntary buyout using an age-plus-tenure "Rule of 70" formula that reached about 8,750 eligible US employees.

Everyone's betting on AI and nobody's cashing in yetOnly around a third accepted, but the sequencing let Microsoft calibrate a smaller follow-on layoff and reach tenured, higher-paid staff without using age alone as the criterion.

🔗 Read more — HR Executive

———————————————————————————

🤖 Zuckerberg just admitted the AI agents he restructured Meta around aren't pulling their weight yet.

At an internal town hall, Zuckerberg said agentic AI progress "hasn't really accelerated" over the past four months and that Meta's bets on the new structure "haven't come to fruition yet."

Meta laid off 10% of staff and reassigned 7,000 employees to AI teams in May on the expectation of gains that Zuckerberg now says are still three to six months away.

🔗 Read more — Reuters

———————————————————————————

🛠️ Citi let 180 HR staffers skip the risk committee and just build AI tools for a week.

Citi's head of HR AI ran a hackathon where 35 HR teams pitched AI use cases across career pathing, skills, and root cause analysis, with winning projects now headed to risk, legal, and audit for review before they scale.

It's a rare case of an HR team getting to prototype freely on AI before governance takes the wheel.

🔗 Read more — HR Brew

———————————————————————————

⚖️ Edward Jones told a reverse discrimination plaintiff his own math doesn't add up.

The plaintiff in Winter v. Edward D. Jones widened his proposed class from "straight, white male" advisors to "all white" advisors, a group that includes the white women he separately claims benefited from the diversity program he's suing over.

Edward Jones is also defending a separate suit from Black financial advisors alleging pay disparities, so the firm is fighting DEI-related claims from both sides at once.

🔗 Read more — HR Dive

[New Webinar] Scaling HR Without the Growing Pains: Building the Infrastructure You’ll Need Before You Need It

In this webinar, we're digging into what scalable HR infrastructure actually looks like...and how to build it before you desperately need it.

From disconnected systems and patchwork processes to the hidden risks that come with rapid growth, we'll explore what it takes to set your HR function up to support the business at every stage, not just the one you're in right now.

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!

Hey HR folks! 👋 

Today we're talking about the update nobody voted on.

Microsoft just shipped a Teams feature called Workplace Check-in that reads your office Wi-Fi connection and reports which building you're working from, straight to your team, manager included.

Before we get into it, what do you think about this “Workplace Check-In” feature by Microsoft?

PRESENTED BY WORKABLE

The agent recruits. You manage talent.

Sourcing candidates and screening them against the job spec is a leaky bucket. While you're sifting through resumes, your top candidates are receiving offers elsewhere.

With the Workable Agent you don't lose a second, or a potential star employee.

Workable is a talent management platform for an agentic world. The Workable Agent runs the top of the hiring funnel, sourcing, screening, and qualifying every candidate against the spec, around the clock, inside a deep ATS that gives it the context to act safely. Recruiters spend less time processing applications and more time on the conversations that need judgment.

Plus now every new and existing Workable customer gets 1,000 free credits to test out the Agent.

Trusted by 35,000+ companies.

IN TODAY’S EDITION

• 👀 The line between monitoring and surveillance gets harder to tell apart

• ☕ The Break Room: how much visibility do you actually have into what your company's software can already track?

• 📚 Additional Reading: tech's layoff surge, an NLRB ruling on a Slack-message firing, and Microsoft's next round of cuts

OPENING THOUGHTS

👀 The line between monitoring and surveillance gets harder to tell apart

What if your office Wi-Fi starts reporting on you?

Microsoft's Workplace Check-in shipped inside Teams this month, an extension of a room-booking tool that now reads your office Wi-Fi connection and reports which building, sometimes which floor, you're working from straight to your team, manager included.

When a Teams user asked Microsoft's own president of Teamwork Experiences, Lan Ye, point blank why Teams is "designed to tattle on employees at every turn," she answered that Teams "does not track employees' movements or attendance." True in the narrowest possible sense.

It dodges what the feature actually does once a manager asks someone to turn it on.

Microsoft says the feature is off by default and employees can decline to share it. Both things are real.

Neither changes the fact that "voluntary" evaporates the moment showing your building becomes a soft expectation of returning to office, or that a feature storing no data today is one policy change away from storing it tomorrow.

None of this required a company to buy a surveillance product. It arrived as a software update, decided somewhere between engineering and legal, not in an HR policy meeting.

LET’S UNPICK

Zoom out and Microsoft isn't the outlier here, it's the preview.

Three employers (and probably more), hit some version of the same wall this year, and together they sketch out where this is headed for you. ➡️ 

1️⃣ Start with AT&T. The company built a "presence reporting" system stitched together from badge swipes, mobile location data, and laptop network connections to catch RTO "freeloaders." It worked, in the narrow sense that AT&T says it identified who it was looking for. 👀 But employees hit what the company itself described as "the brink of frustration," and AT&T found its own tracking data wasn't reliable enough to justify keeping the system running at full strength. It's now easing off company-wide.

2️⃣ Meta had a similar reckoning from the other direction. Its "Model Capability Initiative" tracked employee keystrokes, clicks, code changes, and clipboard activity to train AI, and it lasted about as long as it took employees to notice. Meta added pause controls and opt-out requests after the backlash.

Two employers, two different tools, the same outcome: monitor first, explain later, walk back once the trust damage shows up in headlines.

3️⃣ Target is running the opposite experiment. Its new Attendance Tracking Points System, live for store and warehouse workers starting this September, assigns 0.25 points for arriving more than eight minutes late, accumulating toward automatic termination at 12 points. Clean on paper. It also removes the manager judgment call that used to catch context, a delayed train, a sick kid, before it turned into a disciplinary record.

Regardless of which side of this split your org falls on: regulators are done waiting for employers to sort this out on their own. Maine's new surveillance law, effective this January, requires written notice before any electronic monitoring begins, disclosure to candidates during interviews, and annual notice to existing staff, with fines for violations. It joins New York, Connecticut, and California's AB 1221 in requiring employers to say out loud what they're tracking and why. 👏 

Monitoring tools are shipping faster than monitoring policy, in your tech stack and in state legislatures. If you don't have a documented answer to "what can our systems track, and who approved it," the next audit, lawsuit, or leaked Slack thread will write that policy for you.

You can read more at:

🔗 Futurism — Microsoft Announces New Feature That Narcs on You to Your Boss

🔗 The HR Digest — AT&T Eases Attendance Tracking as Discussions on Workplace Surveillance Grow

🔗 HR Grapevine — Meta Faces Employee Backlash Over AI Tracking Tool as Privacy Concerns Grow

TAKEAWAY AND TRY

1. 📋 Inventory what's already capable of tracking employees in your stack. Teams, Slack, badge systems, scheduling software, most of it shipped with monitoring capability built in, whether or not anyone flipped it on. You can't govern what you haven't mapped.

2. 📝 Write the monitoring policy before a vendor update forces the issue. If Microsoft, Meta, or your HRIS provider can push a tracking feature live with a software update, "we'll deal with it when it comes up" isn't a policy, it's a gap.

3. ⚖️ Get ahead of disclosure requirements now, not after a complaint. Maine, New York, Connecticut, and California all now require written notice before monitoring begins. Build the habit into onboarding and annual comms regardless of where you operate, the trend line only points toward more states following.

4. 🧯 Run a "backlash test" before switching anything on. Before enabling a location or activity-tracking feature, ask what happens if it leaks internally or goes public the way Meta's and AT&T's did. If the honest answer is "that would be bad," you have your answer on whether it should default to on.

5. 🚧 Keep coordination tools separate from consequence tools. A status update that helps coworkers find each other is different from a data point that can trigger discipline. The moment "I can see where you are" starts feeding into performance or attendance decisions, it needs the oversight of a policy, not a Wi-Fi setting.

TLDR;

Microsoft's new Wi-Fi tracking feature, AT&T's and Meta's walk-backs, and Target's new point system all point to the same thing: monitoring tools are shipping faster than the policies to govern them. States are stepping in with disclosure laws because employers haven't. Build your governance answer now, before a vendor default, a lawsuit, or a leaked Slack thread writes it for you.

YOUR TAKE

ADDITIONAL READING

1. 📉 Tech accounts for nearly a third of US layoffs in the first half of 2026 — HR Dive. Challenger, Gray & Christmas found tech sector job cuts jumped 83% year-over-year to 139,156 through June, with AI cited as the top driver of layoffs for a fourth straight month.

2. ⚖️ Atlassian ordered to reinstate engineer sacked over Slack clash with leadership — HRD America. An NLRB judge ruled Atlassian illegally fired an engineer for confrontational Slack messages aimed at its co-founder, finding the company couldn't show other employees who posted similar comments faced discipline. A good reminder that "protected concerted activity" covers more than HR teams often assume.

3. 💻 Microsoft layoffs to put more jobs at risk this week — The HR Digest. Microsoft is cutting 5,000 to 5,700 roles, mostly in sales, consulting, and Xbox, as its new fiscal year begins, continuing a pattern of July restructuring seen in 2025.

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 😀

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

This week's edition comes with a lesson no policy manual covers: the "off-the-clock" era is officially over.

A JPMorgan executive director with a career built on inclusion, storytelling, and community engagement became the latest cautionary tale. If your organization's code of conduct still doesn't address public behavior and social media, it’s a good time to fix that.

PRESENTED BY INSPERITY

Not sure which HR tech is right? Start here

Learn how to evaluate platforms and avoid costly mistakes

Overwhelmed by HR tech options? You’re not alone, but choosing the right solution doesn’t have to be guesswork. Our free guide helps you cut through the noise and make confident, strategic decisions.

In this e-book you’ll learn:

• Key differences between point solutions and all-in-one HR platforms

• Why your HR software choice impacts long-term strategy

• How to evaluate vendors with confidence

• Common mistakes to avoid during the selection process

Make smarter HR technology decisions with clarity and direction.

IN TODAY’S EDITION

• 🏀 The Knicks parade just ended a JPMorgan executive's career 

• 🕐 California starts the WARN Act AI countdown

• 🤖 GM laid off 1,000 workers, then installed 50 cobots

• ⚖️ The Workday hiring bias case just got a lot harder to ignore

• 📉 Oracle's workforce is down 21,000, and AI gets the credit. Again.

THE FRIDAY 5

🕵️ The internet is always watching

🏀 A JPMorgan executive director walked off the Knicks parade with a city trash can and walked right out of her career.

Angie Báez, executive director of community and industry engagement at JPMorgan Chase, went viral after a TikTok video caught her at the New York Knicks NBA Finals celebration, carrying away a team-branded city garbage can. JPMorgan confirmed her departure within days.

This story is the latest in a growing pattern, from the Astronomer CEO Coldplay Jumbotron moment to a Polish manufacturing CEO snatching a signed hat from a child at the US Open, that confirms public behavior is now a workplace issue whether HR codifies it or not.

🔗 Read more — Inc.

———————————————————————————

🕐 California just started a countdown that could rewrite how every employer in the state handles AI-driven layoffs.

Governor Newsom signed an executive order directing multiple state agencies to study AI's impact on the labor market, giving the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency 180 days to recommend changes to the state's WARN Act.

Separately, Senate Bill 951 would amend Cal-WARN to require 90 days' notice for AI-driven layoffs (30 more than standard), lower the trigger threshold to just 25 workers, and give affected employees the right to bid on open roles.

Employment attorneys are advising HR leaders to audit AI use in employment decisions and review WARN readiness now, before California's recommendations take shape.

🔗 Read more — HR Executive

———————————————————————————

🤖 GM cut 1,000 workers at its Factory Zero plant, then installed 50 new cobots in their place.

General Motors laid off over 1,000 workers at its Michigan flagship plant, and UAW Local 22 President James Cotton got a firsthand look at what came next: roughly 50 new Fanuc collaborative robots installed to assist with unit assembly.

GM framed the cobots as a safety and ergonomics improvement; the union framed them as job elimination by another name.

🔗 Read more — The HR Digest

———————————————————————————

⚖️ A federal judge just told Workday that being the vendor does not get you off the hook for your AI's hiring decisions.

A California federal judge again refused to dismiss most claims in Mobley v. Workday, allowing key allegations under California's Fair Employment and Housing Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act to proceed.

The suit alleges that Workday's AI-powered screening tools filtered out candidates in ways that correlate with race, age, and disability, and the court's ruling suggests that vendors can face direct liability for the outcomes their systems produce.

🔗 Read more — HR Executive

———————————————————————————

📉 Oracle shed 21,000 workers in a single year and put AI adoption in the fine print.

Oracle's regulatory filing revealed its headcount dropped from 162,000 to 141,000 full-time employees, a nearly 13% reduction, tied to a restructuring plan that cost $1.8 billion in severance and exit costs.

The company cited "adoption and integration of AI technologies across certain functions" as a factor and noted that future cuts are likely as AI deployment continues. Oracle also acknowledged the risks on the other side: shortages of AI-skilled talent, damage to morale, and difficulty retaining institutional knowledge.

🔗 Read more — Human Resources Director

[New Webinar] Why Employees Quit After the First Month (...and How to Set Your Team Up for Success)

In this webinar, we’ll break down the hidden factors that drive early turnover and explore how HR, payroll, and operations teams can work together to create a smoother first-week experience.

From onboarding and communication to payroll accuracy and manager preparedness, we’ll discuss practical ways to improve retention before employees start looking for the exit and why investing in a better employee experience early on can have a lasting impact on productivity, culture, and business performance.

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!

Hey HR folks! 👋 

The 4-day workweek has been showing up more often in real organizations, real policies, and real leadership conversations. Some teams are thriving with it. Others are realizing pretty fast that squeezing five days of work into four might just create louder burnout.

In this edition, we’re digging into what’s the latest on the 4-day model, what’s actually working (and what’s falling apart), and how HR can lead this shift.

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

Get matched with vetted HR software vendors + a $100 DoorDash gift card

Most teams build a long list, schedule demos with vendors who may not fit, and still second-guess the final call.

SSR's free HR software matching service speeds up the process.

Tell their HR software advisors your team size, budget, and requirements. They send back 2-4 vetted options tailored to what you need, covering HRIS, ATS, payroll, performance management, LMS, EOR, and PEO.

Over 15,000 HR teams have used the service. Rated 4.7/5 on average. Meet with the vendors, and the $100 DoorDash card is yours.*

_{*Terms and conditions apply. Gift card is sent after completing calls with matched vendors.}

IN TODAY’S EDITION

🔄 So… is the 4 day workweek actually working?

🤔 Your Take: What's your organization's stance on the 4-day workweek in 2026?

📚 Additional Reading: Job scams are growing, replacement robots, inclusion in 2026

OPENING THOUGHTS

🔄 So… is the 4 day workweek actually working?

The four-day workweek isn’t new, and has been around since the 1970s, picked up serious momentum after 2020, and has already been tested by hundreds of companies across the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and the UAE 🌍

Some of the biggest pilots so far covered more than 900 employees across 33 businesses in the U.S. and Ireland using the 100-80-100 model 📊 Not one of those companies went back to five days. In fact, 93% said they’re sticking with it or planning to. Iceland has already moved at scale, with 86% of workers now on reduced hours or having the right to be 🇮🇸

Closer to home, the shift is picking up speed. 20% of U.S. employers already run on a four-day week, and another 41% say they plan to try it at least temporarily. More than half of U.S. employers now say they’re open to experimenting with the model 👀

LET’S UNPICK

So what separates the teams that make a four day workweek work from the ones that struggle?

It comes down to productivity 📈

Moving to four days at full pay requires roughly a 25% efficiency gain. That doesn’t happen by working harder. It happens by changing how work gets done.

Organizations seeing positive results are redesigning workflows, not calendars 🗓️ In practice, that looks like:

• ✂️ Ruthlessly cutting low value tasks

• 🧹 Shrinking or cancelling unnecessary meetings

• 🎯 Clarifying priorities and decision rights

• 🤝 Tightening handoffs between teams

• 🔁 Reducing duplicated effort

One company that transitioned about 100 employees found this out the hard way. While morale and loyalty improved, new hires arriving from traditional workplaces brought habits like long meetings and unclear priorities. Without unlearning those patterns, compressing five days into four led to lost efficiency ⚠️

There’s also healthy skepticism around the data 🤔 Critics point out that many trials rely on self reported performance, involve highly motivated participants, or run for limited periods. That makes it harder to prove long term productivity gains at scale. Economists warn that rolling this out without real process change could deepen existing productivity challenges.

Meanwhile, AI and automation are accelerating this conversation 🤖 Business leaders are predicting even shorter workweeks as technology absorbs routine tasks. That’s pushing more organizations to experiment now, not later.

Bottom line: the four day workweek is an operating model, 🛠️ and whether it succeeds depends almost entirely on how willing companies are to challenge habits, redesign work, and tie flexibility to performance.

You can read more at...

🔗 Four-Day Workweek: Global Movement Reshaping Traditional Employment Models (Reneris)

🔗 The Four-Day Workweek: Productivity Promise or Workplace Pressure Cooker? (The Aussie Corporate)

🔗 AI Revolution Could Shrink Workweek, Say Top Business Leaders (Yahoo Finance)

TAKEAWAY AND TRY

If you’re in early discovery mode, here are practical ways to start exploring the 4 day work week operating model:

1. 🧭 Run a time audit with one team. Map where hours actually go today: meetings, approvals, rework, handoffs. This gives you a baseline before anyone starts talking about dropping Fridays.

2. 🧪 Pilot process changes before schedule changes. Try cutting recurring meetings, tightening priorities, or clarifying ownership first. See what productivity looks like when friction is removed.

3. 🏁 Experiment with outcome based expectations. Shift one team from activity tracking to clear deliverables and timelines. This mirrors how many pilots treat flexibility as performance linked.

4. 🧠 Sense check manager readiness. Shorter weeks depend heavily on prioritization, decision making, and workload planning. Use small experiments to see where managers need support.

5. 🔄 Watch for legacy habits. Long meetings, duplicated effort, unclear priorities. These show up fast in pilots and quietly kill momentum if left untouched.

TLDR;

The 4-day workweek is practically at HR's doorstep with 93% of companies sticking with it after trying it. At some point, you may be either implementing your strategic 100-80-100 model or explaining why your competitors are stealing all your best talent with an extra day off.

YOUR TAKE

ADDITIONAL READING

1. 🧑‍💼 Job scams are growing and getting tougher to spot: ‘That’s the reality of this hell job market’

2. 🤖 GM follows up its layoffs with the introduction of new replacement robots

3. 🤝 A top-down commitment is crucial for inclusion in 2026, SHRM panelists say

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 😀

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

A Meta employee did what many of us have quietly imagined: they commandeered a company-wide AI livestream and told a senior executive exactly what they thought of him, in words we definitely can't print here.

PRESENTED BY WORKABLE

The agent recruits. You manage talent.

Sourcing candidates and screening them against the job spec is a leaky bucket. While you're sifting through resumes, your top candidates are receiving offers elsewhere.

With the Workable Agent you don't lose a second, or a potential star employee.

Workable is a talent management platform for an agentic world. The Workable Agent runs the top of the hiring funnel, sourcing, screening, and qualifying every candidate against the spec, around the clock, inside a deep ATS that gives it the context to act safely. Recruiters spend less time processing applications and more time on the conversations that need judgment.

Trusted by 35,000+ companies.

IN TODAY’S EDITION

• 🎤 A Meta employee hijacks a company-wide AI livestream to curse out a senior exec

• ⚠️ Gallup finds tech workers who don't use AI regularly face 3x the layoff risk

• 🔄 BlackRock's 4th round of layoffs in 18 months gets called "ordinary discipline"

• 💃 An Alaska Airlines flight attendant sues for race and sex bias after being fired for a TikTok dance

• 🕶️ Tech CEO security spending is exploding — and the reason why should concern every HR leader

THE FRIDAY 5

🙎 When the workforce is done playing nice

🎤 A Meta employee crashed a company-wide AI livestream, and it did not stay professional for long. During an internal Applied AI division presentation, an employee seized the audio and told organizers to relay a message to a senior Meta AI executive: that he's "a piece of [expletive]." Thousands of colleagues witnessed it live.

The outburst is the most dramatic symptom yet of a workforce in open revolt. Meta reassigned around 6,500 engineers and product managers into its Applied AI division earlier this year, involuntarily. Their new jobs involve creating coding challenges and evaluation tasks for AI models rather than building products. Employees call themselves "draftees" and "conscripts," and one told Wired: "you have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week."

Meta's CPO Chris Cox acknowledged the strain felt like "running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then, like, your teammate gets replaced and then we're recording you."

🔗 Read more — Yahoo Finance

———————————————————————————

⚠️ Tech workers who don't use AI regularly face triple the layoff risk, there's data to back it up. A new Gallup study of more than 23,000 US workers finds the predicted probability of being laid off is about 6% for tech workers who use AI at least monthly, compared to 18% for those who use it less frequently.

AI was the top reason companies cited for job cuts last month, accounting for about 40% of such announcements per outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Gallup's chief scientist Jim Harter also warns against companies tying performance evaluations to AI usage frequency, it could encourage employees to game the system rather than genuinely improve productivity.

🔗 Read more — Business Standard

———————————————————————————

🔄 BlackRock just ran its fourth round of layoffs in under 18 months, and a spokesperson called it "ordinary discipline." The latest cuts affect roughly 200 employees (less than 1% of the firm) across investment, operations, technology, and its private financing arm. The move follows its $12 billion acquisition of HPS Investment Partners and has been framed as streamlining operations to accommodate growth.

The "ordinary" framing has drawn sharp responses from workforce experts. David Grossman, CEO of The Grossman Group, told The HR Digest: "employees do not experience layoffs as ordinary. When cuts happen again and again, the people who remain stay braced, constantly asking, 'Am I next?' That is survival brain as a permanent condition, and survival brain does not do the high-judgment work companies like BlackRock need from the people who remain."

If you are managing repeated restructuring cycles, how you communicate matters as much as what you cut.

🔗 Read more — The HR Digest

———————————————————————————

💃 Alaska Airlines fired a flight attendant for a TikTok dance, she finished her training at the top of her class and sued them for it. The employee, an Asian American and African American woman (case: Diala v. Alaska Airlines), was let go days before the end of her probationary period. The video showed her twerking on a grounded plane at Seattle-Tacoma Airport, with no hashtags linking the video to the airline.

Her lawsuit alleges that male flight attendants who posted comparable content faced little to no discipline, and that the airline's "subjective" conduct policies were used to apply different standards based on race and sex.

🔗 Read more — HR Dive

———————————————————————————

🕶️ Tech CEOs now spend millions on bodyguards, and the numbers explain why this is becoming an HR and governance issue. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at Sam Altman's San Francisco home in early April. A WiseTech Global CEO received a handwritten threat against his family after announcing job cuts due to AI. These incidents follow the December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and corporate America is responding fast.

In 2021, 23.5% of S&P 500 companies offered security packages to executives; by 2025 that figure hit 39.7%, with the median value of those packages nearly tripling from ~$44,000 to $136,000. Meta spent $22 million protecting Mark Zuckerberg and his family in 2025, more than Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix combined.

🔗 Read more — Human Resources Director

[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.

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!

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

Imagine explaining to a new hire that their benefits package includes health insurance, a 401(k), and... a token allowance.

That's not a joke, no. IBM's CHRO floated the idea this week that AI tokens might become the next employee perk, as companies wake up to just how expensive everyone's new AI habit has become. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April. Welcome to the era where your employees' productivity gains come with a monthly bill.

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

Recognition programs work when you have the right tool. SSR can help you find it.

Most HR teams know employee recognition matters. What stalls the program is the tool research: figuring out which platform fits your team size, your culture, and what your managers will actually adopt. That evaluation process adds weeks to an already full plate.

SSR's free HR software matching service takes that work off your desk. Tell them your team size, budget, and recognition priorities, and they will match you with the right tool.

No fees, no sales pressure, no vendor commitments required. Plus, as an incentive, SSR is offering a $100 Amazon gift card*, after you meet your matched vendors.

_{*Terms and conditions apply. Gift card is sent after completing calls with matched vendors.}

IN TODAY’S EDITION

• 🤖 IBM's CHRO drops a reality check: AI is not free, and your employees' token usage is running up the tab

• 👻 New York moves to outlaw ghost jobs, with fines that are very much real

• 💸 The $100,000 H-1B visa fee? A federal judge just threw it out

• 🎮 Xbox is laying off employees next month as new CEO calls for a full "reset"

• 🛒 Walmart held an entire summit to tell its workers AI won't take their jobs, but workers aren't convinced

THE FRIDAY 5

🤑 The year companies discovered AI has a receipt

We've been spending so much on AI that we forgot it actually costs money

🤖 IBM's CHRO just made "tokenmaxxing" a boardroom problem” turns out giving everyone an AI tool is a lot like giving everyone a company card with no spending limit.

IBM CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux warned at New York Tech Week that AI costs are becoming unsustainable, and companies will soon have to make real trade-offs about where the spend is actually worth it. Amazon and Meta have already stopped tracking internal AI usage after employees started competing to max out their usage, running up enormous bills. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April. LaMoreaux floated tokens as a potential employee benefit, essentially rationing AI access the way you'd ration PTO.

🔗 Read more: HR Brew

———————————————————————————

👻 New York may have just ended the ghost job economy, and the fine for ignoring the law doubles every 30 days until you actually take the post down.

New York state lawmakers passed S8877, requiring employers with 100 or more employees to state in bold, capital letters whether a job posting is for a real, current vacancy and when they actually plan to fill it. Employers who maintain ghost listings face fines starting at $2,500 per post. Nearly 1 in 3 U.S. job listings currently never result in a hire, wasting applicants' time and distorting labor market data that policymakers rely on.

🔗 Read more: HR Dive

———————————————————————————

💸 A federal judge just handed back employers' $100,000 H-1B filing fee, ruling it was never a fee at all; it was always a tax, and the president doesn't get to set those.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin vacated the $100,000 H-1B visa fee in a Massachusetts ruling, finding it violated the Administrative Procedure Act. The fee was raised dramatically from the standard $2,000–$5,000 range to discourage employers from hiring foreign workers and push them toward domestic talent.

🔗 Read more — The HR Digest

———————————————————————————

🎮 Xbox to its employees next month: we need a full reset. And new CEO Asha Sharma is not softening the message.

Sharma, who stepped into the role in February after Phil Spencer's 38-year tenure ended, sent a company-wide memo calling for an overhaul of Xbox's "overly complex" systems and announcing layoffs after June 30, the end of Microsoft's fiscal year. The scale of the cuts has not been disclosed, but significant reductions to marketing and other budgets are expected.

🔗 Read more: Human Resources Director

———————————————————————————

🛒 Walmart held an entire conference to tell its workers AI won't take their jobs, which might be more reassuring if they hadn't quietly cut or reallocated around 1,000 roles in tech and product design earlier this year.

At its annual Associates Week summit in Bentonville, Walmart's CPO Donna Morris and new CEO John Furner delivered an AI pep talk: "Technology will power our future. But our associates will lead it." Labor advocacy group United for Respect wasn't buying it, raising concerns that AI-driven scheduling has worsened understaffing and that new hires no longer receive hands-on training. On the upside, Walmart confirmed all US-based workers can now earn certification in OpenAI tooling.

🔗 Read more: HR Grapevine

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

[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.

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!

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.

PRESENTED BY INSPERITY

Avoid HR mistakes that slow your business down

Get clear, practical advice for spotting and preventing common HR errors – so you can boost productivity and safeguard your business.

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:

1. faster onboarding (61%),

2. more reliable output (55%),

3. 24/7 availability (52%), and

4. 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.

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.

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

🔗 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

1. 📊 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.

2. 🔍 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.

3. 🤝 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.

4. 🎯 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.

5. 📋 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

1. 🤖 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.

2. 🎬 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.

3. ⚖️ 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! 🧠

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

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.

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

[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.

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

———————————————————————————

🏆 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

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!

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. 📊

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

Stop Attending Demos for HR Software You Won’t Buy

Finding the right HR software shouldn't take months of demos and research rabbit holes. SSR's free HR software advisors have reviewed 100s of tools and match you with 2-4 vendors suited to your team size, budget, and goals — covering HRIS, ATS, payroll, performance management, LMS, EOR, and PEO.

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

1. 💬 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.

2. 🔍 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.

3. 🎯 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.

4. 📣 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.

5. 📋 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

1. ⚖️ 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.

2. 😤 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.

3. 👴 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!

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 😀

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!

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.

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

• 🔥 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

———————————————————————————

✊ 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

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!

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.

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

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

1. 🔍 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.

2. 📊 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.

3. 🏗️ 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.

4. 🧑‍💼 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.

5. 📋 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

1. Revamped Colorado AI law targets ‘consequential’ HR decisions, takes effect in 2027

2. CEO Marc Benioff’s AI use for employee monitoring raises some questions

3. 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 😀

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. ↔️ 

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

Happening Next Week | The PeopleOps Huddle

Hiring in 2026 looks nothing like it did two years ago. The talent shortage is biting in unexpected places, AI is rewriting the screening process, and the rules for choosing the right hiring tech keep changing under teams.

Tomorrow, SSR is putting those conversations on stage at the PeopleOps Huddle, SSR's first virtual conference for HR and talent professionals.

Why attend? Earn up to 3.5 SHRM/HRCI credits, win giveaways like a pair of new earphones, a Claude pro subscription, and more!

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.

🔗 Read more, HR Dive (https://www.hrdive.com/news/workers-say-job-harms-mental-health/820003/)

🏢 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.

🔗 Read more, HR Executive (https://hrexecutive.com/as-pnc-and-fidelity-double-down-on-rto-cisco-has-a-different-answer/)

✂️ 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.

🔗 Read more, Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/linkedin-is-planning-lay-off-5-staff-latest-tech-sector-cuts-source-says-2026-05-13/)

🤖 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.

🔗 Read more, The HR Digest (https://www.thehrdigest.com/colorado-moves-to-regulate-ai-surveillance-pricing-and-wage-setting/)

📉 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.

🔗 Read more, HR Dive (https://www.hrdive.com/news/iran-war-inflation-crimps-profits-plans-investment-hiring-nabe/819916/)

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!

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. 😬 

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

The fastest way I've seen HR teams pick software

A few years back, a peer HR director asked me how other teams had shortened the HRIS hunt. Her team had been at it for months.

That's when I pointed her to SSR's free HR software matching service. Their HR software advisors put together a shortlist based on your needs, and they can help you with not only HRIS, but also ATS, payroll, LMS, performance management, EOR, and PEO.

15,000+ HR teams have used it.

4.7/5 average rating.

No fees, no commitments! (yes, really)

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 

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

TAKEAWAY AND TRY

1. 🤖 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.

2. 🧑‍💼 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.

3. 📝 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.

4. 💻️ 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.

5. 📈 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

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

🔴 Register and attend live for the chance to win a free online HR course.

In this practical session, we’ll explore how HR leaders can reposition their function as a strategic partner to the business. If you want a stronger seat at the table and clearer alignment with company growth, this conversation will show you how to make the shift.

ADDITIONAL READING

1. 🏢 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.

2. 📉 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.

3. 🤖 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! 🧠

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

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.

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

Free Webinar | From Cost Center to Contributor: Rebranding HR as an Integral Part of Hitting Revenue Targets

In this session, we’ll explore how HR leaders can reposition their function as a strategic partner to the business. If you want a stronger seat at the table and clearer alignment with company growth, this conversation will show you how to make the shift.

💻 [Live Giveaway] Win a free online course (valued at $100+). Join live to get more details!

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

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!

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.

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

Get your free HRIS matches + A free lunch! 🍔

Your HRIS touches every part of your organization, from payroll accuracy and compliance to how new hires experience their first day. If you have the right one, everything runs better.

Not sure if it's time for a new HRIS? Here are a few signs:

• 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.

Sound familiar? Don't worry, SSR's HR Software Advisors are here to give you a head start! Plus, if we can help you find the right HRIS, we'll even buy you lunch!

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

SPONSORED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

Insightful conversations, win giveaways, peer networking, and more! RSVP here.

This event brings together HR practitioners, experts, and technology insiders to share what works in modern hiring - from selecting and implementing people tech, to using data and AI responsibly, to building processes with hiring managers and candidates front of mind.

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!

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.

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

Why do thousands of HR leaders use SSR to find the right HR tool?

1. It's free, no catch: SSR's HR Software Advisor service costs you nothing. They make money from vendors, not from you.

2. You skip the research rabbit hole: Instead of spending weeks comparing features and reading reviews, you get a shortlist of HR tools that actually fit your team size, budget, and needs.

3. You only talk to vendors worth your time: No cold demos, no sales calls for tools that were never a fit. Just the right conversations with the right HR software vendors.

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

1. 🔍 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.

2. 📊 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.

3. 🛑 Audit your current engagement program and ask: are managers the audience here, or just the delivery mechanism?

4. 🧑‍💼 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.

5. 📋 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

1. 📋 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.

2. 💸 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.

3. 🔔 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 😀

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.

SPONSORED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

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. SSR just released a 2026 HRIS Pricing Guide so you can benchmark faster and avoid wasting hours digging through vendor quotes. 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.

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

SPONSORED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

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

This event brings together HR practitioners, experts, and technology insiders to share what works in modern hiring - from selecting and implementing people tech, to using data and AI responsibly, to building processes with hiring managers and candidates front of mind.

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!

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:

• Apr 14th | Scaling HR: Moving off Spreadsheets, PEOs, and Wing-It PeopleOps as Your Company Grows’

• Apr 23rd | Retention Is the New Recruitment: Leading Through the Low-Fire, Low-Hire Era

• Apr 29th | Candidate Assessments for Technical Recruiting: AI Best Practices, Risks, and Expert Tips

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!