The promise of AI in talent acquisition (TA) has long been to reduce time to hire and assist recruiters in making better, fairer decisions at scale.

As HR and TA teams deploy more AI tools for sourcing, screening, and interviewing candidates, HR pros are learning that AI can reduce, reinforce, or even obscure bias, depending on how it’s trained and used.

Human recruiters are increasingly making decisions based on insights from AI across the globe. While fewer marquee headlines are addressing how AI tools are impacting biases in hiring, it’s still a critical issue for HR teams and the vendors that are working to deploy this technology.

“When AI first came out, you heard a lot of conversation around bias and hallucination and all that, and now you hear less about those things and more about all the new tech and all the possibilities,” Daniel Chait, Greenhouse cofounder and CEO, said. But he cautioned that just because the online discourse has moved on from concerns around bias or other AI-related risk, doesn’t mean that HR pros and vendors aren’t still thinking about it.

For more on the impact of AI on bias in hiring, keep reading here.—AD

Global engagement is falling, but job optimism is largely strong, according to the State of the Global Workplace report from Gallup.

Employee engagement fell for the second year in a row in 2025, to a post-Covid low of 20%, after peaking at 23% in 2022. Overall, engagement is still up since Gallup began tracking the metric in 2009, when it was just 12%.

Gallup estimates that employers lost an estimated $10 trillion due to low productivity in 2025. “Recent years are a cause for concern,” the report noted. “This is the first time global engagement has dropped for two consecutive years…No region of the world increased engagement in the past year.”

Some workers are more disengaged than others.

For more on the state of employee engagement around the world, keep reading here.—KP

Sam Naficy is the CEO of Prodoscore, an employee productivity monitoring software that helps companies understand how work actually gets done across their teams. He’s set to speak at HR Brew’s upcoming summit, Talent 2030 Collective: Recruit, Retain, Repeat, on April 21 about how HR leaders can use people analytics to make sharper talent decisions and build more intentional workforce strategies. Before then, we had a chance to pick his brain about why the AI performance divide is already widening, and what today’s smartest organizations are doing about it.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

If you zoom out, what’s the biggest shift happening in the talent landscape right now that HR leaders can’t afford to ignore?

The biggest shift is that AI is no longer just a productivity tool; it is a talent differentiator. We are seeing a clear performance gap between employees who use AI consistently and those who do not, and it is widening over time.

For more from our conversation with Naficy, keep reading here.—JK