In recent weeks employers including Zoom and Deloitte made headlines for reducing paid family leave benefits.

Offerings that were previously considered industry-leading appear less so with the changes. Certain Deloitte employees will see their paid family leave cut in half, from 16 weeks to eight weeks. Zoom reduced its leave from 22 weeks to 18 weeks for most birth mothers (though that’s still more generous than what the average US company offers).

“This is something that typically cycles as the labor market gets tighter,” Craig Copeland, director of wealth benefits research with the Employee Benefits Research Institute, said of recent rollbacks. “When employers are really having to compete for workers, they’re more likely to enhance benefits. When they don’t have to, they’re more likely to cut back on them.”

While US employers have been in “low-hire, low-fire” mode for months, the April jobs report showed hiring picked up more than expected last month, suggesting that the strategy Copeland described may not be as relevant for some companies. And the parental leave reductions don’t seem to reflect a wider trend—at least not yet.

For more on the state of paid leave benefits, keep reading here.—CV

A new lawsuit filed late last month against popular YouTuber MrBeast’s company, Beast Industries, is putting one of the internet’s most successful and influential creator-led content companies under a level of HR and compliance scrutiny that influencer- and creator-centric companies may not be used to.

The suit, filed by former employee Lorrayne Mavromatis—whose first title with the company was “head of Instagram” before two promotions led to a $250,000 salary—alleges in the civil complaint that her former employer violated the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and wrongfully terminated her. She claims to have reported gender discrimination and harassment, as well as retaliation (a demotion to the remote position of “social media manager”), alleging an eventual dismissal tied to maternity leave.

According to the lawsuit, Mavromatis alleges she was pressured to work during and after the birth of her child, including “a work conference call while in the labor and delivery room”, work during leave on a 10-hour shift three weeks after the birth, and travel to Brazil for a MrBeast shoot involving the Brazilian soccer star Neymar.

The suit states she was ultimately terminated less than three weeks after returning from maternity leave and alleges that the company failed to properly inform her of her FMLA protections.

For more on what the lawsuit means for HR, keep reading here.—AD

In February 2025, Katelyn Halbert, market intelligence manager at deepfake-detection company Pindrop, noticed that an interviewee on a video call seemed a bit off. Their answers were not only vague, but delayed by a few seconds. While Halbert is no stranger to a nervous job candidate, she noticed the interviewee’s lip movements weren’t syncing to the audio—and that was enough to make her go straight to her team’s chief people officer and VP of research.

“That first moment, I was very taken aback and honestly intimidated,” Halbert told us.

Halbert’s candidate didn’t land the gig, but the interview made her realize that HR needs to be aware of the tech-aided tactics that fake IT candidates will employ during interviews. These days, finding the right person for the job—and a real person for the job—can require some collaboration between HR and cybersecurity teams.

For more on how HR and cybersecurity pros can team up to identify fake candidates, keep reading on IT Brew.—BH

If AI isn’t coming for your job, it’s certainly coming for your office space.
Executives from Gensler and WeWork share how offices, and workers’
interactions with them, have changed since the pandemic.