From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Sam Blum

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Employee sitting at desk with laptop, resume in the background

Why ChatGPT writing résumés might not threaten the hiring process

Despite the popularity and sophistication of the AI chatbot, ‘We still can’t fake the human element’ of recruiting, says one director of talent acquisition.

ChatGPT writing résumés and cover letters needn’t be feared, HR pros say

A woman wearing a button down shirt speaking into a smartphone 

PwC_NativeAd2_Sep23

One-way video interviews are impersonal, candidates say, and raise privacy concerns

 Automated interviews are used by 61% of organizations globally, according to new research. 

Susanna Vogel

What does an “audit” for bias in automated hiring tech really mean?

In conversations with automated hiring vendors, we learned that processes for bias audits vary widely.

artificial intelligence robot with gavel and scales in front of a wall of binary code

Adam DeRose

A group of 40 economists are calling on the federal government to bolster its efforts to collect employment data related to artificial intelligence.

The move comes amid a leadership shake up at the country’s leading agency tasked with overseeing how the federal government collects and analyzes data related to the economy. President Trump 

 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfar, following a number of disappointing jobs reports, sparking concerns that the moves could further erode trust in the agency.

 to Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer was drafted in partnership with the Americans for Responsible Innovation, a nonprofit advocacy organization, focused on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

“We urge the Department of Labor to make collecting and providing high-quality and timely data for monitoring AI’s impact on labor markets a top priority,” the letter’s subject reads.

The letter’s release also comes as two signatories—economists studying AI’s impact on private employment—

, among them that early-career workers are the most exposed to AI; although employment continues to grow “robustly” overall, younger workers face particularly stagnant conditions, and increased AI uses does not always correlate with job loss.

“We’re in a period, I think, of increasing turbulence in the economy due to AI and other things,” said one of the study’s authors, Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. “It could easily become even more chaotic in the coming months and years, so we absolutely need to get better data. We don’t want to be flying blind into this.”

The economists called on the agency to ramp up data collection and analysis of data that is “granular and timely” in order to react to the new challenges and changes that may arise as widespread AI adoption in the workplace grows.

The letter calls on the department to invest in and improve upon the datasets available for researchers studying economic phenomena related to AI adoption, so that they offer more insight into how the technology may affect the jobs market, and how policymakers can prepare for those changes.

“It’s one of the most cost effective investments the government can make. It’s a public good that we should absolutely be investing in,” Brynjolfsson said. “That’s why I signed that letter.”

Private datasets are “not fully representative,” he added.

The aforementioned paper Brynjolfsson coauthored on early AI impacts leverages only the private employment data from ADP, the largest payroll software provider in the country.

“Ultimately, government data and private data,” he added. “I see them as complements more than substitutes.”

Close up of a briefcase with AI abstract connected lines displayed over the key lock.

Economists call for more DOL data on AI’s impact on the jobs market 

In an open letter to the labor secretary, economists warn that more data is needed to understand the technology’s impact on the workforce.

Staffbase this week announced a move to transform the employee communications platform into one that leverages agentic AI to build on the concept of engagement to upend the employee experience, allowing employees and employers to communicate in new and more accessible ways.

David Maffei, SVP and GM at Staffbase, told HR Brew that the company’s new Employee AI foundation will help customers on the platform facilitate an enhanced way to deliver content with which employees can interact. How does a personalized weekly podcast sound?

“Communications, as a staple or a backbone, has been what Staffbase for 10 years has been built on, but just like everything else, there’s this evolution upon us in this business,” Maffei said. “There’s an evolution upon what’s happening in technology and what employees expect from communications.”

The company intranet, Maffei contends, is set to radically change its value to employees and businesses with faster resolutions for critical employment- and company-related questions and AI-powered tools that interact with the organization quickly through a single interface.

The company unveiled Employee AI, a new foundation designed to integrate 

 into workflows and transform how companies engage, communicate with, and support their workforces.

The shift in thinking represents a change in what Staffbase looks to offer customers. It’s no longer just about broadcasting communication, but rather creating content that enables employees to be more productive and engaged.

Maffei expects the platform to deliver a better employee experience.

“It’s not just to support communicators to make more content or make it faster. It’s to actually create knowledge and information that doesn’t even need to touch a human hand, but will have a material impact on the way that your workforce gets their job done,” he said.

With new AI tools set for wide release later this year, Staffbase customers can deploy a more relevant and personalized interface to employee communications, “one single pane of glass experience” employees can “literally just talk to” via its AI assistant.

“I can have the interactions that ChatGPT brought to my personal life at work in a way that isn’t the business pushing information down, but rather the business using technology to better connect me to the work I need to do to make a difference for my career and for the enterprise that I’m working for,” he said.

And the new technology is allowing the comms platform to evolve how employees consume company content. Staffbase’s AI-powered personalized employee podcasts feature is set for release later this year. The tool will allow the creation at scale of personalized podcasts for each individual employee that can deliver tailored weekly updates about information relevant to and informed by employees’ overall interaction with the Staffbase platform.

Worried about AI’s end product? Makes sense. Maffei told HR Brew that part of this new foundation includes a governance layer, to ensure that the content is up to date and context relevant for employees.

“This content governance capability, the ability to go in and really make the content relevant and ensure that it’s contextually appropriate, is critical,” he said. “And the fact that you don’t need an army of people that are focused on doing this is going to put you in a situation where the way that this content now flows into an organization’s information architecture will fundamentally change the way information is found.”

image if different symbolic ways to communicate

Move over, breakroom bulletin board: Bespoke employee podcasts are coming to internal comms

Employee communications platform Staffbase leverages agentic AI to transform how companies engage with employees and create content. 

Indeed this week released two new AI agents in an effort to aid both sides of the ever-evolving hiring process.

At Indeed’s FutureWorks conference in New Orleans, Louisiana this week, the online jobs and hiring platform announced the full release of its Career Scout and previewed Talent Scout, which is set for public release later this year.

“The hiring process is filled with really mundane tasks that prevent people from getting in rooms with each other, which is where the actual magic of hiring happens,” said Heidi Laki, Indeed’s senior product director. “How do we take out all of that toil so that you can do the thing that you actually want to do, which is put humans together in rooms.”

 Laki likened Talent Scout to…well…a talent scout. Talent scouts in the sporting or entertainment businesses act as advisors to GMs, coaches, record labels, or casting directors. The Talent Scout agent doesn’t do your hiring, but it can offer TA teams valuable insights about where to find the right talent or how to best attract that talent to come on board.

And the agent tackles more of those mundane tasks associated with talent acquisition (TA) by focusing on two major pain points in the hiring process on the employer side: search and outreach.

“It’s really hard to pour through the volume of candidates that people have,” Laki said. “There’s a ton of toil in there. We wanted to remove that.”

Lake said the Talent Scout uses documents like job descriptions, screener questions, and hiring manager notes to surface for recruiters what components the agent thinks is most relevant for hiring, and allows TA teams to interact and dialogue with the agent using natural language in real time.

“No one wants to spend their time writing if-then statements to try to pull back résumés,” she added. “Imagine a world where you didn’t have to anymore.”

This AI-powered querying and reviewing feature may even produce better quality candidates for cold outreach, Laki said of early wins from the tool, adding that responsiveness is “materially better” with the agent, but cautioned the company was still looking into the why.

The agent is powered with generative AI capabilities allowing recruiters to craft personalized messages to boost responsiveness.

 Released publicly this week, Career Scout allows Indeed users to interact with the tool to better understand roles that might work for their careers based on their profiles, and then instantly delivers the job postings fitting their descriptions. The tool also helps applicants prepare for the role, helping shape application documents, or even practice interviewing.

“It’s just a private conversation between you and an agent. So there’s no judgment attached to it. You can falter and stutter as many times [as] you want, but it is like a very real experience where it is listening to you; it is asking follow up questions,” Laki said.

Indeed is betting that this agent, designed for job seekers, will also help recruiters and TA pros, pointing to more engaged and prepared candidates.

person picking a character from a mass of figures

Indeed releases two AI agents to improve hiring process for TA and job seekers

“No one wants to spend their time writing if-then statements to try to pull back résumés. Imagine a world where you didn’t have to anymore.”

As companies rush to deploy AI across their organizations—especially in areas related to their workforce—shaping policies and guardrails to safely and compliantly use the technology has become top of mind for many.

Information security experts told IT Brew during 

 on AI governance last month that this isn’t simply an IT problem. It’s one that requires cross-functional considerations.

“First of all, it’s a shared responsibility,” said Guru Sethupathy, founder and CEO of AI governance platform FairNow. “Ultimately, you still want someone who’s a decision maker, because you don’t want to get lost in paralysis by analysis…That could be a 

In addition to IT leaders, legal and compliance teams also need to weigh in. Business units, too, have a stake in this. HR’s role is particularly important because of the sensitivity of decisions being made with these tools.

“You see AI in the entire kind of value chain of HR, especially in the talent acquisition space,” Sethupathy said. “Everything from identifying and sourcing candidates to scoring résumés and scoring candidates to actual even interviews…As you can imagine, similar to financial services and your health, your career is one of the most important things for people, and so decisions that are being made with these AI systems are considered high risk across almost all frameworks.”

governance allows companies to focus on high-risk use cases, while creating looser guidelines for less risky applications of the technology.

Matt Saner, senior manager of security specialist solutions architecture at AWS, told IT Brew that decisions that can impact life or health and safety should require stricter guardrails, and emphasized the “human in the loop” approach. He said more complicated AI use cases will require more guidance than the “pencil inventory counting tool.”

“At the end of the day, the organization has to make a determination of what their risk appetite is, what they’re willing to take on,” Saner said, adding that regulation and legislation can mandate some politicides, but most are business decisions related to the businesses’ priorities.

Sethupathy pointed to established frameworks such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) 

, sector-specific guardrails, and emerging AI regulations like the 

 as helpful references for organizations.

“What you want are guardrails, where are good guard rails?” Sethupathy said. “You have to combine NIST with specific guardrails that apply to your sector, and so there might be specific standards there that already exist or are starting to emerge.”

But experts cautioned against chasing every new set of guidelines.

“Be wary of the noise as well,” Saner said. “There are hundreds and hundreds of these emerging regulations, emerging frameworks, emerging standards, and looking at what matters to you and your industry and your geography…are really important.”

What HR should know about AI governance

A cross-functional policy document, requires input from across departments, including HR.

When LinkedIn released its first product for recruiters leveraging agentic AI, tasks were on the chopping block. The new tool was designed to help these people pros focus on what they do best (and, not for nothing, enjoy the most): making meaningful human connections with professionals and helping build successful teams for their organization.

“Ultimately what people are trying to do on LinkedIn is go from a billion people to that one perfect hire,” said Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s VP of product.

 has helped the platform’s charter customers—more than 500 companies and 8,000 early users, according to LinkedIn—save more than four hours per role and review 62% fewer profiles, according to an analysis of its early agent use. They’re also seeing InMail acceptance rates blossom by 73%.

“Which means that recruiters need to spend less time looking at profiles, less time writing messages with no reply in order to get to that right side of perfect hire,” Srinivasan said.

The new LinkedIn Hiring Assistant helps extrapolate useful evaluation criteria from the “marketing asset” of a job description, those must-haves and the nice-to-haves.

“If you come in with an intake that you think is so precise, but it doesn’t match the language that is on someone’s profile, or, more accurately, it creates a talent pool that is either too narrow or too wide, you end up with a bad set of search criteria,” he said, adding that LinkedIn’s model iterates and helps narrow down the criteria through natural language. 

The agent also leverages the more than one billion monthly users on the platform and the wealth of historic search data to help recruiters best develop intake criteria using candidate profiles in the process.

LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant is also trained to help surface better candidates for open requisitions. The agent relies on “evidence-based hiring” techniques to not only surface those relevant candidates, but also articulate which skills and competencies are associated with the profile that suggested the AI make such a recommendation.

This unlock, Srinivasan said, impacted InMessage acceptance, he added. In addition to messaging better candidates with a stronger match to the role, the LinkedIn Hiring Assistant is able to better personalize auto-generated communication into “a much more detailed message on a much more detailed search.”

Additionally, LinkedIn’s agent helps manage small recruiting operations after hours or when a recruiter is away from their desk. Agents can handle some basic screening questions that save recruiters both time and effort assessing basic competency for the role, ensuring proper work authorization is secured, and that location or relocation criteria is met.

 “Technology is changing everything, right? So it’s changing the talent that we’re looking for and how we go about attracting and retaining that talent,” said Nicole Lovell, VP of global talent for global infrastructure company Jacobs, which works on projects connecting people with everything from bridges and public transit systems to semiconductors and AI data centers.

Lovell manages a team of more than 100 TA pros across a dozen countries, and has been a charter customer with LinkedIn for more than a decade. Lovell’s team hires thousands of people each year worldwide on a variety of types of projects and began piloting the agent last fall.

“It’s really shaken things up for us in terms of streamlining, sourcing and outputting really quality candidates,” Lovell said. “Anything we could do to speed up the process [and] improve our quality of hire, we need to do.”

For Jacobs, in consulting “talent is our core differentiator,” and passive recruitment constitutes a large portion of the company’s TA strategy, and LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant has most aided her talent organization’s capacity for the relationship building and face time needed to make an impact.

“Sometimes it takes six months to get somebody to a place where they’re willing to talk to a hiring manager, we can now invest our recruiters time in that space,” Lovell said. “Much more value add than sifting through a bunch of résumés that come back in a Boolean search.”

Lovell said “change management is a big, big piece of this.” Lovell said it was important for her recruiters to learn the technology, create new approaches, and become “power users,” adding that consistently using and understanding the agent delivered the biggest impacts on time savings and efficiency.

 The tool will be available globally by the end of the month, according to the company.

LinkedIn is also working to bolster its ATS integrations, the technology powering its sourcing and screening abilities, and finding new ways to improve collaboration with hiring managers in the intake process, Srinivasan said.

“I feel there’s so much more to do, and I am positive, when we launch this, we will learn a lot,” Srinivasan said. “More people will give us more problems…it’s kind of the fun part.”

LinkedIn’s first agent, Hiring Assistant, expands availability globally after first year

Charter users report early wins sourcing better candidates, time savings, and more capacity for networking and relationship building.

Amid a chorus of promises to reduce workloads and headaches, AI tools have made a loud entry into the world of talent acquisition (TA)and…everywhere else. Recruiters who are no strangers to automation in the hiring process are now discovering 

 employed by their counterparts, job seekers, in efforts to bolster their chances of employment.

This cohort of already understaffed and over-burdened HR pros is navigating a tsunami of applications for open roles, and

 to get ahead are impacting the candidate experience, time to fill, quality of hire, and even poses real security and privacy concerns.

“It’s getting easier and easier to apply for jobs and harder and harder to get a job,” said Dan Chait, the CEO of recruiting platform Greenhouse. “I don’t look at a job seeker—who’s trying to get a job and really needs a job—as the villain.”

Chait told HR Brew that the rise of pandemic-era remote work and the ability to employ talent untethered by location, a cooling market for job seekers, and, of course, AI, have all contributed to this new set of problems facing recruiters and TA pros.

“Generally speaking, they’re in a doom loop that’s all making stuff worse,” he said. “Job seekers are applying to many more jobs, and they’re like, ‘I’m never gonna get a job. I’m gonna use AI and automation to apply to hundreds of jobs instead of dozens of jobs,’ and then employers are turning around and saying, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m not gonna read a thousand résumés; AI, tell me the five I should pay attention to.’ And that’s getting worse, not better.”

, job seekers are increasingly turning to AI tools to help apply for more jobs, to tailor their résumés more closely to job postings (sometimes with information or skills that are untrue), or skirt past knock-out questions in applications. Behaviors start to cross the line when job seekers employ the tool to make its own decisions on their behalf in order to move forward in ways that can border on dishonesty or be outright false, he added.

Applicants are using AI tools in interviews (45%) to help aid their expertise, and in some cases this is not malevolent behavior. AI company 

, is “looking for candidates who excel at collaborating with AI,” and outlines ways candidates are encouraged to work with the tools ethically during the hiring process.

Others are even injecting code into their applications to prompt the AI tools to surface up a positive response to the particular application. Greenhouse internal hiring data reveals that this is indeed happening, he said.

“All these places where AI tools are showing up. People are figuring out ways to try to trick the AI,” he said.

, a new product designed to help recruiters cut through the spam and fraud in the hiring process, to better surface up quality candidates. The platform partnered with CLEAR, the identify verification vendor you can spot at the airport.

But TA orgs don’t need the Greenhouse infrastructure to guard against the slop.

“Some of them are quite rudimentary,” he said of the ways TA pros are addressing this. “What companies are doing today, absent Real Talent, literally, I’ve had a company say, ‘We’re having job seekers show their ID on an interview with a recruiter.’”

Talent organizations can also collect and review ATS data for signals of fraud, including the device that submitted the application, the location of the IP address, the email the applicant used to apply, whether the content in the application matches or mirrors other content from other applicants.

Some TA pros are developing a system to assess the onslaught of applications as they come in. Chronological is illogical now, but some organizations are developing ways to better understand the skills and needs of a role and “analyze the inbound applicants” to surface different signals about “who may or may not be a more likely fit,” he said.

Additionally, Chait pointed to efforts the platform is working on to deliver a new set of relevant hiring signals to recruiters that look different than bygone norms. Earlier this year, 

, allowing job seekers on the platform to submit one “dream job” application per month. TA pros can pay special attention to those applications, which would likely signal an increased level of care and intentionality by the applicant, due to the scarcity of the option.

“You might be using automated tools to send a thousand résumés out; that’s up to you,” he said, “But you get one dream job a month, and so as a job seeker you better think carefully…our customers are seeing that those people are passing through at about four times the rate.”

TA teams are looking to new hiring strategies to address “doom loop” of overreliance on AI

: “It’s getting easier and easier to apply for jobs and harder and harder to get a job.”

For many professional services and consulting outfits, college and early-career recruitment have historically made up a large portion of hiring strategy. Entry-level positions offer early-career professionals opportunities to learn the business under the guidance of more senior peers and, in turn, support their work by performing the more monotonous, rote task work associated with the profession (think deep research, data analysis, numbers crunching).

It just so happens that those are the same sorts of 

“The AI piece is becoming more integrated, which is requiring a redefinition of what an entry-level role looks like and the types of skills that might be needed,” Handshake’s chief education strategy officer, Christine Cruzvergara, told 

 earlier this year after telling Axios that AI could eliminate half of entry-level roles. In fact, Big Four consulting firm PwC plans to shrink its entry-level recruiting by nearly one-third over the next three years, according to reporting from 

“We are being prudent by decreasing our campus hiring goals in certain parts of our firm and leaving space for us to reevaluate our needs as necessary to meet the evolving demands of our business and our clients,” the firm told BI in a statement.

But according to Ty Beasley, principal and chief talent officer at mid-sized accounting and consulting firm RSM, the product, in consulting, is the talent: their expertise, their experience, their ideas, and their ability to help clients identify problems and design and execute solutions for them. So replacing people with AI doesn’t feel like the right talent strategy.

Unlike its larger rivals, RSM’s early career program “hasn’t changed pre- and post-AI,” according to Beasley. The firm is instead developing its entry-level talent as the future “products” the firm sells to its clients, meeting this digital native cohort where they’re at in terms of AI skills, and focusing on growing “soft skills” and exposing them earlier to clients.

 “We bring people on; we give them early development so that they can develop their technical skills,” Beasley said. “We sell skills. We sell [the] knowledge of our people. The first thing we focus on…is the development of technical skills, because we have to bring value to our clients through people, and it comes through their ability, or their technical capabilities to solve clients problems.”

Beasley told HR Brew the company teaches employees role- and industry-specific knowledge. Then, as they grow inside the organization, their L&D pathways expand to include more and more training on “durable skills,” like communication and leadership, to grow relationships.

Account reconciliation, for example, could become a task that is better suited for AI than a human accountant. But those accountants using the AI tools in the future to perform the task will still need the knowledge and skills to apply the information to strategy in service of the client.

“You still have to know account reconciliations: why it needs to be done, what’s the importance of it,” he said. “When the tool does it for you, you are now being crafted and skilled and developed to now provide the insights to what the tool is giving you.”

 Early-career employees at RSM also work more closely with clients, partly because of the firm’s size. Though at 18,000 strong, RSM focuses on services for midsized clients, and to serve them, it’s all hands on deck.

“The way we work with our clientele is such that our people get in front of our clients much sooner than let’s say the Big Four. You might be a manager before you’re face-to-face with a client of the Big Four,” he said, but as RSM works with midmarket firms, “You can’t hide staff from the client.”

RSM is also meeting Gen Z entrants where they are. Graduates today come to the profession with native tech knowledge and are looking to grow and contribute, so the firm is tapping this hungry cohort to help shape the work.

“We got people coming into the firm now, from an entry-level perspective, they’re already interacting with these tools,” Beasley said. “So when they come to us, they’re not being introduced to AI tools. They’re looking at us saying, ‘Okay, how can I continue to be upskilled with these tools?’”

 The firm is fully embracing AI, but it’s focused on leveraging AI tools to improve employees’ ability to serve clients, improve the ways employees interact internally, and help grow employees.

“We view AI [as] the force multiplier,” he said “What it is for our talent, it augments their human capabilities. It unlocks their productivity. It enables them to be smarter, but it puts them in the position [of] faster decision making. So this transformation is…a tool we invest in so that we can continue to invest in our people, so that we can continue to serve our clients with more and more excellence, more efficiency.”

A human crushed by giant letters A and I.

AI