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

Generative AI

Adam DeRose

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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. 

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.

This firm is bolstering, not trimming, its early career program as AI automates rote tasks

For RSM, an emphasis on growth and training early career associates is core to success.

Mikaela Cohen

When it comes to AI, Gen Z workers may be the teachers, rather than the students.

Nearly all (89%) of KPMG’s Gen Z interns use generative AI weekly both in their professional and personal lives, according to 

“They come in from day one, just already used to, on a daily basis, almost having some level of technology at their hands” said Derek Thomas, KPMG’s national partner-in-charge of university talent acquisition. “They [have] these tools that’s just helping make their job a little bit easier and helping them to get some more experience doing probably some more challenging things than we did when I first started out.”

Companies have an opportunity, Thomas told HR Brew, to lean on their Gen Z workers, who can use this technology to pursue more complicated tasks and projects than previous generations of entry-level talent. In return, however, they should consider Gen Z’s priorities for their workplace and careers.

Many of KPMG’s Gen Z interns reported finding value in in-person interactions with coworkers, Thomas said. As AI speeds up the pace at which work gets done, he suspects employees will be eager to dedicate even more time to these sorts of opportunities—they ranked hands-on learning as number one as well as observing colleagues in-office for “navigating expectations.”

Thomas said he was surprised to see how many Gen Z workers value stability: 59% of respondents said they want to spend their careers growing at just one or two companies, while 35% want to spend their careers in one industry.

“As a generation, they want to go deeper and wider, so in order to do that, they want to be in that one place where they could try to grow and learn,” he said. “Not necessarily always have to be that jack-of-all-trades and do 100 different things, but where can I best get that focus, and really learn my craft, and really get good at it?”

A photo collage of two coworkers looking at a digital tablet in an office and and a young man with colored hair using laptop in foreground.

Gen Z workers are digital natives, but what they want from their workplace is more old school

The priorities they have for their careers may come as a surprise.

Gen Z and millennial employees are using AI at work, regardless of whether or not you want them to, according to a new survey by Cox Business.

These digital-native employees are regularly using “AI agents to support their productivity at work,” according to the company, but are reluctant to reveal how much they’re relying on it.

The findings didn’t surprise workplace and remote work social media creator Corporate Natalie, known offline as Natalie Marshall, who told HR Brew they’re in line with DMs on social media and comments she’s read below her videos.

“The survey findings show that there’s actually a lot of congruency between these two groups. It might lead to more cross-generational harmony than we might think,” Marshall said. “There’s nothing worse than that feeling of being scared to talk to your manager…whether it’s your mental health at work, how you’re handling your workload, or how you’re feeling about these tools and tech, it’s important to escalate how you’re feeling.”

Cox found that about half of Gen Z and millennial employees are nervous to report how much they’re able to accomplish with AI. And they often use AI tools that aren’t administered by their organization, with 65% saying they are “more familiar” with their personal tools than those offered by their company.

MIT this month released findings that echoed the sentiment reported in the Cox survey. 

’s State of AI in Business 2025 concluded that hampered enterprise AI adoption persists in business, while a “shadow AI economy” erupts as employees leverage unsanctioned tools to complete their work, 

“What if the IT department sought counsel in these early-career individuals and created more of an open door policy? Especially with Gen Z being such digital natives; they’re using all of these AI tools and offerings,” she said. “Asking them what they’re using [and] what we can apply to work, would prevent them from using their kind of rogue personal devices, which is what we’re seeing with this shadow IT concept in the survey.”

Marshall said that organizations can leverage what’s working on the individual level and license professional versions of their most beloved new tools. They just have to ask.

“A lot of times those are early-career individuals and the companies that I see tapping into these people and using them is where it actually leads to a great culture of AI-use,” she said.

Millennials and Gen Z employees are using unsanctioned AI tools at work

They’re reluctant to share with companies how they’re leveraging the technology, and it’s a shame.

AI skills are in demand, and HR will need to fork over higher salaries to recruit this talent.

Adding AI skills to job descriptions could cost employers 28% more in annual compensation, a 

 from research firm Lightcast found. AI-related skills can include expertise with large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, as well as prompt engineering, text summarization, and more.

A Lightcast analysis of over 1.3 billion job postings in 2024 found roles advertising at least one AI or generative AI skill offered $18,000 more in annual compensation on average than those that did not. Some 51% of these AI roles were not in tech-related industries, up from 44% in 2022.

“AI is becoming more and more pervasive throughout all of the job descriptions that we’re seeing for virtually any different career area,” Cole Napper, VP of research at Lightcast, told HR Brew.

No longer are AI skills only associated with tech or IT roles, Napper said, and the roles that are seeing the biggest rise in AI skill demand are recruiters and HR pros.

Companies that don’t keep up with this trend, he said, could miss out on talent.

“There is a divergence that’s going on between employers who are saying, ‘We’re not leaning into this space. We’re not really seeing the need to do that,” Napper said. “It’s better to recruit sooner than later, because if you try to play catch up later, this is going to cost you even more.”

It’s a supply and demand issue, Napper added. More employers are demanding AI skills, but the supply of employees with these skills has stayed consistent, he said. He suspects the workforce will adjust through upskilling and reskilling, but this will take time.

“There is always a lagging effect, because it takes time for people to build skills,” he said.

AI robot arms reaching towards the sky with lots of money falling around them.

AI talent costs nearly 30% more in annual compensation

The majority (64%) of US adults plan to avoid using AI for “as long as possible,” according to a 

. AI experts think 79% of US adults already use AI “constantly or several times a day,” the 

 found in April, but only 27% of respondents said they use AI to that extent.

There could be an educational or “misunderstanding gap,” said Todd Blaskowitz, senior client partner on the AI strategy and transformation team at consulting firm Korn Ferry.

“You’re probably using an AI or a generative AI solution, day in and day out, that you may not even be aware of,” Blaskowitz told HR Brew. “[It’s] a misunderstanding gap with individuals around these tools, and how they are starting to present themselves in your daily lives, and how you accomplish a daily task, or even your work within your job.”

Many people don’t realize they’re already using AI, said Lydia Saad, director of US social research at Gallup. For instance, she said, Netflix uses AI to recommend users content based on their viewing history. And Google uses it to aggregate information for search results.

“There’s a lot of people who don’t know what all the different variations of AI are,” Saad told HR Brew. This could cause resistance.

Saad highlighted another piece of Gallup data, which found the more people use AI tools, the more likely they are to see it as a tech advancement, rather than a threat. Some 71% of US adults who use genAI daily see it as innovative, compared to 35% of those who’ve never used it.

“As people get more familiar with using it, they’ll get more comfortable with understanding how they can use it without it doing harm to them or their livelihood,” she said.

Before introducing AI tools in the workplace, Blaskowitz recommended providing education, as well as clarity and transparency around how it fits in their company’s strategy.

“If people just hear, ‘Oh, we’re doing all this AI stuff at work. Oh, we just got Copilot or ChatGPT, but if they don’t have clarity on how that fits into the overall, bigger picture, that’s going to cause resistance in the organization,” he said. “If you don’t hear that narrative or understand it, you’re going to create your own.”

Then, people leaders, Blaskowitz said, can start encouraging employees to embrace an AI mindset.

“Help your people rethink their work, rethink the outcomes that they’re trying to do with a mindset of, ‘How might AI improve this?’” he said. “How might AI enhance the overall experience, the overall quality, my overall productivity?”

In offering encouragement, however, Blaskowitz said he advises leaders not to ignore workers’ fears. “[Be] a human, showing empathy, and addressing the fears that people bring into the workplace,” he said.

Employees are avoiding AI—HR can help them embrace it

“As people get more familiar with using it, they’ll get more comfortable with understanding how they can use it without it doing harm to them or their livelihood,” Lydia Saad, director of US social research at Gallup, told HR Brew.