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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Canva scours 300,000 job applications a year 

 Every application is looked at by human eyes, says Global Head of People Jennie Rogerson. 

How Canva scours 300,000 job applications a year 

Adam DeRose

A recruiter’s work doesn't stop during downturns, it just changes

When requisitions dry up, it’s a great time to tackle work that will improve talent acquisition processes.

How in-house recruiters can stay valuable when hiring slows

This new bill might just be the solution to recruiters’ staffing struggles. 

The House has introduced a bill that could help low-income job-seekers access skills—and recruiters find qualified workers.

Lawmakers eye a change that would make skills-based training eligible for popular Pell Grant program

cork board with job board text next to morning brew coffee mug and notebooks

Recruitment

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.”

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.”

An illustration of a photo of HR Brew reporter Paige McGlauflin.

Paige McGlauflin

As immigration enforcement skyrockets under the second Trump administration, a new problem is keeping HR teams up at night: I-9 audits.

The one-page forms, used to verify the identity and employment eligibility of new workers, are subject to review from the government at any time. Experts warned that government agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), would ramp up investigations after President Trump took office again in January.

Risks abound with I-9 investigations. Penalties for employers can range from $288 to $2,861 for paperwork errors alone on the form, while knowingly employing an unauthorized worker can result in a fine as high as $5,724 or even criminal charges. As a result, more organizations are auditing their own I-9 forms to avoid getting in trouble should ICE target them for an investigation.

“The key defense to addressing ICE issues is to make sure your I-9s are in order,” David Jones, a managing partner at Fisher Phillips's Memphis office and co-chair of its Immigration Practice Group, said during a breakout session at SHRM’s annual conference in San Diego.

Organizations are increasingly placing that responsibility on HR’s shoulders. Jessica Roberts, manager of HR operations at the Delaware-based healthcare system Christiana Care, told HR Brew that her team is currently conducting a self-audit. The primary driver of the audit was potential investigations: “Just because of today’s climate, as far as the worry of the potential for an I-9 audit,” she said.

Many employers used to overlook I-9 form compliance, but more are looking to conduct audits as enforcement ramps up, John Fay, director of product strategy at Equifax Workforce Solutions and a former practicing immigration attorney, told HR Brew.

“Mostly what we’re hearing now is employers coming to us and saying, ‘What do I do? How do I prepare? What’s the risk?’” Fay said.

Experts strongly recommend that employers use a third-party provider to conduct an audit, because often those conducting the audit in-house will fail to see the previous errors made, which could potentially create an even bigger compliance mess for future self-audits. Experts suggest a third-party auditor could catch inaccuracies that otherwise might be missed.

But “any self assessment is better than none at all,” Fay said. If employers can demonstrate that they were attempting to follow best practices, even if they made errors, the government might be more forgiving when it comes to levying penalties.

To start, some organizations may begin by auditing a sample of all of their forms, while others might choose to review every form. Afterwards, they’ll need to pull the forms in whatever form they’re in (on paper or electronically).

From there, employers will want to ensure they’re getting every form for every active employee, as well as former employees dating back a certain period (either three years since their start date, or one year since their end date, depending on whichever is the longer period).

“Then it’s just going through them all, reviewing them, figuring out what the issues are, and coming up with a strategy of how we’re going to fix them,” Fay said.

As for the frequency of conducting self-audits, Fay explained that it depends on the employer and industry. In sectors that more heavily rely on immigrant labor with a heightened risk for investigations (such as agriculture or manufacturing), organizations might want to conduct reviews more often, such as monthly or quarterly.

Common mistakes Roberts’ team keeps finding as part of their audits include missing documents, incorrect hire dates, and missing initials.

“Nothing crazy, but you can be fined for everything. In the scheme of things, everything is a worry,” she said.

Roberts’ team is not alone as many employers catch errors on these forms. “The I-9 has been one page for most of its existence since 1986, and I’ve almost probably never seen an employer who had every I-9 done correctly,” David Jones said.

Other common errors include employees inputting their birthdate for their hire date, foreign nationals attesting to the wrong status (for example, a visa holder erroneously selecting that they are a permanent resident), and leaving parts of the form blank.

“There’s probably a couple hundred different ways you can mess up an I-9 form,” Fay said.

He also warned against going in and retroactively fixing a problem. Fay recalled one public case where a company discovered it had several incomplete I-9 forms: The employee auditing the forms went and retroactively completed and signed the forms, backdating them for fear of getting in trouble. But, they signed and backdated using their married name on forms completed before they were married.

“The government actually did this investigation and discovered: ‘Hey, you weren’t actually married back then.’ So it looked really, really bad,” Fay said. “That’s the number one thing with audits: You want to be as transparent as possible. No white out, no backdating. We always recommend attaching a note explaining that you saw the issue,” he added, noting that with the notion of good faith, if an employer demonstrates that they’re making an effort, “many times the government will turn the other way.”

A pen rests over an Employee Eligibility Verification form, commonly called the form I-9, which each new hire in the U.S. must fill out at the start of their employment.

What HR can expect when conducting an I-9 audit

As the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement, more employers are tasking their HR teams with getting their I-9 forms in check.

What HR pros should expect when conducting I-9 self-audits, according to experts

An illustration of reporter Courtney Vinopal's headshot.

Courtney Vinopal

Spotify’s new CHRO Anna Lundström is stepping into the role during a fairly rosy period for the streaming giant. For the first time since it was launched in 2008, the Stockholm-based company 

 for an entire year in 2024. A few rockier periods preceded this achievement, though, including layoffs that affected 17% of the company’s workforce in 2023.

Lundström, who has been with Spotify for nine years, officially took over as CHRO in April, replacing Katarina Berg. She said her team is now focused on hiring “homegrown talent” for open roles, as well as preparing the workforce for the AI age.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What was the succession process like when you took over from your predecessor?

The good thing is that succession planning is a huge focus of ours, and has been for many years. Katarina, my predecessor, who I also reported into for nine years, was walking the talk by making me ready for the role.

Prior to this job I had probably the next largest role in the HR org, as I covered all of the business areas in Spotify, all the revenue teams…supporting our chief business officer and co-president, Alex Norström, for about three years before.

That’s a big part of our strategy, what we are actually coaching our leaders and managers to do here…you’re not doing your job if you don’t have a successor.

Any new priorities now that you’ve formally stepped into the CHRO role?

Unsurprisingly, AI is top of mind. AI has been a huge part of our product for a very long time…and now we’re very focused on embracing AI as an organization amongst the workforce.

Gustav Söderström, chief product officer and co-president, and myself, went out to the organization about a month ago and talked about the importance of AI, but with a learning lens. We’re all going to start embracing this regardless of role, offering trainings and tools.

We recently did hack week, which is usually a week where all our product and technology employees get a week [when they’re] free to work on a passion product, something they’re interested in. We went and offered that to the full organization, regardless of role, and the theme was “play with AI,” and that was very well received.

We are experimenting with an AI analyst that will give you real time data, such as, “what’s the current attrition rate over here? What’s the engagement score over there?”

Another one is just deck review—reviewing decks to make them ready for executive presentations, creating GPTs for that to save time…The learning angle really works for us.

You mentioned Spotify’s “work from anywhere” policy has helped the company recruit diverse talent. Has Spotify’s approach to diversity changed given some of the executive orders from the current US administration?

We did a big pivot about two years ago to focus on 

. That’s one big part of who we are as a company, everyone should feel like they belong and are included at the company.

We need a workforce that mirrors the world. Our product is in 184 markets, and our consumers are all over the world, so we need to have a workforce that can serve our consumers in a very real way.

Our focus on inclusion, equity, and diversity has not changed. We needed to train our managers…to be inclusive leaders and so forth. But we have not changed anything…It’s needed for our business to have a diverse workforce.

Spotify’s headcount has fluctuated over the years. How is your team thinking about hiring priorities now?

We have the last two years doubled down on 

We have our own internal talent marketplace built on machine learning, [called] 

We have a strategy where all open jobs should first go in-house because of the belief that we need to retain our talent. What keeps people here is the challenges, the opportunities, the ability to grow, and it's been a success for us. We filled 30% of our open jobs last year internally, going up from 22% the year before.


Spotify CHRO Anna Lundström stands in front of the streaming platform's logo

Spotify’s CHRO talks AI, recruiting internally, and DEI

Anna Lundström, who has been with Spotify for nine years, took over as the streaming giant’s HR chief in April. 

Spotify’s new CHRO on encouraging employees to “play with AI” 

Working through a flood of applications with rising pressure to fill roles quickly with top talent, recruiters haven’t had an easy go lately. To help address key pain points, applicant tracking system and hiring platform Greenhouse announced a suite of new AI-driven features aimed at easing the burden on talent acquisition pros while hastening the hiring process.

Greenhouse is designing new tools to help recruiters make faster and better hiring decisions inside their existing workflows at a time when there are more and more applicants, but fewer and fewer recruiters to handle open requisitions. Unveiled at the UNLEASH Conference in Las Vegas last week, the new tools promise to automate labor-intensive tasks, from filtering resumes to drafting job descriptions.

“Application volume has doubled over the last two years,” Meredith Johnson, Greenhouse’s new chief product officer, said in Las Vegas. “That volume is clear. We’re seeing in our data three times the number of applicants per recruiter. So there’s a real challenge here that’s forming.”

Johnson pointed to a 102% spike in job applications since the release of ChatGPT, according to Greenhouse data. Generative AI has made it easier for candidates to tailor their application materials for specific job descriptions, and robo-apply tools allow job seekers to throw the proverbial spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

In its May release, Greenhouse announced new AI-powered features including:

AI-assisted personalized candidate outreach

“When we think about talent, talent acquisition, recruiting, and all the things that our operational teams have to do, our recruiting teams, our hiring teams, we’re really trying to be pragmatic and focused and prescriptive about where we are adding AI technologies and features right into the workflow,” Johnson said.

Features such as candidate filters and personalized candidate outreach are aimed at helping recruiters engage with the best talent for the role, but to help winnow down the field and better engage top talent.

“It is about saving time and money and being efficient,” she said. “To me, what’s more important is actually driving up the efficacy of the value we’re trying to deliver. In this case, great hires.”

The percentage increase in job applications since the release of ChatGPT has been updated, per Greenhouse data.

Greenhouse unveils new AI hiring tools

New features equip recruiters with more tools to streamline hiring amid high volumes of applications

follows a shepherd boy on a journey to find the treasure from his dreams, [spoiler alert] only to learn that the treasure was back home where his journey began (so why did I read all 208 pages?). Coelho suggests sometimes you have to go on a journey to recognize the value of what you’ve got.

In some ways, recruiters have been on their own AI-powered, 

-esque treasure hunt in TA. But even AI proponents see core 

 to the future of work. New AI tools have created a new set of issues and concerns—forcing some to rethink how to pursue new talent.

And in some ways, emerging AI tools and platforms are creating the opportunity for recruiters to return to their people-focused roots: building and leveraging professional relationships, creating a positive candidate experience, and navigating the nuances of human needs in the workplace.

“[TA] can be very transactional anytime you’re using AI,” said Bonnie Dilber, a recruiter with Zapier and a 

. “You’re never going to have that same human touch, and if you’re a company that wants to hire the best talent out there, that talent wants to feel courted; they want to feel like your company is putting as much human time into them as they are into you.”

New AI tools have allowed for recruiters and TA pros to better communicate with their networks, create more effective cold-outreach messages, and for companies to better correspond with the massive amount of applicants for open roles that 

 via templated auto-send emails. But these AI level-ups, perhaps, aren’t always delivering on the candidate experience.

“Candidates are now complaining about that saying, ‘I don't want to hear from your ATS. I want to hear from a person.’ So what makes any product person believe that a candidate’s going to want to go through an experience where everything is automated or done through a machine, rather than a person, when people don’t even like getting a rejection [email] from the system,” said Dayforce’s VP of global TA Steve Knox.

Dayforce’s strategy is evolving “more and more” towards “bringing that human element back into the recruiting process,” said Knox in noting that the high-touch aspects of the company’s recruiting process are the components of the program that receive the highest praise.

“Every time I ask candidates, ‘How would you feel if this process was automated’, everybody runs screaming, saying they would never want to go through that,” he said.

Joel Lalgee, who runs a boutique recruitment firm, The Realest Recruiter, and hosts a podcast of the same name, told HR Brew that AI has allowed for the mass-sending of personalized messages creating “a lot of high-quality spam.”

“But you only have an advantage with AI if you’re the only one using the tool,” Lalgee said. “Once everybody’s using a tool, it then becomes really, really noisy…In the future, if we’re all used to this high-quality spam, we’re not going to respond to messages.”

This is where a strong employer brand comes into play, otherwise recruiters for smaller or lesser-known organizations will need to contend with standing out in messages and differentiate their outreach from other companies. Lalgee said he sees in-person recruiting at conferences or industry events as continuing to be a key future component to TA

In addition to returning to bespoke, human-authored outreach, AI tools available to candidates have also led some TA leaders to bring candidates back into the office for in-person (ID-verified) interviews or skills assessments.

“When it comes to global hiring, we’re seeing a lot more fraud,” Lalgee said, pointing to people showing up for interviews who aren’t who they say they are, different people showing up for work on the first day than the person who interviewed, or “pyramid schemes”-type candidates, who take on roles but then outsource the actual work to freelancers or contractors.

Lalgee also pointed to fraud involving AI-use itself: in a virtual interview setting, candidates can sometimes appear on screen but are caught looking off screen for an excessive amount during the interview, referring to AI tools to deliver the best answers.

“I think the only way that I’ve heard from people trying to solve that problem is just to get people back on site,” Lalgee said. “Which kind of ruins remote work for everybody. So I’m like, how did we screw that one up?”

image of people waiting to be interviewed for a job