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

Adam DeRose

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Cassie Kozyrkov, CEO of Data Scientific, speaks at SHRM’s AI + HI Project event

This data scientist wants HR leaders to ask these three questions when shopping around for AI tools

Best known for enhancing productivity, AI tools still need a human to double-check their work.

Technically HR recurring feature illustration

Technically HR: Indeed launches new tool helping TA pros match candidates to job openings

With Smart Sourcing, Indeed aims to make finding the right candidate easier and faster by using AI.

A computer processor icon denoting HR technology

Tech

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

Paige McGlauflin

 on AI technology, many companies aren’t having much luck getting their workforce to 

After discovering that its own employees were timid about using AI in the workplace, enterprise software giant Workday spearheaded a program to encourage adoption. Ashley Goldsmith, Workday’s chief people officer, recently spoke with HR Brew about that initiative, and how her own team is using AI.

Internal research revealed that Workday employees weren’t 

 because they weren’t clear on the appropriate use cases. So Workday launched a program called “Everyday AI,” through which it encouraged employees to use and experiment with AI, and learn how it’s already being used within the organization.

To start, Workday held a company-wide meeting in April that CEO Carl Eschenbach opened by discussing his own AI use. Then, Goldsmith said he gave the floor to employees, who shared how they use different AI tools. Workday intentionally focused the event on employee experiences, as they thought these would do more to engage and inspire than a more general training.

“With that, we saw this huge adoption and real enthusiasm,” Goldsmith told HR Brew. The company has also encouraged adoption in other ways, including leveraging a peer recognition tool for AI use, and providing managers with resources (such as prompt cards) to help them gamify AI use within their teams.

As of June, 79% of Workday employees were using the technology, 

exceeding the goal the company set for itself

 earlier this year. It aims to further increase adoption rates and mandated that every employee set a goal for AI use, whether that be doubling their usage or leveraging it to reduce hours spent on mundane tasks. Goldsmith hopes Workday’s recently announced AI tools and acquisitions will encourage more use as well.

“We want to take full advantage of and maximize all the efficiency and productivity and assistance that we can gain from within those tools,” she said.

Goldsmith’s team has adopted AI more quickly than the rest of the company, and has seen several successful use cases.

Workday’s recruiting agent, for example, has helped streamline the process of sourcing and selecting candidates. Recruiters saw a 12% decrease in their workloads after the agent was introduced, allowing them more time for critical tasks that were otherwise neglected, including post-interview debriefs.

“That 12% was really quickly redeployed into making sure we had these thoughtful, well-facilitated conversations,” Goldsmith said. “We’re hiring faster, we’re getting really good quality candidates. Everybody feels like it was a great use of their time to interview, because they were really heard and their thoughts were heard.”

The team has also used AI to analyze employee feedback gathered through Workday’s employee sentiment tool, Peakon. The technology analyzes thousands of comments and provides insights and trends, giving Goldsmith’s team actionable insights without having to read every individual piece of feedback. The result: initiatives like Workday’s 

“It’s truly game-changing in terms of how you constantly listen to employees,” Goldsmith said. “I think, in the world today, where we know trust is critical and changes at breakneck speed, it’s harder to continue to stay in touch with your employees. To build [and] keep trust at that speed, listening is so incredibly important.”

When spearheading workforce-wide initiatives related to L&D or AI transformation, HR leaders tend to neglect their own employees’ needs, according to Goldsmith. To ensure her team engages with AI, Goldsmith incorporated the technology into a 

style competition, during which HR staff present how they’re using AI for a chance to win $1,000. While the competition is unique to her team, it mirrors the broader push her team has spearheaded to encourage more AI use throughout the company.

“I think if we follow the advice we give others, it really does work,” she said.

A portrait of chief people officer at Workday, Ashley Goldsmith.

Workday’s chief people officer discusses the tech giant’s AI adoption push

After learning that employees were hesitant to use AI at work, Workday spearheaded an adoption campaign.

Workday’s chief people officer shares how the tech giant got 79% of its employees to use AI

More than 100 startups applied to participate in the annual HR Tech pitchfest this week in Las Vegas.

The judges, along with the audience, winnowed the field from 33 finalists—who pitched in three rounds during the conference and expo—before six were chosen to participate in a final round of head-to-head pitches Thursday.

It was SonicJobs, the agentic AI startup that builds agents enabling job seekers to apply to jobs without any redirection from careers sites, that earned the big fake check, and actual $25,000 prize.

“Ninety-five percent of candidates drop out between clicking ‘apply’ on the job platform and then submitting their data on the ATS,” SonicJobs cofounder and CEO Mikhil Raja claimed during his final five-minute pitch Thursday. “In fact, 70% of candidates bounce as soon as they’re redirected, even before the page has loaded, and a further 25% drop out as they go through the flow and have to reenter their data again and again for every application.”

“We’ve built AI agents that understand every single data field in a job application flow, and that enables the candidate to answer all of those questions on site without redirection and without repetitive data entry,” he said.

SonicJobs isn’t a robo-apply tool. It’s individualized for each role, and prompts applicants to answer about 40 questions, on average, Raja said. The agent can interact directly with the web browser to transfer the correct information to the job application, so applicants don’t need to resubmit materials into an ATS. And “the beauty,” Raja pitched, is the agent doesn’t require any integrations or APIs to work.

The SonicJobs agent also assesses and advises applicants of how their skills and experiences match the role—or don’t.

“One of the hardest things for a startup is to get exposure to buyers, to partners, and so this has been an amazing experience to get our story out there,” Raja told HR Brew after the competition. “There’s millions of people that are losing out on careers and jobs that they’d be an amazing fit for, and that impacts millions of lives.”

Representatives from TA and recruiting startups Hallo, Match2, and SCALIS, as well as mental health platform Spirence and identity verification platform Trua, also participated in the competition’s final round.

Spirence, the mental health platform, secured a runner-up prize of $5,000.

Agentic startup that seeks to reinvent the job search wins HR Tech pitchfest

“There’s millions of people that are losing out on careers and jobs that they’d be an amazing fit for, and that impacts millions of lives,” Sonic Jobs’ founder tells HR Brew.

Leave management software platform Tilt announced Tuesday a shift in thinking when it comes to managing leaves of absence with its new leave experience management platform, powered by AI.

The move introduces an entirely new category of HR tech: leave experience management, according to the startup, reimagining the approach companies take to administering and managing leaves of absence with more transparency and hands-on control by companies and their HR teams.

“The problem isn’t that HR doesn’t want to be involved in leave at all. The problem is they’ve never had the right tools to be involved in the right way,” said CEO Jen Henderson, who founded Tilt in 2017. “The long held belief was that you had to outsource the entire function, but the real job to be done was to eliminate the administrative burden like complex math, the endless forms, the broken data streams. No one ever wanted to be fully removed from the human connection.”

Leave can be an important strategic and cultural asset for companies when it comes to retention, Henderson added during a demo at the HR Technology conference this week in Las Vegas, NV.

Handling requests, processing, and administering leaves of absence often requires a complicated, multistep, and multi-stakeholder operation that involves a lot of personal information on the part of the employee, and compliance expertise on the part of the employer (or vendor), and lots and lots of paperwork.

Tilt last month completed a $15 million Series B funding round, led by Bramalea Partners, with participation from HearstLab, Firework Ventures, Origin Ventures, and Techstars, bringing its total funding to $37 million.

Henderson said Tilt emerged to better serve businesses looking to do right by employees in the very space “where work and life, quite literally, collide.”

“The most critical, vulnerable moments in an employee’s journey should be handled by the people who know them, who know the names of their family members, know the names of their children, not by a stranger,” she added.

Leave of absence, Henderson suggested, is often outsourced to mitigate compliance risk and maintain efficiency on the complicated processes . However, when employees need to use leave to address something in their personal lives, navigating the “black box” of a vendor’s processes can impact an organization’s employee experience, and doesn’t always free HR teams from headaches.

“This broken model erodes the very culture that you’ve worked so hard to build,” Henderson said. “It pushes your best talent towards the door and leaves you legally exposed with no direct control over the process you’re ultimately liable for.”

Tilt’s new LXM platform leveraged “intelligent automation” to create a workflow and dashboard that serves both the HR pro and the employee. AI is allowing humans back into the leave of absence process, Henderson contends, because the technology can help with the administrative, accounting, and compliance burdens, while providing employees, managers and HR teams with the necessary information about the employee leave in one central platform, managed by HR.

“AI could finally sever the link between administrative complexity and human empathy. It could automate the tedious work to finally liberate the humans that are involved in leave,” Henderson said. “You should be in control of supporting your employees’ critical life moments as HR.”

"Out of office" written on a heart-shaped note posted on a calendar. Credit: Francis Scialabba

Introducing a new HR tech category: Leave experience management

This leave management platform is betting that AI can help HR take back the reigns of leave management.

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.”