Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor is returning to the world of work, announcing the launch of a new AI-native talent marketplace that leverages AI technology to help connect the right applicants to open roles using vibrant “dossiers,” rather than outdated résumés and job descriptions.

Taylor’s new entry into the hiring tech landscape, Boomband, is set to launch in March and this month closed a $4 million seed financing round led by Boston Seed, with participation from Slater Technology Fund, Rogue Venture Partners, and Service Provider Capital.

Taylor said Boomband will look to address current headaches on both sides of the hiring process by using AI to rethink the way applicants and employers connect and talk about roles.

“The early AI examples [in TA] aren’t very good. They’re not helping. I think they’re actually hurting the problem,” he told HR Brew. “The reality still is that AI is not deployed in a way that’s deeply impactful, but I’m of the school that that’s coming.”

For more on how Taylor hopes to (again) address pain points in the hiring tech space, keep reading here.—AD

Recruiting teams are, in many ways, ground zero for AI disruption. A plethora of tasks historically performed by recruiters can now be performed by AI technology. But…with a world of possibilities at one’s fingertips, it can be difficult to know where to begin.

Real estate tech giant Zillow has launched several AI tools for recruitment since it began experimenting in late 2023. HR Brew recently sat down with Roz Harris, Zillow’s VP of talent acquisition, engagement, and belonging, to discuss how her recruitment team has identified and adopted AI solutions.

In November 2023, Harris’s team started looking into how AI could be used by recruiters. “We started looking at the possibility of AI. And what we found was, when you look at the role of a recruiter and what they do, about 80% of our jobs were what you would hear in the conferences about the mundane tasks” that AI could replace, she told HR Brew.

To help ease recruiters’ fear of being replaced by AI, Harris and her team experimented with AI with prompt-a-thons.

For more on how Zillow uses AI to make candidates’ and recruiters’ lives easier, keep reading here.—PM

Nobody’s perfect. It’s a good mantra, except when delivering bad news to employees. Then you want to be as perfect as possible.

HR leaders and their teams are often tasked with delivering bad news—whether it be earth-shattering (layoffs, firings) or lower-stakes (smaller raises, the end of a beloved perk). Missteps along the way can create uncomfortable, yet critical, lessons.

HR Brew spoke with two HR leaders about instances in their careers when a sensitive conversation went haywire, the lessons they learned, and their advice for practitioners in similar situations.

For more on communications missteps, and what two HR leaders learned from them, keep reading here.—PM