Is your company an “employer of choice?” Does it have a long history that you want to brag about to anyone who’ll listen? Do you think it stands out from competitors?

That’s nice. Job seekers don’t care—or, rather, they don’t care when they’re applying.

Attention spans are as short as ever, leaving employers seemingly struggling to make an impression via their job postings: A November 2025 survey by Indeed found that, in the prior year, 65% of employers were missing the mark on the first try and had to revise its job description. Of those employers, 42% said they had to revise it because they were getting too many unqualified applicants, while enother 21% said they weren’t getting enough candidates, period.

Job seekers don’t read postings to learn about your company’s entire story. They want to know: “What’s in it for me?”

For more on what candidates are really looking for in job postings, keep reading here.—PM

On Feb. 4, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a subpoena request to obtain records from Nike about its DEI programming, a move the company called an “unusual escalation.”

What’s happening? The EEOC filed the request in the Eastern District of Missouri Court, and claims that white workers could have been discriminated against as a result of Nike’s DEI initiatives. Among the documents the EEOC is requesting are criteria considered before layoffs, how the company used race and ethnicity data, and “information about 16 programs” related to mentoring, leadership, and career development.

According to the EEOC, Nike allegedly has not fully complied with their previous requests for documents, but Nike claims otherwise.

Part of the anti-DEI strategy. This is the latest instance of federal agencies investigating a company over its DEI practices, dating back to President Trump’s first days back in office.

On Jan 30, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a warning to roughly 40 law firms that participated in a diversity certification program, according to Bloomberg Law. The FTC claimed that the certifications could indicate “anticompetitive collusion,” a move that Stephen Calkins, a law professor at Wayne State University, told the publication is “untested legal territory.”

For more on the subpoena request, and the Trump administration’s broader anti-DEI strategy, keep reading here.—KP

Here’s this week’s edition of our Coworking series. Each week, we chat 1:1 with an HR Brew reader. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

What do a cruise line, a suburb, a baseball team, and SHRM all have in common? It’s not the set-up for a joke. They’re all stops along the CV of this HR leader.

Carnival Corporation’s CHRO Bettina Deynes has had a “very untraditional career journey.” The Uruguayan immigrant got her start in the workforce at the age of 17 as a janitor in Washington, DC. Still in high school, Deynes cleaned office buildings just blocks from Congress, looking out onto the US Capitol, imagining a future from a corner office with these views of her own.

Nearly a decade later, Deynes took it upon herself to grow her career at the cleaning company. She moved into an office role, helped with payroll, and began developing her HR skills by attending the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) conferences and work sessions. She was then tapped for a senior HR role at a company in one of those same office buildings on Capitol Hill. Imagine her stunned pride walking into a corner office with the same views of the Capitol dome, having manifested her dreams.

Deynes credits this moment as the catalyst for her “maverick” approach to HR.

For more from our conversation with Deynes, keep reading here.—AD

As AI reshapes jobs and entry-level roles disappear, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are facing growing uncertainty about their careers. Experts share why anxiety is rising—and what HR leaders should understand about supporting the next generation of workers.