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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Employee sitting at desk with laptop, resume in the background

Why ChatGPT writing résumés might not threaten the hiring process

Despite the popularity and sophistication of the AI chatbot, ‘We still can’t fake the human element’ of recruiting, says one director of talent acquisition.

ChatGPT writing résumés and cover letters needn’t be feared, HR pros say

A woman wearing a button down shirt speaking into a smartphone 

PwC_NativeAd2_Sep23

One-way video interviews are impersonal, candidates say, and raise privacy concerns

 Automated interviews are used by 61% of organizations globally, according to new research. 

Susanna Vogel

What does an “audit” for bias in automated hiring tech really mean?

In conversations with automated hiring vendors, we learned that processes for bias audits vary widely.

artificial intelligence robot with gavel and scales in front of a wall of binary code

Adam DeRose

It’s pretty safe to say that corporate execs are bullish on AI, and if you’re reading this sentence, it means even the detail-oriented copy desk at Morning Brew sees the ones and zeros on the wall.

 found that enterprise organizations have invested between $30–40 billion in AI—though it would be irresponsible not to mention that the analysis also concluded that 95% of those investments, so far, have 

While AI is top of mind for many in the C-suite, HR pros are more hesitant to welcome the burgeoning technology, according to survey research from employee experience platform Culture Amp.

Culture Amp’s North American people science director, Robert Melloy, told HR Brew that the platform’s found HR pros are more leery of the promise of AI for their function and for employee

“The primary benefits of AI are to increase your scale, your scope, and your learning,” said Melloy, who also teaches business and organizational psychology. “Increase the amount of things that you’re able to do…increase the types of things that you’re able to do, and then…being able to get feedback faster, to become better over time.”

Execs are frothing at the mouth at the thought of AI because they see the tool as a cash multiplier, he said.

“The whole promise of AI in increasing scale, scope, and learning is that it affords us efficiency gains that allow us to be more productive and therefore potentially more profitable, because we’re doing more with less,” he said. “If we can spend less but do more, profits should increase, so AI is like a beacon of hope in a path toward a higher profit.”

But Melloy said that Culture Amp researchers found that HR pros don’t feel like AI is going to prop up the HR function in organizations.

“They actually feel like AI is going to benefit the company and the company’s bottom line more than, specifically, it will benefit people,” he said. “That’s not to say that, if it benefits people, [thus] it benefits the company; they chose ‘the company’ instead of choosing any individual person-related option.”

Perhaps AI is helping them tackle tasks and duties in ways that save them minutes, instead of being the boon to productivity they were promised and keep hearing about. Melloy told HR Brew that the top AI use cases were mostly administrative: drafting emails or communications, brainstorming ideas, or taking and summarizing meeting notes.

“What you’re seeing is like a lot of administrative use, which is not surprising, because maybe that’s the first thought of how to use AI,” Melloy said. “It’s low hanging fruit.”

People work, he argues, would be more impactful and better deliver on AI’s promise, but those AI use cases are ones that HR leaders haven’t yet waded into with gusto, like automating HR operations, upskilling, and analysing people data and HR metrics.

“All of the kinds of things that I would try to argue are the reasons HR should use AI in order to get the benefits of AI for HR,” Melloy said. “Then it’s not surprising why HR folks don’t think that AI has this promise to elevate the value of HR in organizations, because they’re not using AI in the ways that I’m trying to argue they should use it in order to increase the value of HR.”

That tide should change as more people become proficient with AI, Melloy said, but right now many HR pros are missing the potential dramatic gains available to them.

“Most people in HR were not interested to be owning this—the AI strategy—within their own organization,” Melloy said, but added that HR pros “are best positioned to be shepherds of this technology in your organization and creating the strategy for how it’s used among your people, because you’re the people people.”

Image of a person's head covered by an AI-labeled dark cloud.

Many HR pros see the value of AI for business, but fewer see its impact on HR and people

“You are best positioned to be shepherds of this technology in your organization and creating the strategy for how it’s used among your people, because you’re the people people.”

Kristen Parisi

Consulting giant Accenture has a clear message for workers: learn AI, or get out. And it’s not alone. Many companies are reconfiguring their workforces for a rapidly shifting future.

During an earnings call last week, CEO Julie Sweet 

“Our number one strategy is upskilling,” Sweet said on the call. “We are exiting on a compressed timeline, people, where reskilling, based on our experience, is not a viable path for the skills we need.”

Sweet went on to say that the company, which has 779,000 employees globally, is restructuring to be an AI-driven business. While Accenture has cut roughly 22,000 employees so far in 2025, it isn’t looking to reduce its overall headcount. Instead, the company is focused on adding to its AI and data workforce of about 77,000 in the hopes of saving at least $1 billion that it intends to reinvest in workers, CFO Angie Park said on the call.

Accenture has also been hard at work training current employees for a future with GenAI and has trained more than half a million employees. “Our early investment in AI is really paying off,” Sweet 

. “We feel very good as we go into FY26 with the momentum we’re seeing in our business which is driven by Accenture being the company that you really partner to make sure you can use advanced AI.”

Sweet also said the company is focused on “talent rotating,” a strategy that involves cutting workers who don’t have an aptitude for AI, while investing in AI and cloud roles. Microsoft, Meta, and Klarna have all deployed the tactic as they fight to stay ahead in the AI race.

Walmart is taking a similar strategy with its workforce, according to the 

. “It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job,” CEO Doug McMillon recently told business leaders during a workforce conference at the retailer’s Bentonville headquarters. Walmart expects to cut some roles and tasks and create new ones, without changing its overall headcount. “Our goal is to create the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side.”

 that he expects Walmart’s corporate roles to be impacted by AI faster than its store and fulfillment jobs, though he’s unsure exactly what that will look like and how the changes will take place.

“The way for all of us to approach it, especially here at Walmart, is just in a very transparent, honest, human, straightforward way,” McMillon said. “Talking to people [in] real time about what we’re learning and what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. That’s the way that we plan to lead through this.”

Accenture in investing in reskilling workers for AI

Accenture recently said it will layoff employees who it believes can’t be reskilled.

Accenture and Walmart are developing workforce strategies with AI in mind

California Gov. Gavin Newsom made headlines Monday, signing landmark legislation into law to govern the development of frontier AI technology and mitigate risk. But the Golden State this week also began enforcing new AI regulations related to automated decision making systems (ADS) for all employers in the state.

Newsom signed the Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, a first-of-its-kind law that oversees the development of major AI technology systems, requiring companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to disclose their safety measures and report any risks associated with their tech.

The measure also strengthens whistleblower protections for workers at these companies against retaliation for flagging issues of potential or apparent risk.

“California has proven that we can establish regulations to protect our communities while also ensuring that the growing AI industry continues to thrive. This legislation strikes that balance,” the governor said 

 While the signature new law in California doesn’t touch on the work of HR pros like yourself, other regs do. The new law isn’t the only major AI regulation in the state addressing the burgeoning technology as it’s deployed in homes and businesses across Cali and the rest of the country.

Taking effect Oct. 1, the state’s amended Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) now also prohibits businesses in California from using ADS that discriminate against their applicants or employees based on protected statuses.

The changes require employers to conduct specific record-keeping practices related to uses of any ADS, systems that use “artificial intelligence, machine-learning, algorithms, statistics, and/or other data processing techniques” to aid in decisions.

“One of the things that I’m telling my clients, and really starting to get out there, is that you’re already using AI, and chances are you’re exposing yourself to risk,” said Wende Knapp, who leads the employment law practice group with the Rochester, NY-based firm Woods Oviatt Gillman. Knapp’s practice closely aligns with an in-house counsel role for clients.

Conducting bias audits can help businesses mitigate risk, and the measure outlines audits and record-keeping as possible affirmative defenses if properly executed.

“What this regulation does in a nutshell, it really forces employers to inventory all the AI tools that they’re using in HR. So take a deep look, understand what type of technology they’re using,” Knapp said.

The rule also outlines protections for those who require religious or disability accommodations.

 The California Privacy Protection Agency (CCPA) in August 

 a separate set of regs aimed at the same sorts of tools—this body refers to these AI-powered decision making platforms as automated decision-making tools (ADMT).

“They don’t call it ADS, they call it ADMT, but it’s the same thing. [CCPA board members] talk about the processing of personal information, and so that’s their entry point into this,” said Niloy Ray, a shareholder at employment and labor law firm Littler.

These regulations update the state’s consumer privacy law to make sure that these tools, when used in employment decisions, have a detailed risk assessment and notice of use, and that opt-out rights are observed, according to an 

“If both of these sets of regulations aren’t challenged, and I’m not sure that they will be,” Ray said. “Then California employers will have to look closely at CCPA to see if their particular AI tool or use falls within it, and if so, they’ll have to do these things.” These same employers will also need to make sure any of these systems adhere to the California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act revisions via bias auditing and records keeping.

California lawmakers are leading on AI legislation and regulation

 Newsom signs landmark law, but other statewide regulations will impact California employers.

HCM platform Workday announced this month during its annual customer event in San Francisco a set of new features, capabilities, and acquisitions aimed at improving the way HR and employees use technology to get work done.

“Big changes happen whenever there’s a huge technology shift,” Workday’s Melanie Lougee, VP of product vision, told HR Brew following the announcement at Workday Rising 2025. “If you think about where we’re going from a technology standpoint, but also, what does that mean for HR; What does it mean for HR practitioners to…start thinking and doing things in different ways, Workday has the whole stack.”

The “AI platform for managing people, money, and agents” introduced to its stack the Workday Data Cloud, a new data layer that helps customers extract information and insights from HR and finance data by connecting existing analytics platforms and systems together to create improved intersystem work.

“From an HR practitioner’s standpoint, there are a lot of systems that are out there, and the data is all over the place,” Lougee said.

, Workday also announced a partnership with Databricks, Salesforce, and Snowflake to surface additional business data inside the Workday platform and provide people and finance data from Workforce to external systems enterprise companies are already using. The data layer enables “two-way, zero-copy data sharing between Workday and leading data platforms,” according to a news release.

For years these different systems have operated independently of one another or required complicated API or integration processes to communicate between platforms. And even then, data isn’t always congruent.

“We’re coming out of a time where a lot of HR organizations did buying based on an independent department’s priorities,” Lougee said.

She added that an L&D team might procure an LMS platform to meet an organization’s particular skills goals, but when it comes to performance management, HR leaders often procure tools separately. So organizations lack the capacity to connect skills data and performance data, for example, to design intelligent, informed processes to grow talent simply because the infrastructure doesn’t exist to help leaders draw the connections between skills data and performance metrics.

“When you start looking at being able to do things like internal mobility, for example, and wanting to retain your existing workforce, when you have that across 18 different systems, you can’t do it,” she said. “So by creating a data layer, it’s laying the foundation to be able to build business processes, insights, [and] inferences, with one data source.”

This year, Workday has worked to leverage AI to better connect processes and systems for enterprise clients. In February, the company announced a new Agent System of Record product that allows customers to onboard new AI agents (both Workday agents and third-party ones), define which tasks and duties these agents are responsible for, track their impact, and budget and forecast for them.

This month at Workday Rising, Workday also announced a new way for organizations to pay for and experiment with Workday agents via 

. Workday products now come with flex credits, allowing users to tap into the agentic promise of a particular Workday product, but they can purchase additional credits to maximize their value, or use those flex credits to experiment with a different Workday agent all together, but the HR team and the customer are in the driver’s seat about how best to use them for their own business needs.

“Lots and lots of talk about agentic [AI] and agents and all of this, but there’s a lot of barriers to HR being able to adopt some of these things,” Lougee said. “[Workday Flex Credits] removes some barriers to HR being able to experiment.”

Workday’s new data cloud announcement should matter to HR

HR Brew spoke with Workday’s VP of product vision and experience about the data that’s powering AI in human resources.

Morning Brew Creative Studio

Facing hiring struggles? We’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news? You’re not alone. SHRM found that over half of HR professionals report understaffed teams—ouch.

Here’s the good news: AI agents can help take the pressure off during the labor shortage. Designed to help HR and payroll teams boost efficiency, AI agents handle manual tasks while your team of experts gets back to what they do best.

AI agents aren’t just another AI buzzword. According to Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz, the integration of AI agents means “baking AI into already‑used and loved technology to remove the barriers that slow teams down.”

With a little help from some AI team members, HR and payroll teams can claim their time back, get creative, and discover new opportunities.

We teamed up with Deel to learn about its new AI Workforce and how AI agents work alongside humans to impact workflows. Let’s get into it.

 workflows. Its agents are trained on vetted compliance data and are built to execute tasks for you.

The idea is this: to provide your team with 

 support, AI agents shouldn’t create more work. Unlike other AI tools that wait for your queries or instructions, Deel’s AI agents are proactive, jumping in and completing tasks before you notice an issue.

Ready to meet the team? Each of Deel’s seven AI agents is specialized, providing researched expertise in topics that help your team reduce repetitive tasks. This includes:

The Hiring Guru: an agent that recommends the best countries for your company to consider hiring from, based on your requirements and budget

The PTO Fairy: an agent speeding up time-off approvals by analyzing requests and alerting coverage gaps

The Border Buddy: an agent that geolocates employee work locations and helps ensure tax compliance

The Schedule Sheriff: an agent identifying scheduling gaps across your workforce’s time zones to ensure full coverage at all times

The IT Guy: an agent that suggests equipment procurement based on roles and team size

The Goodbye Genie: an agent providing compliant offboarding steps tailored to individual employees by location and tenure

The Payroll Detective: an agent helping to flag payroll anomalies before they hit payouts

Now that you’ve gotten acquainted with the team, let’s get to know how AI agents can work within your existing workflows.

Deel agents live inside the Deel platform, allowing for easy integration. They plug into your tools and work to deliver results all day, every day. And setting up an AI agent is simple. Just choose the specialized agent you need, drop in your criteria, and let it get to work.

Curious about what powers these specialized agents? Well-researched expertise grounded in local laws. Deel’s AI agents are built using the knowledge of 2k+ in-country experts. Don’t have an in-house global hiring expert on your team? No problem. Because Deel’s agents are vetted by country-specific compliance experts, they can operate in over 150 countries.

And speaking of compliance, let’s talk security. Deel uses enterprise-grade encryption, access to controls, and secure storage to help ensure your company’s sensitive data stays protected.

Once your AI agents are online, you can instantly track their progress. No more bouncing between dashboards and platforms to get a clear picture of your analytics. Keep tabs on time saved, tasks completed, errors prevented, ROI earned, and more, all within the Deel platform.

If Deel’s specialized agents aren’t what you’re looking for, that’s no problem. Deel is preparing to launch custom agents you can design to your exact specifications. To help you make the most of your resources, Deel can connect AI agents from outside systems into Deel. And it works with Slack, Zapier, and your existing stack so your business can keep moving and growing.

HR is busier than ever. AI agents help take the pressure off of HR and payroll teams, helping to boost efficiency even when they’re understaffed.

Whether you’re looking for a little automated assistance or in a hurry to grow your team of humans, Deel has your back. Deel helps businesses hire FTEs and contractors in 150+ countries. They handle the hiring and onboarding processes with payroll, tax, and compliance solutions built into one platform, letting your team get to work ASAP.

dashboard containing budgets where each budget can be converted based country

Deel

Deel Sept 2025 Branded Article

How Deel’s AI agents can help HR teams boost efficiency

Deel’s specialized AI agents are designed to streamline workflows so you can get back to work.

Meet your new coworkers

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

Paige McGlauflin

These days, finding a needle in a haystack may actually be easier than finding top talent as a Fortune 500 company.

Telecoms giant Verizon hires 20,000 employees annually. It receives more than one million applications, with some roles, particularly frontline positions, netting more than 1,000 applicants.

“When we say high volume, we mean high volume,” Spring Lacy, Verizon’s global head of talent acquisition, culture and community, told HR Brew.

Verizon, like many other companies, has seen the volume of résumés it receives grow exponentially in recent years, as part of a trend that’s expected to continue as job seekers 

 to assist in their application process. Lacy spoke with HR Brew about her team’s process for identifying top candidates and initiatives for staying on top of the inflow of résumés.

Verizon ensures its recruiters understand the expertise the company is looking for in candidates.

“Our recruiters are really the first point of engagement with our candidates,” Lacy said. “They work really closely with our HR business partners and our business leaders to understand: What are the skills and experiences that someone will need to be successful in the role?”

Recruiters use assessments to evaluate knowledge when hiring for roles, such as high-volume or technical positions. When it comes to interviews—of which Verizon conducts more than 60,000 annually—recruiters follow specific guidelines, including questions specific to the roles they’re recruiting for. Hiring managers handle the final stages of the recruitment process.

While proud of the practices her team has established, Lacy said they’re planning to launch several projects in 2026 to make hiring even easier.

“Almost a million resumes to screen and 60,000 reviews is a lot. We know that there are technologies out there that can help with that, but we’re just at the beginning phases,” she said.

One initiative involves chatbots that candidates can engage with on Verizon’s careers website or through text messaging. The chatbots, for example, can help candidates determine what open jobs best fit their skills, experience, and location. They can also answer questions about job availability and help candidates apply for jobs more quickly and check the status of applications.

 of their jobs. “By the time you actually get to a recruiter, you’ve been very well cared for, and then the recruiter can just focus on deepening relationship and assessing skills,” Lacy said.

As AI becomes more commonplace in the hiring process, many job seekers have 

 with the technology’s use in candidate selection. “Folks feel like AI is making all the decisions and that they never really had a chance at Verizon. We don’t have AI making decisions about hiring. Full stop,” she said.

Lacy pointed out that these sorts of concerns aren’t exactly new—in fact, in the early 2000s, job seekers and recruiters 

 about internet job boards broadening the applicant pool and making the hiring process far less personal. She believes that AI can actually help address them. To that end, candidate experience, she added, will be a top priority next year.

“I think technology can help us to close that gap a little bit in terms of just helping people understand where they are in the process,” she said. “I always say people want news. Whether it’s good or bad, they just want to be informed.”

As her team further experiments with AI, she said they will need to maintain a balance between using the technology responsibly and not being left behind.

“We just want to make sure that we proceed with enough caution that allows us to make sure that there’s integrity in the process, but not so much caution that slows us down and doesn’t allow us to leverage such a fantastic technology that, literally, at this point, is sitting in our laps,” she said.

A cutout of a woman, Spring Lacy, Verizon’s global head of talent acquisition, breaking the frame of an abstract shape with V shaped icons on each side.

How Verizon handles more than 1 million applications annually—and its plans for AI in hiring

Addressing job seekers’ grievances about AI in hiring is also top of mind.

How Verizon handles more than 1 million job applications annually—and plans to use AI to streamline the process

Good news for people who think that there could be a better way to find and recruit new hires (so, basically everyone): New research reveals that AI is delivering in recruiting by transforming talent acquisition (TA) into a new more strategic and tactical role for high-performing firms.

 outlines how TA pros are changing the way talent is recruited and requisitions are delivered, to the tune of faster times to fill, stronger matches between candidates and roles, and improved insights on how to secure said talent. The Josh Bersin Company produced the research with HR strategy group AMS, and released it last week at the HR Technology conference in Las Vegas.

The hiring landscape reveals growing demand for new “high-precision” AI tools that assist in the TA process, from recruitment, assessment, and interviewing, to hiring and beyond.

“This idea of precision talent acquisition is almost the perfect word that describes where this is all going,” Bersin told HR Brew, adding that the tools being developed and available for talent teams now offer insights on broad sets of data that can better advise matches between roles and candidates.

With talent data and AI-powered workforce tools, companies can better understand their needs and the different ways those needs can be met, whether by new hires or internal candidates or something else all together, and better connect individual siloed hiring managers across organizations.

“Because it has more automation and more data, the function is getting more strategic,” Bersin said.

New AI in recruiting isn’t just solving specific isolated issues along each step of the hiring process—it’s reshaping the entire infrastructure and changing how companies interact with and understand their own talent.

Bersin said CHROs and HR leaders need to make the case to the C-suite that when headcount decisions are under consideration, the talent team, and their data-informed insights, can help deliver that precision in strategy.

Armed with robust talent data and AI tools, TA teams, he contends, are more than the “Amazon fulfillment center for people.”

An office full of silhouettes of workers filled with The Matrix-style cascading computer code

AI