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 

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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

Girish Ganesan, CPO at S&P Global, took the reins of the financial information and analytics giant’s HR function last fall amid a C-suite shake up following the appointment of CEO Martina Cheung 

. Ganesan told HR Brew he’s spent the nearly year-long journey focused on three main priorities: supporting the executive team’s efforts under a new CEO, readying the workforce as the company and world evolves, and maximizing the people teams to best deliver for the company and its employees.

He said a big chunk of his work involved deploying a new employee value proposition for its workforce: people forward. Ganesan said the organization needed to evolve its people philosophy to reflect changes inside the organization and outside more broadly.

 The new framework guides all company messaging and communication and is “embedded across the employee life cycle,” according to Ganesan.

“It’s an evolution from our people-first philosophy, which has existed at S&P Global for many years,” he said. “It’s a mindset that guides how we invest in our people, largely underpinned in continuous growth and development.”

The shift to people forward reflected not only a strategy shift from new executive leaders, but also acknowledged ongoing AI-disruption and new economic and geopolitical realities.

S&P Global focuses on employee career development, trust and transparency amid a changing workplace and world, and a renewed focus on employee well-being with emphasis on the entire person.

“We want our people to grow and come along the journey as the organization evolves, so it emphasizes momentum, propelling our workforce towards keeping up with the pace with market changes, emerging technologies and shifting work-life needs,” he said.

Ganesan said people forward is an evolution of the company’s previous “people first” philosophy, designed to equip the workforce for continuous innovation and adaptation.

Empowering employee growth and career development requires a focus on employee agency over their own career development and equipping employees with the training and tools to succeed in a new economy. It’s no secret an AI-enabled economy is where 

“We’re not just adopting AI. We want to prepare our people to thrive alongside it,” he said.

S&P offers in-house generative AI tooling to every employee. Every employee, 42,000 of them, is required to complete a training program on the tools. The organization is doubling down with additional role-specific training for specific groups of employees and managers.

S&P focuses its education both on essential tech and essential skills training, largely focused on human skills or leadership skills, which will be more urgently needed as AI becomes more enveloped in the day-to-day of business, he said.

“You both need to be technically astute to be able to leverage AI, but you also need to have those power skills to be able to supplement where AI is going to leave a gap,” he said.

As businesses transition amid the ongoing AI transformation, and S&P Global moves ahead with its AI plans, company execs are working to include employee listening and needs. AI transformation questions are included in employee surveying, and AI technology showcased to employees also “generates a lot of commentary and questions.”

“We want to make sure that we’re building a community in which everyone feels connected and valued,” he said, “It was fundamentally important to us that…our people feel that their voices are being heard and that we are on this journey together.” 

Ganesan also said that employee wellness and well being is paramount to S&P’s new strategy. The company boasts of its wellness days, five days a year when its offices are closed and employees are asked to focus on their lives and families. It also focuses on hybrid work, an essential resource for supporting employees’ ability to work the way that works best for them.

“AI is truly turning into a life skill very quickly, beyond a professional skill,” Ganesan said. “It’s seeping into our lives. It’s in society everywhere. I wake up to an AI feed every day, and that’s how life’s going to be, but combining that with human connectivity, empathy, respect for human race, also respect for human intelligence, that’s going to bring about judgment…even more profound as we move forward.”

business people walking on a windy path towards progress

S&P Global’s employee strategy builds on human talent by investing in their skills and development in AI and beyond

“People forward” invests in developing the next generation of workers equipped for working in an AI-powered future.

An illustration of reporter Courtney Vinopal's headshot.

Courtney Vinopal

As the war for AI talent continues, it’s become pricier than ever.

At least that’s the case for a small group of companies seeking to capitalize on the revolution that proponents of the technology are promising.

Meta, which is going all-in on AI investments with the creation of a “superintelligence” lab, is reportedly offering multi-million dollar pay packages to poach top AI talent from competitors like OpenAI. At least one offer reached $1.5 billion, but the prospective hire turned it down, according to 

Some of the companies Meta is looking to poach AI talent from are outside the tech firms it has traditionally competed with for workers. To field his superintelligence team, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reaching out to employees not only from OpenAI, but also Anthropic and Thinking Machines Lab, which OpenAI alumni founded and only launched in the last five years.

While not all HR leaders can afford to hire AI talent for the price Meta is paying, they may well be taking a similar approach in their hiring strategy, forming separate AI “peer groups” to understand where top talent works, and what they earn, according to compensation experts.

How companies use peer groups to recruit workers, set salaries. 

Establishing peer groups is a longstanding practice in executive compensation. When determining executive pay packages, compensation committees will look at market data from a select basket of companies they typically compete against (at Meta, for example, this group included Alphabet, Microsoft, and Netflix in 2023, according to a 

When determining peer groups, employers typically “look at [their] competitive labor market for this pocket of employees that [they’re] thinking about,” Jonathan Jebson, compensation insights director with the compensation software firm Compa, told HR Brew. They ask themselves, “who are we hiring from? Who is hiring our people?” Companies also take into account factors like size and industry when selecting a peer group.

While this practice is common when setting pay for executives, it’s also used by companies seeking “more granular benchmarking data” for a broader set of employees, Jebson explained.

Such data is particularly valuable for companies hiring for AI-related roles as the field is fairly nascent, said Tom McMullen, senior client partner with Korn Ferry. “It’s not a mature space,” he said. “The technology is new…organizations are figuring out how to use it.” While employees may be using AI in their jobs, their roles may not be entirely dedicated to it, he said.

“When you don’t have firmed up roles…the published compensation surveys aren’t going to survey those jobs because the jobs aren’t firm,” McMullen explained, though he added that HR professionals may be able to glean how companies are paying for AI roles through job postings, given the increasing 

To help determine what pay might look like for roles requiring AI skills, compensation teams are identifying peer groups that look different from the set of organizations they would typically compete against for most roles, said Compa CEO and co-founder Charlie Franklin.

Compa sees many companies “explicitly targeting” Magnificent 7 firms for their AI peer groups, he said, referencing a term to describe a group of tech companies with large market capitalizations that includes Microsoft, Meta, and Nvidia. Organizations are looking not only to these firms, but also “some of the largest, most famous, private AI companies” to pull AI talent from, he added.

Once HR teams identify an AI peer group, they have to figure out if their company can afford talent from the firms they’re targeting, sources told HR Brew.

 for certain AI skills means engineering and HR teams are having to strike a balance in discussions about talent, Jebson said. While an engineering lead might be hoping to hire a candidate that hails from OpenAI, Anthropic, or a big tech company, the compensation team must then ask, “Can we effectively afford this?” and consider how hiring an elite machine learning engineer may affect internal pay equity.

Compensation teams lean on peer groups to guide these conversations, Jebson said. If the market for pay looks too high for a very narrow peer group, they may point to a different set of companies where talent is more affordable.

Paying top-of-market salaries for AI talent may be out of the question for many smaller startups, but Kaitlyn Knopp, founder and CEO of the compensation management software firm Pequity, encourages them to consider other factors that may drive talent to their company. A generous equity offer, work-life balance, and the opportunity to “work really hard at cool, new problems” are all things that could hold sway over a promising candidate, she said.

To price top AI roles, HR teams are leaning on peer groups

Companies have long relied on peer groups to help inform their hiring strategy, but their competitors are evolving as the war for AI talent continues.

To nab top AI talent, companies are pricing roles against a new set of competitors

Mikaela Cohen

AI skills are in demand, and HR will need to fork over higher salaries to recruit this talent.

Adding AI skills to job descriptions could cost employers 28% more in annual compensation, a 

 from research firm Lightcast found. AI-related skills can include expertise with large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, as well as prompt engineering, text summarization, and more.

A Lightcast analysis of over 1.3 billion job postings in 2024 found roles advertising at least one AI or generative AI skill offered $18,000 more in annual compensation on average than those that did not. Some 51% of these AI roles were not in tech-related industries, up from 44% in 2022.

“AI is becoming more and more pervasive throughout all of the job descriptions that we’re seeing for virtually any different career area,” Cole Napper, VP of research at Lightcast, told HR Brew.

No longer are AI skills only associated with tech or IT roles, Napper said, and the roles that are seeing the biggest rise in AI skill demand are recruiters and HR pros.

Companies that don’t keep up with this trend, he said, could miss out on talent.

“There is a divergence that’s going on between employers who are saying, ‘We’re not leaning into this space. We’re not really seeing the need to do that,” Napper said. “It’s better to recruit sooner than later, because if you try to play catch up later, this is going to cost you even more.”

It’s a supply and demand issue, Napper added. More employers are demanding AI skills, but the supply of employees with these skills has stayed consistent, he said. He suspects the workforce will adjust through upskilling and reskilling, but this will take time.

“There is always a lagging effect, because it takes time for people to build skills,” he said.

AI robot arms reaching towards the sky with lots of money falling around them.

AI talent costs nearly 30% more in annual compensation

AI skills aren’t the only urgently needed skills to ready the workforce for the AI transformation. Skilling across workplace technology—not just AI—will be critical to successful AI-enablement projects, new research from Coursera and AWS finds.

The survey of technology leaders across top global firms finds that 88% agree planned AI investments will not succeed without increasing investments in skills development.

“Despite all this technological transformation and automation and speed that you know these leaders…still believe that humans are irreplaceable,” said Coursera’s CPO Marcelo Modica.

But the findings are a bit more complex. While AI upskilling is obviously important to success, technology leaders say cloud, data, and cybersecurity upskilling are also essentially needed, especially in the next three years, or AI initiatives spearheaded by organizations may underdeliver or even fail, 

A workforce with strong cloud skills remains a top priority because cloud infrastructure plays a fundamental role in every digital initiative inside the organization, including AI projects. Data skills are needed as data quality and good governance are required to successfully deploy AI solutions, and cybersecurity responsibilities will grow with expanded cloud and AI infrastructure.

“Those technical skills in themselves are changing very rapidly,” Modica told HR Brew.

 Modica told HR Brew that readying the workforce for this AI transformation calls for a new strategy for employee learning.

Learning in the AI-enabled future will require more “practical skill development, working on real projects, practicing skill assessments,” he said, and importantly “risk-free experimentation.” A culture of experimentation, innovation, and failure, “the louder the better,” will best prepare employees for participating in the future of work.

 has been thought of as something you do separately from 

Employees stop working to participate in a training program, but according to Modica, this new culture always requires learning.

“Now more than ever, these things have to be very tightly webbed together on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “From an HR perspective, this idea of continuous learning is going to be really important…As these new technologies roll out, constantly thinking about that training in a day-to-day workflow as opposed to separate.”

image of a hand pushing a learning button with a stylist pen in a digital space

Cloud, data, and cybersecurity upskilling needed amid ongoing AI transformation

AI upskilling requires foundational technology skills, and maybe a new approach to employee learning.

The majority (64%) of US adults plan to avoid using AI for “as long as possible,” according to a 

. AI experts think 79% of US adults already use AI “constantly or several times a day,” the 

 found in April, but only 27% of respondents said they use AI to that extent.

There could be an educational or “misunderstanding gap,” said Todd Blaskowitz, senior client partner on the AI strategy and transformation team at consulting firm Korn Ferry.

“You’re probably using an AI or a generative AI solution, day in and day out, that you may not even be aware of,” Blaskowitz told HR Brew. “[It’s] a misunderstanding gap with individuals around these tools, and how they are starting to present themselves in your daily lives, and how you accomplish a daily task, or even your work within your job.”

Many people don’t realize they’re already using AI, said Lydia Saad, director of US social research at Gallup. For instance, she said, Netflix uses AI to recommend users content based on their viewing history. And Google uses it to aggregate information for search results.

“There’s a lot of people who don’t know what all the different variations of AI are,” Saad told HR Brew. This could cause resistance.

Saad highlighted another piece of Gallup data, which found the more people use AI tools, the more likely they are to see it as a tech advancement, rather than a threat. Some 71% of US adults who use genAI daily see it as innovative, compared to 35% of those who’ve never used it.

“As people get more familiar with using it, they’ll get more comfortable with understanding how they can use it without it doing harm to them or their livelihood,” she said.

Before introducing AI tools in the workplace, Blaskowitz recommended providing education, as well as clarity and transparency around how it fits in their company’s strategy.

“If people just hear, ‘Oh, we’re doing all this AI stuff at work. Oh, we just got Copilot or ChatGPT, but if they don’t have clarity on how that fits into the overall, bigger picture, that’s going to cause resistance in the organization,” he said. “If you don’t hear that narrative or understand it, you’re going to create your own.”

Then, people leaders, Blaskowitz said, can start encouraging employees to embrace an AI mindset.

“Help your people rethink their work, rethink the outcomes that they’re trying to do with a mindset of, ‘How might AI improve this?’” he said. “How might AI enhance the overall experience, the overall quality, my overall productivity?”

In offering encouragement, however, Blaskowitz said he advises leaders not to ignore workers’ fears. “[Be] a human, showing empathy, and addressing the fears that people bring into the workplace,” he said.

Employees are avoiding AI—HR can help them embrace it

“As people get more familiar with using it, they’ll get more comfortable with understanding how they can use it without it doing harm to them or their livelihood,” Lydia Saad, director of US social research at Gallup, told HR Brew.

Like any seasoned gardener knows, a green thumb alone doesn’t make a great garden. It’s a confluence of a skilled workforce, intentional but flexible strategies, and the right environment for the bounty—and in many ways, developing an AI-ready workforce requires the same approach as ripe, juicy beefsteak tomatoes right off the vine.

HR pros play an increasingly important role when it comes to 

 for the AI transformation. The function is tasked, of course, with optimizing HR workflows with the burgeoning technology, but leaders also play a key role in 

“There are going to be job losses with AI, but there will be job additions as well with new types of technology and getting even the technology infrastructure,” said Richard Smith, who runs the Human Capital Development Lab at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. “How do organizations make that shift is a key question.”

Smith told HR Brew that while there are, of course, companies that will favor downsizing their headcount for AI systems and a smaller skilled workforce, “the enlightened approach is a real focus on the reskilling needed, and we see this with certainly the tech companies.”

Luckily for HR and learning and development pros (L&D) that the tools and strategies needed for upskilling and reskilling are also undergoing their own 

, offering organizations and employees more training tailored to their individual professional goals and learning styles.

“The reskilling challenge—when you begin to think about it—isn’t just the pocket of people. It’s, ‘How do you get everyone in your organization to step up to this?’”

Smith said early research into the ongoing AI transformation suggests that HR plays a key role in a broader organizational transformation, and to yield the ripest fruit, a skilled workforce is only one component of a strategy to fully prepare the organization for AI.

“What we’re seeing is it’s not just the way that HR people are managing the talent,” he said, adding that skills, organization structure, company culture, and leadership are all needed to deliver AI transformation.

Smith added that companies also need to look at organizational structure itself because the “old job descriptions and KPIs” can get in the way of AI’s potential. HR is accustomed to policing job descriptions and overseeing the interdependencies associated with each role, and now some HR leaders are calling for additional flexibility in this transition period.

Organizations that are “more people-centered” and “innovation oriented” have the requisite culture required to best adopt AI, Smith claimed. Leadership buy-in is also required. Leaders in organizations that are ahead on AI are leading by example, taking risks in experimenting with the new technology, and encouraging their employees to develop their skills in the field, he said.

With a skilled workforce, flexible org structure, innovative and creative culture, and AI-friendly leadership, companies can uniquely unlock the potential that AI offers their businesses.

“I would maybe encourage HR leaders…[to] come up with their own unique practices for their organization. I think too many times, HR leaders are always looking for best practices and what ends up happening is that they can all end up doing the same things,” Smith said.

“What that does is it actually reduces competitive advantage, and I encourage HR leaders to really think about their human capital system and think about it as something that could potentially be a strategic advantage for the organization.”

Figure looking at binary code on screen in front of a staircase with stars sitting at the top. Credit: Illustration: Anna Kim, Photo: Adobe Stock.

It’s more than reskilling—AI readiness requires a multipronged approach

HR pros have a lot to do when it comes to preparing the business for AI, expert says.

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

Paige McGlauflin

When it comes to AI transformation, having HR on board is critical. But some people leaders experience 

Those who are feeling left out in the cold might want to look to ServiceNow’s 

In January, ServiceNow announced a title change for Canney, making her its chief people and AI enablement officer. The change reflected an expanded role for Canney, who’d led HR at the tech giant since 2021, and put her at the helm of the change management aspect of AI transformation within the company.

That decision, to tie developing the company’s workforce for the future and creating a desired company culture to AI technology investment, felt like a “very natural extension” of her role and “the right move to make in the market,” Canney told HR Brew. But the interest she got from other HR leaders was somewhat unexpected.

“I think HR leaders are starting to see…why you would want human capital strategy, human capital investment to be something bigger than that, as it ties to this really powerful technology that’s moving very quickly,” she said.

Canney spoke with HR Brew about some of the AI-related initiatives that her team is leading at ServiceNow, including launching a new training platform and honing in on AI-related skills during hiring.

Canney’s team has embarked on revamping the company’s training approach, including combining employee and customer training under one team.

Over a year ago, ServiceNow focused on teaching all employees the basics around AI terminology to ensure everyone was on the same page about AI terms and how they are used at the company.

These trainings were disseminated by bringing in speakers, creating use cases, and encouraging company leaders to explain what it meant when terms like AI, generative AI, and 

In May, the company launched ServiceNow University, an online learning platform. The platform uses AI to help chart the path that workers can pursue to attain the skills and expertise they want. The service is also available for its customers, and the company aims to get 3 million people learning on the platform by the end of 2027.

“It’s ambitious, but it feels really good,” Canney said of that goal.

Soft skills—which experts argue are important to develop along with AI use skills—are also a priority. Canney said one example of how these skills are being developed is through manager training. Her team has created classes around different kinds of managers—such as first-time people managers, or a manager of managers—which teach them how to navigate trickier situations like having a difficult conversation with a subordinate.

“We’re seeing humanity come through as [being] equally as important as it is for someone to feel confident using AI,” Canney said.

The company’s investment in AI has also impacted its hiring processes. Earlier this week, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said in an 

that AI adoption is helping the company save money by slowing hiring demand for roles he described as being “soul crushing,” such as IT support and customer service.

Hiring has picked up dramatically, though, for roles focused on using AI. Over the past two years, ServiceNow quadrupled its AI hires. ServiceNow has posted more than 1,200 jobs focused on or requiring AI skills, a 163% year over year increase. AI skills don’t just encompass AI roles, however.

“We did say we are the AI platform for business transformation. So it can’t just be like, here’s the AI team, here’s the employee workflow team, here’s the CRM team. It has to literally go across,” Canney said. “And that’s why we’ve put more hires into the pipeline, so that we can cover off on the entire platform instead of maybe being viewed in a more narrow lane.”

Recruiters are also trained to understand AI-relevant skills and how to identify them while navigating high résumé volumes. This has in part been driven by Amit Zavery, ServiceNow’s president, COO and chief product officer, who joined the company last October.

“It’s been a learning across the whole team, but they’re delivering, and I feel like Amit’s been the driving force, because he knows what great looks like, and I believe that his point of view is why we have accelerated where we have and the success that we’ve been having in the hires that we’ve made,” Canney said.

The company is also training recruiters to watch out for candidates using AI during the hiring process.

“That path on AI skills is really important in HR. It’s the ability to use critical thinking, your instinct, deciding when things need to be in person, maybe, versus on the Zoom like that’s all going to get sorted out a little bit from where it is today,” Canney said.

“And I think the HR function is probably going to lead in a lot of that, to be able to discern: When is it a human interaction? When’s it human plus machine? When can it just be machine? It’s not something that HR teams have grown up having to figure that out.”

Profile treatment of Jacqui Canney, Chief People and AI Enablement Officer at ServiceNow.

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