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

HR Explainers

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

Paige McGlauflin

hr-brew.com

Talk to any talent acquisition leader about their strategic priorities these days, and 

While employers aren’t currently as desperate for workers compared to the “Great Resignation,” candidate experience 

The hiring process before the internet and era of instant communication didn’t require employers to care about candidates’ feelings. Job seekers, who’d send in paper applications, were lucky if they received notice that they weren’t selected for a job, Gerry Crispin, principal and cofounder of CareerXroads and an expert on candidate experience, told HR Brew.

When Crispin worked at Johnson & Johnson in the 1970s, the company received upwards of 40,000 résumés annually, ”which is not a lot compared to what large companies get today, obviously,” Crispin noted. “But still, they were all coming in with paper.” Rejected candidates received a postcard or letter notifying them that they weren’t selected—an uncommon practice at the time.

“It wasn’t the norm because you had to go out of your way to communicate. It wasn’t like you could send a text back to somebody,” he said.

As computers and the internet became more commonplace, that changed. People could communicate with each other faster, and candidates started to expect potential employers to respond. And, the emergence of platforms 

 allowed applicants to air out their frustrations in a public setting.

“Companies began going, ‘Oh man, we’re getting a bad rap out there. And I thought we were doing a good job,’” Crispin said. “So the internet really allowed for a shift in the power distribution, if you will, that is now impacting your brand.”

. Candidates believe they’re not benefitting from automation tools the same way employers are, making their frustrations reach a boiling point and giving rise to trending topics like 

“Where the pushback is coming, is they’re saying, ‘Hey, I thought automation was going to deliver efficiency for recruiting. We were going to hear real time the status of our applications’…but that’s actually not happening,” said Steve Knox, Dayforce’s global head of talent acquisition.

 A good candidate experience isn’t about placating rejected job seekers. The number one thing applicants want is the job itself, said Kevin Grossman, VP of CandE Benchmark Research at Survale. CandE Awards survey data shows that, any time a candidate is told no, their perception of that employer automatically tanks.

“It’s not about a happy candidate, because I’m only going to be happy if I get the offer,” Grossman said. Instead, he said, the differentiator is, “Did I feel like it was a positive and fair experience, and am I willing to engage the business again? That's what we try to impart on companies every single year.”

There are two primary focuses for improving candidate experiences: Branding and feedback. For branding, some factors to consider include:

What are candidates hearing about companies before they apply, including what’s being said about the company on sites like Glassdoor?

Are candidates getting a glimpse of what it’s like to work at the employer (either from information posted on the company’s career pages and social channels, or by bringing finalists on-site or to meet potential coworkers)?

Is the hiring process consistent with employer branding?

“You could have five good experiences, one negative experience, and that one negative might leave the stronger lasting impression,” said Robert Ployhart, business administration and management professor at the University of South Carolina who has co-authored 

 about candidate experience. “So it’s really important to be consistent across the board with the messaging, not just with the talent acquisition part, but also consistent with the company’s brand, its marketing strategy, and so on.”

As for feedback, candidates expect timely communication and will expect more detailed information around why they were rejected.

“If you don’t hear anything and you’re ghosted as an applicant, which does happen, that’s one of the worst things I think an employer can do,” said Lynn McFarland, associate professor of management at the University of South Carolina, and Ployhart’s co-author.. “I think you have to give closure to the applicants in some way.”

Scott Redfearn, Protiviti’s executive VP of global HR, told HR Brew in a recent interview that companies are realizing that differentiating themselves from competitors is more important than ever. 

“Creating this rich candidate experience is your first opportunity to showcase how we are different and why that would be good for you, and then the more people they meet, the better in a recruiting process,” said Redfearn. “But a smooth candidate experience will generate a big dividend and the caliber of employees that you’re able to attract.”

However, some experts worry that economic conditions could change company efforts surrounding candidate experience, particularly if hiring continues to slow.

“I am going to be curious and watching how the candidate experience fares in the next few years, because I do think the market is going to tighten up a bit where there are going to be even more applicants for each job,” McFarland said. “So I just wonder if organizations are committed to it, or will be as much in the future as they seek to be now, and they have been the past few years.”

An illustration of a computer rejecting a resume.

The rise of candidate experience

While employers aren’t hurting for workers these days, candidate experience remains a priority.

Why candidate experience is top-of-mind for TA leaders

Adam DeRose

AI Policy Audio Embed

Much like welcoming a firstborn into the world, some things are hard to fully prepare for, and there’s myriad competing recommendations and advice about how to 

Unlike childbirth, AI technology hasn’t been around since before the protohuman, so it’s unclear if we even know what is 

. That hasn’t stopped people pros from being tapped to articulate policy on using AI at work or to work on a plan for how to incorporate these new tools into workflows.

“Almost every CEO, HR director, CTO is being asked by their boards of directors and their colleagues: What is our GenAI game plan? They’re all scrambling to develop one,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered AI and the Department of Economics. “I see a chaotic landscape out there that’s filled with confusion and buzzwords, and that’s a tough situation to be making decisions.”

Brynjolfsson, who also co-founded Workhelix, a tech company that works with employers to identify opportunities for AI adoption, told HR Brew that these decisions must be cross-functional. HR pros should work with IT leaders and other senior execs. AI technology affects every part of the organization, he said, so decisions should also be data-driven.

“We developed what we call the task-based analysis,” Brynjolfsson said of Workhelix. “Take any organization, you can look at the occupations in that organization and then you look at each occupation, and an occupation is a bundle of tasks.”

Workhelix identifies and bundles more than 200,000 tasks associated with different occupations and found that “upwards of 40% of the tasks in most organizations have a potential to be significantly augmented with generative AI or other tools.” The evaluation considers tasks augmentable if it more than doubles the productivity when relying on AI.

What results could be a roadmap for employers to look for automation opportunities. The process can help them identify where to put resources amid the AI transformation. According to Brynjolfsson, Workhelix’s task-based analysis can tap into a company’s HRIS or HCM platforms to run its analysis, but the models also rely on other data sources like LinkedIn and job postings.

When looking to figure out the role AI is going to play in a company, Brynjolfsson recommends avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach.

“You really want to know where your relative strengths and weaknesses are and where your biggest opportunities are,” he said.

The tech stack isn’t the only consideration when thinking through the implications of AI at work. Compliance concerns and industry best practices also need to be factored into decision-making and policy.

“I think especially smaller employers are nervous about using the [generative AI] tools because they’re not sure how they can do it without running afoul of the legal landscape,” Gunderson Dettmer labor attorney Natalie Pierce 

Major HR tech companies ADP, Indeed, LinkedIn, and Workday teamed up with the Future of Privacy Forum last fall to outline 

Principles that companies and their HR teams should be mindful of, according to the framework, include:

 to new laws and regulations governing AI’s use that might impact how companies use and make sure the new tech is compliant.

Pierce then suggested that when leveraging generative AI in work settings, users should use neutral prompts, avoid indicating preferences, and guide users to ask open-ended questions; Pierce also recommended prompting generative AI tools to perform their own blind assessments, and telling it to avoid bias in its responses.

“[AI] is changing fundamentally the nature of the skills and the tasks that people are doing. So many of them now are being augmented by these technologies, and it requires a very different kind of skill set,” Brynjolfsson said. “It just ultimately changes to work, so this is a deeper, more lasting transformation.”

Brynjolfsson said this is a transition to the economy that will reveal “winners and losers,” so tech procurement and people policy needs to be developed carefully.

Cassie Kozyrkov, CEO of Data Scientific, suggested 

What is the AI tool going to be used for? 

What data will it be relying on to accomplish that? 

“Not all experts will agree, but in my opinion, the safety nets of your system are more important than the algorithm’s quality. So, focus a lot on safety nets, then at least you’ll throttle it before it does something bad if the quality is not so good,” Kozyrkov said.

A man free falling into a safety net with binary code in the background

HR plays a critical role in AI policy and deploying the tech at work

People leaders should be helping guide how businesses automate tasks and guide employees on using the technology.

HR plays a critical role in creating AI policy and deploying the tech at work

HRBR-Application tracking systems

Long-retired Clippy sought to help users navigate Microsoft Word—popping up uninvited, blinking aggressively, and occasionally even tapping on the monitor glass.

A future might not be far off wherein generative AI assistants help HR professionals navigate complicated application tracking systems (ATS), and—provided Clippy’s AI-powered descendents are more useful, and respectful of personal space—this could prove to be a boon for talent professionals looking to streamline their craft.

“[Generative AI is] evolving so fast, and I’m very encouraged by some of the companies in the market…thinking about, how can this technology become [a] responsible [version of] AI by being more explainable? It’s not there yet,” iCIMS CTO Al Smith said.

Because ATS tools are a “different class of software” than most others used in the industry, Smith said that developers are designing and testing solutions to ensure recommendations are accurate and add value to the TA professional.

“If you really distill it down, [ATS software is] a 30-year industry of taking what had been a paper process, 30 years ago, and digitizing it, and so there’s still an immense amount of content creation, whether that’s job description, marketing campaigns, offer letters,” Smith said. “We see huge value where this technology helps generate a higher level and higher quality starting point for you.”

The company released in March two AI features that are “relatively simple,” said Smith, with its Copilot tool helping HR clients address some of the myriad content creation associated with recruiting and hiring.

The AI, which is informed by iCIMS’s database of job descriptions, can be used to help recruiters or hiring managers draft job descriptions that call for the right skills and experiences. It’s also “particularly helpful” if a company needs to reimagine a job description as more senior or junior, he added.

iCIMS also designed a tool that relies on generative AI to help create custom interview questions based on a job description, as well as relevant information related to a candidate. Smith said the team at iCIMS asked the models to provide users with expected answers and explain why it suggested the questions.

Smith identified eight areas where the technology could be useful to TA pros, and “there is an underlying theme that it deals with content of some form.”

“One thing AI is always good at is solving problems beyond human scale, when you have too much of something,” he said. “So those are really high priorities in our use cases…What we’re not doing at this point is using generative AI to do job match, people match selection.”

One intuitive place where AI might come in handy is linking candidates to jobs, but for iCIMS (and 

 companies), this is a thorny space legally and ethically.

“We started our program with a code of conduct and ethics for AI,” Smith said. “It’s human-led, it’s explainable, and it’s transparent and reversible. [In its] current state, generative AI is none of those things.”

When it comes to assisting HR teams in hiring decisions, the technology doesn’t meet the company’s standards, and making the right and ethical hiring decision is too critical a component of the business—especially in 

“How important is [it] that [AI-generated] artwork is correct? It’s not; it’s a subjective decision. AI is fine for things like that,” he said. “But when precision and regulatory rules are required, generative AI is not there yet.”

It’s also on iCIMS to make clients sure using its software won’t run afoul of new compliance measures aimed at protecting against bias in the hiring process. Smith sees AI as a “complement [to] that selection process” and provides TA pros with materials related to candidates that might be useful when considering a hiring decision.

“The program that we have in place, we work so hard at…curating data to make sure that we’re not using data that we know creates bias,” he said.

Clippy was excellent at knowing how to use Microsoft Word…he just failed to realize that many of its users knew how to use it, too.

But Smith sees an opening for an AI assistant to help navigate the complicated options and processes when interfacing with the iCIMS platform. An AI assistant could serve TA professionals with institutional knowledge about how a company has done one thing or another in the past and nudge users to remember a step they might have skipped. This, Smith said, is even more important for hiring managers or HR professionals who may have taken over TA roles following widespread 

“Software is hard to use, especially business software,” he said. “I find that it’s hard for people to be an expert on using our software, and I do see the opportunity…that the Copilot experience can actually be the expert user.”

An AI robot holding out a résumé in its hands scanning it green

What’s next for AI-enabled application tracking systems?

We spoke with the CTO behind an ATS firm about how AI is going to change the hiring landscape. 

What’s next for AI-enabled recruiting and talent acquisition?

The Supreme Court last summer made it harder for employers to reject religious accommodation requests. The court clarified the legal standards needed to reject accommodation requests based on religion and ruled that the previous application of the law for an “undue hardship” was incorrect.

“For almost 50 years, when it came to determining whether a reasonable accommodation was an ‘undue hardship’ with regard to religion, the courts have applied a 

 test: If it was more than an increase in de minimis cost, it was an undue hardship. That’s different from the test under the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act],” said Jonathan Segal, an employment attorney with Duane Morris.

 on the case last year. In Groff v. DeJoy, Gerald Groff, a Christian former Postal Service worker, filed a discrimination lawsuit against the USPS after he left the agency because it required him to work on Sundays, when he observes the Sabbath.

“Over the years, there’s been conversation on both sides of the political aisle—a rarity—that something needed to be done because the de minimis cost [test]…meant that undue hardship could be met almost in every case,” Segal said.

In a unanimous decision, the court found that the standard more than a de minimis cost was too generous to employers and incorrectly applied to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Rather than a de minimis cost, an employer must show that “the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business” in such cases, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the opinion, HR Brew 

. The courts “clarified” the definition, seeming to imply it had been incorrectly applied for the last half-century, according to Segal.

Now, accommodation requests for religious reasons should be granted unless doing so would result in “substantial increased costs” to the business. This standard is more in line with the ADA.

The ruling has changed the employment law landscape on the issue. Segal said there’s been an uptick in religious discrimination questions within his firm, though he noted that it’s too early to tell if the increase is due to a rise in claims.

“With a Supreme Court case and the public discussion of it, we already are seeing again an increase in religious accommodation claims,” Segal told HR Brew. “Before—and I’ve talked with plaintiffs lawyers—they wouldn’t want to take religious discrimination cases when the issue is failure to accommodate, because they thought they were going to lose on the undue hardship defense. Now that the undue hardship defense is a real defense, the victory on the part of employers is less sure, so there’s more claims.”

For some employers, the court’s decision hasn’t changed much in practice, but for others there’s work to do to stay compliant.

“I think a lot of employers…have understood that you really don’t want to treat ADA differently from Title VII,” he said. “I’ve been advising clients for a long time that…not to give the same deference to a reasonable accommodation for religion as you do for disability sends a cultural message, even if you can legally justify it.”

Segal advises clients to include in employee handbooks a procedure for how employees can request an accommodation based on religion. HR teams should maintain control over the process for handling requests.

“An accommodation policy should address disabilities, physical or mental, pregnancy, childbirth and related conditions, even if not a disability, and then three issues: religious beliefs, practices, or observances,” Segal said.

Religious accommodation requests should also use a separate form, he noted. And while some ADA-related policies might require a note from a doctor to grant, Segal said it can be problematic to mandate a similar requirement for religious requests because an employee doesn’t need to be a member of an organized religion or could hold beliefs different from the organized religion.

Segal recommended HR departments review the accommodation process. Look at previous accommodation requests granted to employees on the grounds of disability, or even secular reasons (i.e., childcare needs), and make sure any application to religious accommodations is fulfilled—or rejected—along the same lines.

Segal also suggested management training. Managers should tell employees, “Thanks for telling me, let me consult with HR and get back to you,” to avoid running afoul of discrimination laws.

Outside of the US Supreme Court building surrounded by the Christian cross, symbol of Islam, and Star of David

More religious accommodation requests following the Groff v DeJoy Supreme Court decision

HR Brew speaks with an employment attorney about best practices under the clarified standard.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision on religious accommodations, more requests have found their way into the courts

An illustration of reporter Courtney Vinopal's headshot.

Courtney Vinopal

Gone are the days of sifting through Excel cells or binders to audit employee compensation on a once-a-year basis.

Employers have more access to compensation data than ever before, thanks in part to laws that have prompted companies to start sharing more information about pay, as well as a push by workers to receive more information about how they’re paid. The proliferation of pay data makes HR’s role more complex, but technology has also evolved to meet the needs of today’s compensation managers.

Thanks to advancements in HR tech, employers can now monitor pay on a more continuous basis, as well as work to correct inequities within their organizations, compensation experts told HR Brew.

Data collection has changed quite a lot in the over 30 years since David Turetsky, CHRO and VP of consulting at Salary.com, has been working in compensation. “We used to get binders,” he said. “We used to participate in surveys, on paper, get binders back like five or six months later. Now, everything is electronic.”

Historically, companies would typically purchase surveys from compensation consultancies to determine competitive salaries in their market. They might have looked at government data as well, but that was typically the extent of it, Turetsky said. Today, HR can draw not only on compensation data from consultancies, but also payroll companies such as UKG or ADP, as well as self-reported data given to job sites like Glassdoor and Indeed.

With all of this information, “the job of the compensation manager has now become a little bit more difficult,” Turetsky said. “You have to sift through what I like to call ‘noise’ to be able to find what is accurate in terms of how people get paid.”

As compensation strategy has grown more complex, technology has evolved to meet HR departments’ needs—and more HR chiefs have started looking to invest in such technologies to ensure they’re getting compensation right.

Payscale has seen increased demand for its products specifically in response to 

 laws, said Ruth Thomas, the company’s chief evangelist and pay equity strategist. These laws typically require companies to post an estimated salary range for jobs they advertise, and as such are challenging employers “to develop much more rigor in their compensation practices,” Thomas said.

The software Payscale allows employers to access a range of market data in order to determine a competitive pay range for the jobs they advertise. But the company also sells a tool focused on 

, which identifies pay disparities between workers based on protected characteristics such as race or gender.

Pay equity—a central goal of pay transparency—has been a key challenge for employers, and one that has driven more technology adoption in the last five years, Thomas said. Historically, humans made decisions about compensation, and as such the process was “fraught with…potential subjectivity and bias.”

“With more transparency, you need more consistency in your pay decisions,” she continued. “And therefore, technology is obviously the ideal solution.” Some algorithms have shown capacity for bias though, Thomas added, so software companies are still figuring out the most effective ways to help employers make “non-biased pay decisions at scale.”

Given that technology now allows HR to analyze pay on a more continuous basis and identify gaps that exist fairly quickly, employers now have fewer excuses to overlook such inequities, compensation industry experts say.

“Because that technology exists now, companies have the ability to see, what have we been doing wrong? And how do we correct it?” Turetsky said. “It’s their responsibility.”

, with a projected annual growth rate of 11% over the next five years, so sorting through the different offerings may be daunting. Companies selling compensation tools range from large human capital management firms like ADP, Ceridian, and Oracle, to smaller solutions like OpenComp, Payscale, and Salary.com.

Organizations’ needs will vary depending on their size and pay structures, said John Kostoulas, a VP analyst in Gartner’s HR practice. Use cases for compensation software vary widely, with HR turning to tech for everything from developing a job architecture to performing a “regression analysis” to identify pay gaps, he said.

If you’re just dipping your toe into the world of HR tech for compensation, keep in mind that even a small investment can go far: A Gartner survey found that simply affirming pay equity goals can increase pay equity perception by 17%.

An office manager sitting at a desk in front of two computers with money floating around her

Tech is changing the game for compensation managers

An explosion of data coupled with advancements in tech means auditing compensation is now a year-round endeavor for HR. 

A 2D illustration of a generic resume with a pie chart, megaphone, and hiring sign surrounding it

Read about recruitment marketing, its benefits, and how to implement into your business.

Recruitment marketing, what is it?

More than one-quarter of the US labor force 

 to see expected salary ranges when they apply to jobs, thanks to pay transparency laws that have taken effect across eight states and several jurisdictions.

It’s too early to know whether these new laws will have the intended effect of reducing pay inequities, experts told HR Brew. But it’s already changing the way HR pros decide and talk about compensation.

 prohibits compensation discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or disability, pay gaps in the US persist.

Women earn around 80 cents for every dollar earned by men on average in the US—a gap that has remained 

 over the last two decades. Additionally, white and Asian American workers earn more, on average, than their Black, Hispanic, and Native American counterparts, per 

Over the last decade or so, legislators have sought to address these disparities with laws banning employers from asking about 

 to report pay data broken down by role, sex, and race/ethnicity.

Pay transparency laws are part of a second wave of legislation that specifically focuses on achieving equity, Helena Almeida, vice president-counsel at ADP, told HR Brew. Policymakers advocating for these laws—which are now in effect in California, New York City, Colorado, and Washington State—posit that if job candidates know appropriate salary ranges, they’re in a better position to negotiate, making it harder for employers to perpetuate disparities, Almeida said.

“It’s shedding light on a practice of how pay is set at companies so that the applicants and employees have a basis to negotiate for their best outcome,” Almeida said.

State and local pay transparency laws are having a nationwide impact, given they’re being passed “at a time where we’re also seeing…a significant uptick in workers going remote,” Almeida said.

If an employer is hiring for a remote role and doesn’t know where the employee will be based, they’re likely to comply with stricter pay transparency requirements, she added: “Otherwise you’re playing Whac-A-Mole and trying to change your job application posting by jurisdiction.”

Given so many employers have a presence in jurisdictions like California and New York, where pay transparency is now required, “it’s really become something that everyone needs to think about,” said Megan Nail, VP of total rewards practice with NFP, a benefits consultancy.

The laws are forcing employers to think more deeply about how they pay and why disparities exist within their organizations, Nail said. If an employee approaches their manager because they realize they’re being paid less than similarly situated colleagues, HR pros should be ready to have that conversation, she added.

She advised HR to train their managers to answer questions about pay ranges, including explaining how they were created, on what criteria they’re based, and what skills employees need to develop in order to advance in their roles.

As more data becomes publicly available on how companies pay their employees, some employers are starting to use that information to inform competition for talent, as well, Almeida said; if they can’t raise wages to better align with their competitors, they might consider boosting their total rewards to attract employees.

“It’s not purely a pay issue,” she said.

Does pay transparency reduce pay disparities?

Given most pay transparency laws took effect within the past two years, it may be too early to tell how successful they’ve been in reducing compensation inequities.

 documented some promising results with regard to the gender pay gap in the state of Colorado, which enacted pay transparency in 2021. Between January 2021 and January 2023, the share of women being hired into upper-management positions increased from 41.5% to 43.8%, overtaking nearby states with similar shares of female workers. This suggests seeing more information about pay may give women “that additional push to perhaps go ask for that promotion, go ask for another, higher title,” Lisa Simon, senior economist with Revelio, told HR Brew.

In nearly two dozen US metro areas, the pay gap has closed entirely for women under the age of 30, where they earn the same amount or more than their young male counterparts, according to a 2022 

 of US Census data. However, Pew added, research suggests that the pay gap widens as women age, which may help explain why it persists at the national level.

One study suggests pay transparency may have unintended negative effects, such as leading employers to 

 overall. Employees may have less room to negotiate their salaries as managers become more cognizant of what equitable pay looks like, Nail said.

Still, pay transparency appears to be shifting the tenor of discussions surrounding pay, she added: “Compensation is typically the most poorly communicated aspect of our entire work experience. People don’t like to talk about it. It’s uncomfortable; they don’t understand it. I think some of this is changing the tide on that.”

A Dollar Sign on top of a stack of money encased in a glass case and stacks of gold coins outside of it