Industry Insights

Here’s a number that should change how you hear the words “best and final”: about 40% of job offers in a major NBER study were made verbally, which let employers withhold a written offer without ever formally taking it back. That’s not a courtesy. That’s a structural choice, and it cuts both ways. Our read…

Promotion rates fell in 10 of the 11 industries Workday tracks in 2025. Manufacturing was the only one that went up. As Workday’s VP of People Analytics Phil Willburn put it, it’s “pretty rare for 10 industries to see a promotion recession all at the same time.” So if you’ve been grinding, hitting your targets,…

Here’s a number that should make every software vendor squirm. Recruiters now spend three to four hours a day reviewing AI-generated summaries, hunting for candidate data scattered across dashboards, and manually dragging people through stages the AI flagged but never actually moved. The vendor that named this problem, JobTwine, calls it “AI Admin Debt.” We’ll…

Here’s the number that should change how you read every job board: openings jumped to 7.6 million in April 2026, a surge of 731,000 from March and the highest level since May 2024. In the same month, hires fell to 5.1 million, down 419,000 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, JOLTS, April 2026). Read that again….

Harvard Business Review just put a number on something a lot of hiring managers have only whispered about. After interviewing 120 talent-acquisition leaders and analyzing 6,380 recorded first-round screening sessions, the authors concluded that companies now risk selecting for candidates who are best at navigating the hiring process, not best equipped to do the job…

Here’s the number that should make every hiring manager flinch. 82% of workers say pay transparency matters to them, but only 34% believe they actually work somewhere that practices it. That’s a 48-percentage-point gap between what people want and what they think they’re getting, according to G-P and Talker Research’s ‘Borderless Pay Standard’ study. Call…

Here’s a number that should reframe how you think about who’s restless at work right now: 46% of U.S. professionals plan to look for a new job in the next six months. One year ago that figure was just 27%, according to Robert Half data reported by Staffing Industry Analysts. That’s a 19-percentage-point jump in…

Here’s the number that should make you squint: 56% of 2026 layoff events now explicitly cite AI, automation, or machine learning as a reason, according to the SkillSyncer 2026 Tech Layoffs Tracker. That’s 150 out of 267 tracked events, roughly 156,270 workers across 150 companies. Now here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud….