A single internal memo reset the week’s mood. As Big Tech reshuffles for AI, pay debates get louder, monitoring gets normalised, and confidence drops. This edition covers the new bargain at work, what it’s doing to retention, and why trust is now the scarce resource.
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Meta's May 2026 restructuring eliminated 8,000 jobs and forced a public reckoning with how Big Tech employer brands sell mission to candidates and then revert to transaction at exit. Here is what the moral premium model gets wrong, and the EB playbook leaders should rebuild now.
Many organisations collect exit interview data, identify the patterns, and do nothing visible with them. A senior EB professional with 15 years of experience explains why retention is only part of the problem and how employer brand is collateral damage.
LVMH unveiled its employer brand campaign on 25 July 2025 and rebuilt its careers experience around “Where Dreams Become Careers”. Here’s the EVP, the proof, the trade-offs, and how it compares to luxury rivals.
Low unemployment can still hide a labour crisis. This week: underemployment in plain sight, AI reshaping work without shrinking headcount (until it does), surveillance and “proof-of-work” culture, and the slow slide from careers to gigs. Plus The Cut List.
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Headline unemployment figures still look relatively stable across many economies. Beneath those numbers sits a growing class of underemployed workers patching together income through gigs, freelance work, consulting, and side hustles, while struggling to regain stable employment.
The employee deal is tightening while the measurement layer grows. This week: culture as an operating system, leaders reframing hiring and layoffs through AI, burnout boundaries snapping back, and the quiet risks nobody budgets for, from shadow IT to discoverable workplace texts.
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Mass layoffs at profitable companies. AI deep in the hiring stack. A generation that prices in disloyalty before signing. Employer branding in 2026 has not become redundant. The version built on a different decade's assumptions has.
An EVP should expand your reach, not narrow it. When it becomes repetitive or overly inward-looking, it risks losing relevance with the very audiences it is meant to influence.
An EVP should expand your reach, not narrow it. When it becomes repetitive or overly inward-looking, it risks losing relevance with the very audiences it is meant to influence.
Benefits are being trimmed, AI adoption is being measured, and HR is stuck managing the fallout. This week: the perks rollback, the rise of AI scorecards and surveillance, a widening career divide for graduates, and why HR governance is suddenly the main brand risk.
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