Paper Cut is normally a subscriber-only dispatch. Each week it slices through the labour news cycle and pulls out the stories that matter for work, talent, and employer reputation, with an “Employer Brand POV” attached.
EBN
For this special edition, we looked back at all 45 Paper Cut issues published in 2025. In plain terms:
- Every issue was analysed, not just the ones with punchy titles.
- AI shows up in every edition.
- Layoffs or job cuts appear in almost 9 out of 10.
- Remote work, RTO, and hybrid creep appear in about half.
- DEI, diversity, and inclusion show up in roughly a third.
- New micro terms like job hugging, coffee badging, resenteeism, career cushioning, workslop and career catfishing all make appearances.
What follows is the Paper Cut year in review: not a recap of every headline, but the big story arcs that kept resurfacing week after week.
1. The overcapacity era: AI, layoffs and the pink-slip economy
By the time The Overcapacity Era: AI, Layoffs and the Culture Recession landed at the end of November, Paper Cut had been circling the same tension for months.
Across the year, almost every issue connected AI to some form of cuts:
- Enterprise tech and big platforms announcing waves of AI “efficiency” and “restructuring”.
- White-collar job cuts in organisations that had just finished talking about “talent scarcity”.
- Vendors pitching AI as the route to productivity, while workers described something closer to a pink-slip economy, crystalised in The Productivity Mirage Meets The Pink-Slip Economy.
Several editions walked the line between macro trends and ground-level impact:
- Hard Reset, Soft Demand and Stall Speed, Fast Cuts, Frayed Trust chronicled how companies used “softening demand” to justify cuts that looked more strategic than reactive.
- Consulting Gets Rewritten by AI While Workers Play Defense traced how billable-hour work is being quietly rearchitected around AI agents and automation.
- Issues like Fear, Not AI, Is Fueling The Cuts and The Freeze, The Bot, The Backlash showed how often “AI” is the alibi for deeper strategic resets.
The cumulative story is simple and uncomfortable: overcapacity has become a strategy, not a surprise. Many organisations are designing for fewer layers and more automation, then working backwards to justify it.
Helping HR, talent acquisition, employer branding, and company culture professionals find careers worth smiling about.
Why this matters for employer brand leaders
Paper Cut’s coverage makes one thing clear: you cannot treat layoffs as a discreet comms event any more. When AI, job cuts, and “efficiency” recur in filings, internal calls, and media coverage, candidates and employees see patterns, not isolated incidents.
Three hard but useful rules emerge:
- Publish your workforce math. When you cut roles, say which kinds and why. Split reductions by category: structural overcapacity, performance, market exit, automation. Silence suggests chaos.
- If AI removes tasks, show the new craft. “We will reskill you” is only credible if people can see actual roles and paths. The AI editions above repeatedly pushed leaders to describe what a post-AI version of the job looks like, not just say “your job will change”.
- Treat culture repair as part of the restructuring plan. Dispatches like Count the Cuts, Ditch Ultimatums, Fix the Middle hammered the point that trust collapses fastest in the middle. Manager enablement and small, visible repairs matter as much as the original announcement.
The thread running through every AI and cuts story is this: your employer brand in 2025 was defined less by what you said about AI on a slide, and more by how you handled overcapacity in public.
2. Hybrid creep, commute culture and trust theatre
From Hard Reset, Soft Demand through to Hybrid Creep, Burnout, and Workslop and Commutes, Cuts & Credibility, Paper Cut treated work models as a rolling, unresolved story rather than a one-off policy decision.
Across the 45 issues, remote work, RTO and hybrid show up in roughly half, usually in combination with three themes:
- Hybrid creep: the quiet drift from “one or two anchor days” to an unspoken expectation of being in more often, captured in lines from Hybrid Creep, Burnout, and Workslop.
- Commute theatre: people travelling in for meetings that could have been calls, plus coffee badging (showing up long enough to be seen then working elsewhere), dissected in Commutes, Cuts & Credibility.
- Trust theatre: leaders doubling down on “productivity” and “face time”, even as their own dashboards showed output had not collapsed in remote-heavy teams. Traffic Lights, Shrinking Giants, Skill Truths and Work Is Having an Identity Crisis both looked at that gap.
Paper Cut often framed these stories as credibility tests:
- Trust Theater, AI Scoreboards, and Hiring Whiplash outlined how some firms used badge data and keystroke monitoring while still talking about “outcomes over hours”.
- Pink Slips, Quiet Scripts, and RTO Flip-Flops tracked companies that issued hard RTO ultimatums, then quietly softened them after attrition spikes.
Why this matters for employer brand leaders
Paper Cut’s year of RTO coverage makes one thing obvious: RTO is no longer a facilities question. It is a public signal of what kinds of lives you think are compatible with career progression.
Some working rules from the coverage:
- Get specific about patterns. “Hybrid” can mean three set days in, or “come in when it makes sense”. The newsletters showed repeatedly that vague language turns work models into rumours. Spell out patterns by role and geography.
- Explain the trade offs, not just the policy. Pieces like Commutes, Cuts & Credibility made the same point in different stories: people can handle inconvenient rules better than incoherent ones. If you tighten office expectations, say what you are optimising for.
- Assume candidates know about coffee badging. When you see it in your workforce, it is not a moral failing. It is feedback on whether in-office time is genuinely useful. Treat it as design input.
Meta lesson: if your work model relies on theatre, your employer brand will eventually inherit the reviews.
Momentum isn’t always progress, especially when you always end up back where you started.
Fathom helps you escape the loop. With insight, not intuition.
3. DEI rollback, culture wars and the quiet middle
Early in the year, several January and February editions (for example JAN12 Paper Cut and 16FEB Paper Cut) opened with the fallout from high-profile DEI changes. Throughout 2025, DEI, diversity and inclusion appeared in roughly a third of issues.
The pattern is twofold:
- On one side, high profile rollback. US-centric stories of big players cutting DEI teams, softening language after political pressure, or quietly dropping targets while insisting “the work continues”.
- On the other, quiet persistence. Companies in Europe, parts of APAC, and sectors like professional services continuing to invest, but toning down the language and emphasising “belonging”, “fairness” or “skills-based hiring” instead.
Paper Cut’s framing here is more forensic than moralistic. The question is: what do these moves do to trust, especially among underrepresented groups who have heard decades of promises already.
Why this matters for employer brand leaders
Three recurring themes from the DEI coverage:
- People remember the swing, not just the position. The reputational damage often comes less from where an organisation lands, and more from how fast it pivots. Moving from loud DEI rhetoric to quiet retrenchment, as tracked in early-year issues, reads as opportunism.
- DEI lives in decisions, not slogans. Several editions followed layoffs and promotions by role, geography and band. When cuts disproportionately hit certain groups, no amount of “we value diversity” copy holds.
- Middle managers carry the contradiction. Managers are asked to deliver both “inclusive leadership” and “zero tolerance on underperformance” in environments with shrinking budgets. That is where employer brands either harden or crack.
For a public lead magnet, the message is blunt: your DEI story will increasingly be reconstructed from observable decisions, not your statement page.
4. Worker survival tactics: job hugging, coffee badging and resenteeism
If the first three themes describe what employers did, this one describes how workers responded.
Across the year, Paper Cut surfaced a vocabulary of small, very human strategies:
- Job hugging and career cushioning showed up early, especially in JAN12 Paper Cut and later in pieces like Cuts, Checklists and the Big Stay: staying in a role you have outgrown because the outside market feels frightening, while quietly keeping options warm.
- Coffee badging took centre stage in Commutes, Cuts & Credibility: showing up just long enough to be seen in the office, then working somewhere else.
- Resenteeism and its cousins surfaced in issues like Green Lights, Red Flags, Real Work: turning up, doing the work, and loudly resenting the organisation while you do it.
- Career catfishing and rage applying appeared in The Jobs Are There. The Offers Aren’t.: interviewing for roles you do not really want, or blasting out applications, to test your market value in a jittery environment.
These terms cropped up in coverage of hybrid work, layoffs, and engagement. They were not treated as memes, but as clues.
Why this matters for employer brand leaders
Taken together, they describe a workforce that is nervous but not naïve. People:
- Assume restructuring is always around the corner.
- Expect flexibility to be conditional.
- Know how to manage their own risk, sometimes at the expense of employer loyalty.
The EB implications that recur in Paper Cut:
- Engagement without mobility breeds job hugging. If your engagement scores are “fine” but internal mobility is flat, you may be running a job-hugging shelter. The risk is not churn. It is a quietly stale workforce.
- Hybrid games are trust feedback. Coffee badging and resenteeism often show up where employees believe leaders care more about optics than outcomes. That is an employer brand problem, not just a performance one.
- Assume your best people are permanently half-looking. In a year of layoffs and AI pilots, career cushioning became rational. The question is not “how do we stop that”, but “how do we become the benchmark they compare others to”.
Paper Cut’s tone here is matter of fact, almost sympathetic. These behaviours are not quirks to be mocked. They are user research on your EVP.
EBN
5. Talent whiplash and the jobless boom
A cluster of editions dug into the bizarre dynamic where jobs exist, but offers stall. The Jobs Are There. The Offers Aren’t. captured it in a headline. Throughout the year, Paper Cut linked:
- Headlines about low unemployment and “resilient” labour markets.
- Company statements about “hiring freezes” and “headcount discipline”.
- Real stories of candidates stuck in multi-round processes while hearing about “urgent roles”.
Later issues added AI scoreboards and agentic HR to the mix:
- When the Bots Hire and Fire You and Trust Theater, AI Scoreboards, and Hiring Whiplash looked at systems that rank candidates, score employees, and spit out neatly prioritised lists.
- Carrots, Sticks, and Agentic HR explored how HR teams experiment with AI agents to run processes while still needing human courage to act.
- Editions like C-Suite Swagger, AI Whiplash and the Talent U-Turn and Green Lights, Red Flags, Real Work tracked executives talking confidently about growth while quietly freezing requisitions.
The effect, captured over multiple weeks:
- Candidates see more roles advertised.
- Recruiters are asked to “keep pipelines warm”.
- Actual hiring decisions move slowly, or not at all.
Why this matters for employer brand leaders
Repeated across 45 issues, this is not a glitch. It is a structural tell.
Three clear signals:
- Your time-to-decision is now part of your brand. Paper Cut repeatedly highlighted stories where candidates waited weeks between final interviews and decisions, often to hear “we have re-scoped the role”. People tell that story more than they tell your careers copy.
- Scoreboards do not remove accountability. AI-driven ranking and dashboards create a comforting illusion of progress. If managers are still scared to actually make offers, all the scoring in the world is cosmetic.
- Pipeline without clarity feels like manipulation. Keeping people “warm” while the business waits to decide whether it truly wants to hire creates resentment that eventually spills onto review sites and social feeds.
One of the sharpest lines to carry away: in 2025, employer brands were shaped as much by what happened after the final interview as by anything on the way in.
6. Words of the year: the Paper Cut lexicon
Across all 45 issues, certain phrases kept recurring. A few became unofficial house vocabulary.
Cliché but central
These are not going away, but Paper Cut made a habit of poking at them:
- “Future of work” – used frequently, but always followed by “for whom” and “under what conditions”.
- “War for talent” – still deployed in boardrooms even as job cuts mounted.
- “Productivity” and “efficiency” – the corporate fig leaves over many AI and layoffs stories.
Darkly funny, deeply revealing
- Job hugging, career cushioning, coffee badging, resenteeism – shorthand for how people manage risk and resentment at work.
- Pink-slip economy, jobless boom, overcapacity era – phrases used in editions like The Productivity Mirage Meets The Pink-Slip Economy and The Overcapacity Era: AI, Layoffs and the Culture Recession to explain why job cuts and hiring headlines did not match.
- Trust theater – the performance of leadership confidence that collapses as soon as employees look at their own lived reality, unpacked in Trust Theater, AI Scoreboards, and Hiring Whiplash.
Newer terms that stuck
- Hybrid creep and workslop – the feeling that hybrid models are drifting back to old norms and that a lot of “collaboration time” is just mess, named outright in Hybrid Creep, Burnout, and Workslop.
- Agentic HR – the idea of HR and TA teams using AI agents to run processes, while still needing human courage to act, explored in Carrots, Sticks, and Agentic HR.
- Talent multiverse – the overlapping labour markets where some workers face AI exposure and others face stagnant wages, all inside the same brand.
EBN
What Paper Cut tells us to watch next
Looking across the year, Paper Cut did three things consistently:
- Called the overcapacity strategy early. By mid-year, dispatches like Hard Reset, Soft Demand, Stall Speed, Fast Cuts, Frayed Trust and The Freeze, The Bot, The Backlash were already linking AI, job cuts, and “efficiency” language in a way that made end-of-year headlines feel inevitable, not shocking.
- Treated work models as ongoing stories, not announcements. Hybrid Creep, Burnout, and Workslop, Commutes, Cuts & Credibility and Count the Cuts, Ditch Ultimatums, Fix the Middle tracked hybrid creep, commute games and trust theatre week by week, which is how they show up to employees too.
- Took worker micro-behaviours seriously. From JAN12 Paper Cut through to The Jobs Are There. The Offers Aren’t., job hugging, career cushioning and resenteeism were treated as data points, not punchlines.
For employer branding and HR leaders, the Paper Cut year in review points to a few priorities:
- Make your workforce strategy legible. If overcapacity and automation are part of the plan, say so in adult language. People will work with hard truths more easily than with spin.
- Design work models for credibility, not optics. If your office pattern is about collaboration, show the work and redesign meetings, not just badge rules.
- Track how your EVP feels, not just how it reads. New vocabulary, memes and neologisms are free sentiment data. If your people recognise themselves in the darker ones, you have work to do.
- Close the gap between pipeline and offers. Hiring whiplash is corrosive. Even a “we cannot move right now” answer will do less damage than silence.
Finally, for readers who have not seen Paper Cut before: this is the kind of connective tissue the weekly dispatch offers subscribers (and it's free!). The stories are out there. The value is in seeing how they line up.
If this year in review resonates, the simplest next step is clear: make sure somebody in your team is reading Paper Cut every week, and treating it as an early warning system for your employer brand.
EBN
