This week, at a conference in Singapore, a senior Goldman Sachs executive said the bank's newest recruits now manage AI agents from their first day, and that nobody quite knows what happens to the middle managers they would once have reported to. Citi has cut its investment banking analyst programme from three years to two. Bayer's chief executive has explained to Fortune how he removed roughly 70% of the company's managers.
The best employer brands don’t manufacture stories. They uncover what’s already true. Sell The Truth: Leadership Storytelling For Cultures That Win by Bryan Adams shows leaders how to turn truth into stories that build belief, trust and competitive advantage.
Elsewhere, Booking.com asked a court to order its own staff into the office, and Australia's Fair Work Commission ruled that a 63-year-old can work from home one day a week because the commute wears her out. Only 4% of US chief human resources officers say they feel very confident they can manage AI-driven change.
Taken together, the week describes an org chart being redrawn while people are still sitting in it: fewer managers, shorter ladders, a hiring market that has stopped moving, and an AI rollout nobody quite owns. The pattern here is that the structure is changing faster than the arrangements for the people inside it.
This Week’s Paper Cut's
Watch or listen here ↯
We keep tracking to a minimum. The video is hosted on YouTube and the podcast is hosted on PodBean, which may place cookies that measure viewing and personalize content. We only load the player after you consent to these cookies. You can update your cookie settings any time.
Hiring has frozen, and the bottom rungs of the ladder are going first
The US labour market is in what Marketplace describes as a low-hire, low-fire state. Initial jobless claims fell by 2,000 to 197,000, the fourth week in a row below 200,000, yet employers added only 29,000 jobs in September, and 27.1% of unemployed Americans have been looking for work for six months or longer. Kyle Moore, chief economist at The Century Foundation, called it a "stagnation situation", while Monster's Vicki Salemi said workers are "nervous and anxious about leaving the security that they currently have". EBN's recent Dear Government, Recruitment Needs Some New Rules looks at the same market from the other side, and at the rules recruitment needs now.
The Danish evidence on who pays for the freeze is early but specific. Economists at Danmarks Nationalbank, writing for CEPR's VoxEU on 8 October, compared firms that adopted AI with similar firms that had not. By September 2025 the adopters' employment sat about 9% below their own trend relative to non-adopters, up from about 6% at the end of 2024, and the authors say the adjustment runs through reduced hiring, not layoffs. In the top quartile of AI-exposed occupations, employment fell about 27% below trend by late 2025, against about 12% for other occupations, with the decline concentrated among workers under 30 and the university-educated.
The authors are careful about what this shows. Adoption is not random, adopters and non-adopters are self-selected groups, and the estimates are comparisons rather than causal effects. They add that many comparison firms adopted AI during 2024 and 2025, so the gaps are, if anything, conservative. It is still worth reading alongside EBN's look at California's AI unemployment tracker, which asks the same question of US data.
The banks are responding from the top of the ladder. Citi announced on 5 October that it is cutting its investment banking analyst programme from three years to two, with the expected path to vice president falling from six and a half years to five and a half, as it tries to retain junior talent against competition from private equity firms. At the Milken Institute Asia Summit, Goldman Sachs's Kevin Sneader said "when our young folks now start work, they're managing agents", and that the management task "no longer sits with the middle manager; it sits with the front line". Sandra Peterson of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice said professional service firms used to be pyramids, and that with AI doing much of the grunt work it is unclear they will need as many entry-level staff. Chia Der Jiun of the Monetary Authority of Singapore said banks will need fewer fresh graduates for analysis and preparatory work.
The pattern here is a ladder compressed at the top and thinned at the bottom, with the managers who used to teach the middle rungs being removed. EBN's analysis of where McKinsey's entry-level plan breaks down is worth rereading alongside this week's cuts to management layers.
Employer Brand POV
Publish what a first-year hire actually does once agents handle the preparatory work, and put it on your careers site, because candidates are already deciding whether your entry-level roles are real jobs or placeholders, and an employer brand with no answer to that has nothing to say to the people it most needs.
Everyone is deploying AI, and nobody is sure who owns the people side
The Conference Board's third-quarter CHRO Confidence Index, reported by HR Dive, found that only 4% of US chief human resources officers feel very confident they can manage AI-driven change. Just 19% said AI's anticipated effects are included in enterprise-wide workforce and financial planning, and fewer than half have incorporated new AI-related workforce, skills or labour-market data. The Conference Board's own headline was that CHRO confidence remains positive but continues to ease. It sits alongside EBN's recent piece on CHROs left out of the decisions that affect their people.
Gartner, at its HR Symposium in London, put a number on part of the reason: only 38% of CHROs and CIOs share an understanding of how AI affects the future of work. Rachel Juley, a senior director analyst at Gartner, said success "increasingly depends on how effectively CHROs and CIOs collaborate to prepare the enterprise for AI transformation", and that "the greatest risk for CHROs is being confined to supporting a transformation they should co-lead". Gartner suggests HR take on four roles in AI value creation: co-pilot, futurist, engineer and architect.
A more playful answer came from Darrell West of the Brookings Institution, whose proposal for a "robot relations" function was picked up by HR Director this week. West argues organisations will need a team to handle employee problems with AI agents and digital tools, and in his Brookings commentary, published in July, he goes further and says HR and IT departments should merge. That commentary contains no survey data, so treat it as a provocation rather than a finding. The figure HR Director pairs with it is more useful: in a Workday survey of 2,950 decision-makers and implementation leaders, published in August 2025, 75% were comfortable working alongside AI agents but only 30% were comfortable being managed by one.
Measurement is where the ownership gap shows. HR Director reports that Amazon set a target in May for more than 80% of its developers to use AI tools weekly, ranked them on internal leaderboards by token consumption, watched employees run unnecessary AI tasks to climb the rankings, and scrapped the scheme within the month. EBN asked in September whether employer brands confuse visibility with value, and the same question applies to usage dashboards.
Google DeepMind's chief AI readiness officer, Lila Ibrahim, offered CNBC a different measure. She asks her teams three questions: how are you using AI, what would help you use it more, and where are you not using it. The third, she said, is the human talent element: "That's what we need to hire for; we need to reward." AI can help automate all of her tasks, she added, "but it cannot automate my Tuesdays".
Employer Brand POV
Name a person employees can take an AI problem to, and tell them who it is, because the complaints exist whether or not anyone owns them, and the ones nobody answers tend to turn up in public reviews.
The cuts keep coming, and how they are announced is now part of the story
Nike's statement on 1 October said its operating model changes "will result in fewer roles across Nike", but that "decisions about impacted roles related to this work will begin in calendar year 2027 and beyond", and that it does not yet know the number of roles or the locations affected. Business Insider calls this layoff limbo, noting that Meta and GitLab have also announced cuts before identifying who would go. An employment lawyer quoted there said early warning can invite voluntary exits and save severance, but that "you may lose good people", including some the company would not have chosen to cut.
KPMG's UK arm has a different delivery problem. The Register reported on 6 October that around 200 people, about 4% of the UK workforce, in AI, Cyber, SAP and Testing teams would be told by email on Friday 9 October, and that, according to an insider, they are being offered "a nominal £100 consideration" to waive their legal rights to appeal or bring claims. KPMG declined to answer The Register's questions about the payment, and a spokesperson said the firm is "proposing reductions in some of our advisory client-facing teams and will support our colleagues throughout this process". EBN has covered the firm before, in Layoffs Are Being Rebranded as a Turnaround. KPMG Is a Different Story, and The Register notes it cut 600 UK roles six months before this round.
Where the cuts land matters as much as how they are announced, and management layers featured in two of this week's stories. Bayer's chief executive, Bill Anderson, told Fortune the company has cut managers from about 16,000 to 4,500 out of 88,000 employees, replacing hierarchy and annual budgets with about 5,000 small teams working in 90-day cycles. He conceded the culture is "a little softer" on decisiveness than hoped, and Fortune notes the real test is growth: the shares are up 57% over the past year but flat over three. FICO's SEC filing on 6 October said it will cut about 15% of positions, with the stated aims of reducing management layers, simplifying the operating structure and "integrating AI-driven product development".
Those who remain are responding by getting louder. Business Insider describes "loud working": employees making their work visible to managers and recruiters as job-hopping gets harder and layoffs feel like a constant threat. A former Meta employee told the outlet "it felt like the Hunger Games had started", with colleagues taking on as much work as possible to claim the spotlight. Last week's Paper Cut, Every Metric Improved. Nobody Felt It, dealt with a related gap between what is measured and what is felt.
Employer Brand POV
Decide how you will announce a cut before you decide how many, because Nike's timeline and KPMG's reported terms show that employees and journalists read the delivery as the message long before they read the numbers.
The office argument has reached the courts, and the evidence keeps pointing at managers
Booking.com has asked a court to order employees at its Amsterdam head office, about 7,000 people, to work there at least two days a week, after its works council declined to endorse the plan, DutchNews reports. Under Dutch law the council must approve changes to working location. The company says remote work hurts teambuilding and productivity, and that most staff in its surveys find collaboration easier in the office. The council says there is no business case for two mandatory days. Under the proposal, one day would be agreed within each team and the other chosen individually.
In Australia, Commissioner Oanh Thi Tran of the Fair Work Commission found that Victoria University had reasonable business grounds to refuse a 63-year-old student adviser's request to work from home two days a week, but ordered a compromise of one day a week on a trial basis. No medical evidence was needed, with age-related commuting fatigue accepted as a legitimate reason. Under the Fair Work Act, workers aged 55 or older can request flexible working arrangements. What this suggests is that the ruling concerns an older worker's right to request flexibility, which makes it narrower than the headlines imply, but it shows how quickly an employer's blanket policy can meet an individual case.
The research that might settle these arguments keeps pointing past location. An analysis of nearly 165,000 US employees surveyed by Payscale between 2020 and 2023, written up in The Conversation by one of its co-authors, found that once factors such as feeling appreciated, fair pay, useful communication, development chances and the manager relationship were accounted for, the satisfaction edge for fully or mostly remote workers disappeared. A good manager relationship was tied to higher satisfaction in every arrangement, and more strongly among on-site workers. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, cited in the same piece, shows substantial stress the previous day for 41% of fully remote employees, 46% of hybrid employees, and 46% of on-site employees whose jobs could be done remotely.
Taken with the Gallup figures, the analysis suggests that location is standing in for something else. The pattern here is that mandates are being argued on attendance while the evidence is about management.
Employer Brand POV
State the purpose of an office day in one sentence, and test it with the managers expected to run it, because two disputes this week were put in front of third parties who asked for a reason, and a mandate that cannot give one leaves the decision to someone else.
Odds and Ends
A few stories that did not earn a full section, but are worth a mention on their way past.
OpenAI is piloting a "mission interview", starting with candidates for its marketing and HR teams, Fortune reports. The interviewer comes from outside the hiring team, OpenAI is building a certification programme for interviewers, and the conversation focuses on judgement and weighing trade-offs. An OpenAI representative told Fortune there is no right answer and that scepticism and disagreement are welcome. The company has about 8,000 employees and 830 open roles.
A Robert Walters survey of more than 3,100 UK and Irish white-collar professionals found 60% would prioritise higher employer pension contributions over a salary increase when considering a new role, and 72% ranked pensions as the most important workplace benefit, up from 32% in 2025. It is a recruiter's survey, so treat it as a signal rather than a benchmark, but the CIPD's Charles Cotton suggested changes in the labour market may be pushing workers to build a larger pot in case their skills become less sought after.
In a week of cuts at banks, the New York State Comptroller reported first-half Wall Street profits of $45.9bn, up 51.3% on the year, and said the full year could pass $90bn. The Comptroller expects the 2026 bonus pool to rise, although the city's own projection assumes bonuses fall by about a fifth.
A study of the oil, gas and petroleum industry in the International Journal of Business Information Systems found that quiet firing, where employers indirectly encourage workers to leave, is associated with more quiet quitting, and that the link is weaker in workplaces with stronger social capital. It covers a single industry, but the finding supports treating withdrawal as a management practice issue, not only a motivation problem.
HR Director's profile of Safe Software's chief people officer, Vanessa Ribreau, argues that employer brand must be felt inside before it works outside, and that it is an operational task more than a communications one, living in managers, one-to-ones, decisions and onboarding. It is one voice with no independent research, but it pairs with EBN's The EVP Is Finished. Now Comes the Dangerous Bit, which argues that the work of employer branding has moved on from the statement itself.
Deputy, a workforce management vendor, says a major game launch can push shift absenteeism up by roughly 90% or more against a normal week, based on past launches including Overwatch 2. GTA 6 arrives on Thursday 19 November, and Deputy advises treating 18 to 20 November as a high-risk window and offering shift swaps rather than policing sick leave. The data comes from a vendor with something to sell, but the advice is cheap.
The Cut List
Seven employers confirmed or detailed cuts this week. Three of them, FICO, DNB and Oracle, tied the changes to AI in some way, while the others pointed to pandemic overhiring, falling letter volumes, a changing market or a new operating model.
This week's confirmed and reported job cuts:
- Amazon: fewer than 1,000 white-collar roles, mainly in its Stores unit, across the US, India and the UK, confirmed on 7 October.
- Oracle: a further 70 Irish jobs, mostly engineering and development, after about 150 earlier this year and roughly 21,000 globally in the 12 months to May.
- FICO: about 15% of positions, with a pre-tax charge of about $27m, citing fewer management layers and AI-driven product development.
- DNB: around 400 full-time roles in its technology and services division, with the bank saying AI is changing how it works.
- Royal Mail: up to 2,500 head office and support roles, through attrition and voluntary exits, with no compulsory redundancies and no cuts to frontline delivery.
- KPMG UK: about 200 roles in AI, Cyber, SAP and Testing, according to The Register, with the £100 waiver offer reported from sources and not confirmed by the firm.
- Nike: fewer roles over time, with decisions on affected roles beginning in 2027 and beyond.
Put the week side by side and the sequence is clear: structure changed first, and the arrangements for the people inside it followed, if they followed at all. Managers were removed before anyone said what replaced them, juniors were given agents before anyone said what a first year involves, and cuts were announced years before the roles were named. The employers that handle this well will be the ones able to describe the new org chart to the people sitting in it.
Takeaways
- US employers added only 29,000 jobs in September while jobless claims stayed below 200,000 for a fourth straight week, which Marketplace describes as a low-hire, low-fire market.
- Danish firms that adopted AI first had employment about 9% below their own trend by late 2025, relative to non-adopters, driven by reduced hiring, concentrated among workers under 30, rather than layoffs, according to Danmarks Nationalbank economists.
- Only 4% of US CHROs feel very confident they can manage AI-driven change, according to the Conference Board's Q3 index as reported by HR Dive.
- Gartner finds just 38% of CHROs and CIOs share an understanding of how AI affects the future of work.
- Citi is cutting its investment banking analyst programme from three years to two, and Goldman Sachs's Kevin Sneader says new hires now manage AI agents from day one.
- Bayer has cut managers from about 16,000 to 4,500, and FICO is cutting about 15% of positions partly to reduce management layers.
- Nike says decisions on affected roles will begin in 2027 and beyond, while KPMG UK is reportedly offering £100 for departing staff to waive the right to appeal or bring claims.
- Booking.com has asked a court to order two office days a week, and Australia's Fair Work Commission has ordered a one-day work-from-home trial for an older worker citing commuting fatigue.
Inside EBClub
EBClub, the community for employer brand, talent attraction and comms professionals, has a busy autumn: in-person events across Europe, new online formats, and a members' hub with live conversations running daily.
In person
- Bristol, 22 October, at UNITE
- Dublin, 11 November, at Salesforce
- Paris, 19 November, at Datadog
- Rotterdam, 26 November, at Clubgeist
- London, 3 December, hosted by Linklaters: a half day of insights and stories from your peers
- Madrid on 4 November may be announced shortly, handy for anyone heading to GEBEX
- 2027: the USA, Singapore and Australia, plus the favourite UK and European cities
Online
- The Talking Point: the fortnightly webinar, with two sessions so far on GEO and candidate trust erosion, and more to come
- The EB Therapy Couch: a closed, in-house-only space for open chats on matters you want to do better. First session 16 October, with Gina Edge and Tom Portingale on multi-brand EVPs
- My EB Story: one-to-one conversations with people who have a story to tell, open to anyone. First up is Adriano Corso, Global Head of EB at Riyadh Air, on moving from Europe to Saudi Arabia
Inside the hub
- Live threads on EVPs, recruitment marketing and distribution products, content tech, GEO adoption, creating with Copilot and Asia localisation
- The Exchange, where providers can join the conversation and members can ask for recommendations
Not a member yet? Joining gets you the events, the fortnightly Talking Point sessions and a seat in the conversations above: Join EBClub
Already inside? Pick a thread, post a question, or ask the Exchange for a supplier recommendation. EBClub events listing has the full dates. Anyone with something to say can also write for EBN by jumping in here.
Employer branding works better when people share what they know. EBClub brings practitioners together to exchange ideas, compare experiences, and learn from the people doing the work.
SOURCES
| # | Source | Publisher | Used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A frozen job market means no layoffs and no new hires | Marketplace, Oct 2026 | 29,000 September jobs; 197,000 claims; 27.1% long-term unemployed; Moore and Salemi quotes |
| 2 | Adjustment of the Danish labour market: AI has begun | CEPR VoxEU (Danmarks Nationalbank authors), Oct 2026 | Adopter employment about 9% below trend by Sept 2025; 27% vs 12% by AI exposure; hiring not layoffs; caveats |
| 3 | Citi accelerates junior banker promotions as private equity competition grows | FStech, Oct 2026 | Analyst programme cut from three years to two; VP path 6.5 to 5.5 years; 5 Oct (FT alternative) |
| 4 | Young bankers to manage AI agents from start, Goldman exec says | Straits Times (Bloomberg), Oct 2026 | Sneader, Peterson and Chia Der Jiun comments at Milken Institute Asia Summit, 8 Oct |
| 5 | Few CHROs say they feel very confident they can manage AI-driven change | HR Dive, Oct 2026 | 4% very confident; 19% in enterprise planning; fewer than half using new AI workforce data |
| 6 | CHRO Confidence Index Q3 2026 | The Conference Board, Oct 2026 | Index headline: CHRO confidence positive but continuing to ease |
| 7 | Gartner Survey Finds Only 38% of CHROs and CIOs Share an Understanding of How AI Impacts the Future of Work | Gartner, Oct 2026 | 38% shared understanding; Juley quotes; four HR roles |
| 8 | Organizations will need AI and robot relations departments | Brookings, Jul 2026 | West's robot relations proposal and HR/IT merger argument; no data in the piece |
| 9 | Companies may need a robot relations team for AI complaints | HR Director, Oct 2026 | Workday survey: 75% comfortable working alongside AI agents, 30% comfortable being managed by one |
| 10 | Amazon's failed AI token leaderboard shows risk of volume over value | HR Director, Oct 2026 | Amazon 80% weekly AI-use target, token leaderboard, gaming and withdrawal |
| 11 | Google DeepMind's Lila Ibrahim, world's top AI 'readiness' officer, on preparing for what's to come | CNBC, Oct 2026 | Ibrahim's three AI questions; 'cannot automate my Tuesdays' |
| 12 | NIKE, Inc. Announces Changes to Its Operating Model | Nike, Oct 2026 | 'Fewer roles'; decisions from 2027 and beyond; role numbers and locations not yet known |
| 13 | The bad, and unexpected good, of being in layoff limbo | Business Insider, Oct 2026 | Nike, Meta and GitLab advance cut notices; Zwetsch on voluntary exits and losing good people |
| 14 | KPMG tells staff facing the axe: Here's £100, now zip it | The Register, Oct 2026 | About 200 KPMG UK roles; £100 waiver offer per sources; 9 October notification; KPMG statement |
| 15 | Bayer's CEO cut manager ranks by 70%. Now comes the hard part | Fortune, Oct 2026 | Managers cut from about 16,000 to 4,500; 5,000 small teams; Anderson quotes; share price context |
| 16 | Fair Isaac Corporation Form 8-K, 6 October 2026 | SEC / Fair Isaac Corp, Oct 2026 | About 15% of positions; $27.0m charge; management layers and AI-driven product development |
| 17 | 'It felt like the Hunger Games had started': Workers are 'loud working' in an effort to secure their jobs | Business Insider, Oct 2026 | Loud working definition; ex-Meta employee quote; Salemi on tact |
| 18 | Booking.com goes to court to force staff to go to the office | DutchNews, Oct 2026 | Two-day order sought for about 7,000 Amsterdam staff; works council position |
| 19 | Too tired to commute? This work-from-home ruling could matter to you | Your Life Choices, Oct 2026 | FWC order, Commissioner Tran, no medical evidence needed, age link under the Fair Work Act |
| 20 | FWC makes flex work order despite employer's reasonable refusal | HR Daily, Oct 2026 | Order despite reasonable refusal; trial basis (paywalled, introduction only) |
| 21 | Why your boss matters more than remote or hybrid work when it comes to burnout and job satisfaction | The Conversation, Oct 2026 | Study of about 165,000 US employees; Gallup 2026 stress figures |
| 22 | OpenAI is piloting a 'mission interview' for candidates | Fortune, Oct 2026 | Pilot design; 8,000 employees and 830 open roles; interviewer from outside the team |
| 23 | More than half of professionals prioritise pension contributions over salary increases, survey finds | People Management (Robert Walters survey), Oct 2026 | 60% prefer pension contributions to pay rise; 72% vs 32% in 2025; Cotton comment |
| 24 | Wall Street first-half profits soar nearly $46 billion | NY State Comptroller, Oct 2026 | $45.9bn first-half profit, up 51.3%; bonus pool expected to rise; city forecast of a 20% fall |
| 25 | 'Quiet firing' linked to higher levels of 'quiet quitting' among employees | Phys.org (Inderscience), Oct 2026 | Quiet firing and quiet quitting association; weaker with stronger social capital |
| 26 | Employer brand must be felt inside before it works outside | HR Director, Oct 2026 | Ribreau on employer brand as operational, not communications |
| 27 | Grand Theft Auto 6 could almost double worker absence | HR Director (Deputy data), Oct 2026 | Roughly 90% absenteeism uplift on launch days; 19 November launch; rostering advice |
| 28 | Amazon makes fresh job cuts, mainly in retail division | Straits Times (Reuters), Oct 2026 | Fewer than 1,000 white-collar roles; US, India and UK; Amazon statement |
| 29 | Oracle to cut another 70 jobs in Ireland in AI cost-cutting push | Irish Times, Oct 2026 | 70 Irish roles; about 150 earlier this year; 21,000 global cuts in 12 months to May |
| 30 | Norwegian lender DNB to cut 400 jobs in AI overhaul | Retail Banker International, Oct 2026 | About 400 full-time roles in technology and services; Braathen quote |
| 31 | Royal Mail to cut up to 2,500 jobs amid restructure and fall in letter deliveries | The Guardian, Oct 2026 | Up to 2,500 roles, no compulsory redundancies, under 2% of 131,000 workforce |
Find the right people. Search hundreds of screened employer branding agencies, consultants, platforms and specialist providers. The employer branding rabbit hole now has filters.
