Paper Cut took a week off for the summer. Welcome back. There's plenty to catch up on.
The headlines of the past fortnight tell a story that no one has put to a press release. A major tech company quietly shed 21,000 jobs over twelve months while presenting its AI strategy as an expansion. A government launched the first public tracker for AI-linked unemployment. A bank let staff work from home for the World Cup, weeks after demanding they return to the office. Senior workers at the peak of their careers are being asked, politely, to leave or to learn. The gap between what companies say about AI and what it is doing to their workforces has stopped being a talking point. It is now a data trail.
California published its AI Unemployment Tracker on 25 June, making it the first US state to formally attempt to quantify what technology is doing to work in real time. The tracker is still early and the data is directional rather than definitive. But the fact of its existence tells its own story. Policymakers no longer think the AI-and-jobs question is hypothetical.
Your employees know the truth. Does your EVP? At Fathom we measure the "Credibility Gap" between your promise and their reality.
For employer brand teams, the next few months will require a specific kind of honesty. Trust in HR is reported as a competitive advantage by SHRM, but trust is not built through messaging. It accumulates through what organisations do when the numbers are down and the pressure is on. This fortnight, a lot of organisations revealed something about their character. The question for practitioners is whether their employer brand reflects that, or papers over it.
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