Career Corner's top picks this week. #1
Hiring, Recruiting, Job Market trends, Leadership insights.
Hey everyone, hope you enjoy this.
My Top Picks This Week ✅
1. Hiring & Recruitment
Here's what to expect for raises, promotions, and job seeking in 2025 (Business Insider)
"While business sentiment has picked up somewhat since the election, there is still a lot of uncertainty about future policy changes that will likely make businesses hesitant to ramp up hiring, particularly in the first half of 2025”
“A crackdown on immigration could affect industries with higher shares of immigrant workers”
“A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy”
“Healthcare has had large job growth relative to other industries”
“Real wage growth could be strong this year”
Citadel Extends Non-Compete to 21 Months to Retain Talent (Bloomberg)
“The firm’s non-competes averaged one year in 2020, though some managers had to sit out as long as 18 months to get their deferred compensation.”
“Citadel’s latest extension is longer than rivals’ policies, which are closer to 12 months, according to people familiar with hiring practices.”
“While the Federal Trade Commission banned non-compete clauses last year, it made an exception for mandatory garden leaves — as long as firms keep paying departing employees normal wages during their required time out. A federal judge blocked the ban in August, and the FTC appealed the ruling.”
Research: Do New Hires Really Understand Your Policies? (Harvard Business Review)
“While 52% of hiring managers thought their most recent hire was fully informed of the terms of their employment and 65% thought they had fully consented to these terms, only 20% of employees felt fully informed of the terms of their employment and only 39% felt that they had fully consented to them.”
LinkedIn is doubling down on AI features, but do they help job seekers? (Fast Company)
“According to a recent survey conducted by the career platform CV Genius, 80% of hiring managers expressed a distaste for AI-generated content—and 74% claimed to know an AI application when they saw one.”
"Your chance of receiving an offer after applying to as many as 80 roles stands at just 31%”
“LinkedIn’s AI-powered job-assessment tool—available now to premium subscribers and in early 2025 to everyone else—identifies listings for which you’d be a top applicant and marks them with a gold square.”
2. Remote Work & Return to Office
AT&T, Sweetgreen Demand More Days in Office, Joining Amazon (Bloomberg)
“University of Pittsburgh associate business professor Mark Ma and colleagues found that “firms experience abnormally high employee turnover following RTO mandates,” with the brain drain being worse among female and more experienced employees in the tech and finance fields. It also takes “significantly longer” for those companies to fill vacancies.”
“The share of companies that are in the office all week declined slightly to 32% in the fourth quarter, according to the Flex Index, which tracks attendance policies covering 100 million workers across more than 13,000 companies. A survey of employers from ZipRecruiter Inc., though, found that five-day policies have become slightly more popular over the past year.”
Allstate Thinks Outside the Cubicle With Flexible Workspaces (Bloomberg)
“In the coming months, a quarter of the insurance giant’s 54,000 corporate employees in cities like Atlanta, Tampa and Minneapolis will be able to meet up with colleagues in offices booked by the day through a coworking platform called LiquidSpace.”
“LiquidSpace also counts big companies like wireless provider T-Mobile US as clients, which book daily locations in cities like Los Angeles where it’s shuttered offices, significantly reducing real estate costs in those areas. Amazon — which just told corporate staff they must soon be in the office five days a week — is also a big user of on-demand space in some markets. Gilbreath sees on-demand space being part of the mix of all big companies one day.”
3. Job Market & Unemployment
Unemployed Office Workers Are Having a Harder Time Finding New Jobs (Wall Street Journal)
“On average, it now takes people about six months to find a job, roughly a month longer than it did during the postpandemic hiring boom in early 2023”
“The pain is largely in high-paying white-collar jobs, including in tech, law and media, where businesses grew fast when the economy reopened from the pandemic but now have less need for new hires.”
Job-Hoppers Could Boost Productivity (Chicago Booth Review)
“Moving from one job to another can be good for productivity.” “it’s not enough merely to encourage all workers to change jobs. Increasing output necessarily involves promoting employment mobility among the set of workers most likely to hop to newly formed businesses that are growing and hiring”
“researchers determined that workers who moved from one job directly to another were more likely to go up the productivity ladder than workers who passed through periods of unemployment. This is consistent with the standard theory that workers who search for new positions while still employed tend to find the sorts of new jobs that are more commonly available at higher-productivity companies.”
4. AI & Technology
Sam Altman on ChatGPT’s First Two Years, Elon Musk and AI Under Trump (Bloomberg)
“One of the strengths of that original OpenAI group was recruiting. Somehow you managed to corner the market on a ton of the top AI research talent, often with much less money to offer than your competitors. What was the pitch?”
“The pitch was just built by AGI. And the reason it worked—I cannot overstate how heretical it was at the time to say we’re gonna build AGI. So you filter out 99% of the world, and you only get the really talented, original thinkers. And that’s really powerful. If you’re doing the same thing everybody else is doing, if you’re building, like, the 10,000th photo-sharing app? Really hard to recruit talent. Convince me no one else is doing it, and appeal to a small, really talented set? You can get them all. And they all wanna work together. So we had what at the time sounded like an audacious or maybe outlandish pitch, and it pushed away all of the senior experts in the field, and we got the ragtag, young, talented people who are good to start with.”
5. Leadership & Management
The Dangers of Hiring a Nice CEO (Harvard Business Review)
“team’s performance is driven by three key factors: priorities, talent, and relationships. Each of those dimensions takes a hit when CEOs (or bosses at any level) who fall into what we call the “niceness trap.”
“The solution is not, by any means, to get rid of empathy and kindness—rather, it’s to clarify priorities, be collaborative but not blindly consensus-driven, deliver direct feedback with caring courage, and embrace the healthy tension among stakeholders.”
How to Amplify the Advantages of Working at a Founder-Led Company (MIT Sloan Review)
“The most successful executives lean into this bet, using their experiences to amplify founder strengths in a few ways”.”
“First, they act as translators between the founder’s intuitive leaps and the rest of the organization by breaking down unorthodox decisions into actionable steps, testing and validating those intuitions with data and feedback loops, and scaling the founder’s domain knowledge across the organization without requiring their direct involvement. Next, they position themselves as extensions of the founder’s vision and establish complementary credibility in areas where the founder is less involved. Finally, they help the founder pick and fight their battles — advising them on which controversial moves are worth sacrificing some goodwill, managing stakeholder relationships, and creating guardrails and contingency plans around the founder’s risky bets.”
4 areas CHROs must consider for HR transformation (HR Dive)
“A successful HR transformation must consider changes in four areas: world-class leadership, a modern HR operating model, future-proofed HR team competencies and HR technology enablement.”