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Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | |
CULTURE
Welcome to the eggshell economy
As economic uncertainty looms large, employees find themselves navigating a professional environment that feels increasingly fragile
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WORKERS ARE BECOMING more cautious, careful and calculated as they navigate an “eggshell economy” where surviving is replacing thriving, stated a new survey from BambooHR.
That’s not to say workers are entirely unhappy ― 84 per cent said they have some satisfaction in their job ― but that the dominant mood is one of trying to navigate uncertainty.
“Employees find themselves walking on eggshells in the workplace as they navigate a professional environment that feels increasingly fragile,” the report reads.
The survey also suggested this mood of uncertainty is creating some unusual workplace behaviours. Workers are increasingly paranoid their contributions are going unnoticed, with 73 per cent going out of their way to “ensure their contributions are visible to their entire team.” This includes steps like maintaining detailed project logs, documenting idea ownership and copying senior leaders on important emails.
“Fear drives these behaviours,” said BambooHR’s Kelsey Tarp. “When people don’t know if they’re valued, they create barriers and silos.”
This way of thinking about employee welfare helps explain one of the paradoxes of the current labour market, where low satisfaction exists alongside low turnover (the latter being more expected in times of high satisfaction).
“Low turnover rates within your organization may be missing the bigger picture,” pointed out BambooHR’s Tara Martell. “The job market has been wonky at best. Very few open roles are out there, so competition is fierce. Many candidates also complain about exhaustive interview processes or poor communication.”
It extends even to the watercooler, where employees are behaving in ways that are much less forthcoming, open and sociable. Fifty-one per cent of employees said they censor themselves at work more than ever. Everyone, it seems, is treading warily, sizing up their coworkers and trying to gain an edge.
“The modern employee isn’t just working,” said Martell. “They’re managing perception, guarding their roles and adapting to an environment where missteps feel more consequential.”
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HIRING
The AI will see you now
AI is now conducting real-time job interviews. What could possibly go wrong?
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COVERING THE ROLE of AI in hiring and job search is a bit like covering a low-stakes game of tennis. One side finds a little advantage that makes them more efficient for a while, until the other side finds a counter to that, to which the first side counters again, and around and around everyone goes.
Nobody in the hiring equation is happy about the state of things, and we’ve written more than a few stories both about candidates frustrated with AI screening and hiring managers at their wit’s end with AI résumés and applications.
And yet, as if they know how to do nothing else, new AI wrenches are being thrown into the gears of hiring. Forget being annoyed that your interviewer is using AI ― jobseekers are now annoyed that their interviewer is AI.
“Startups like Apriora, HeyMilo AI and Ribbon all say they’re seeing swift adoption of their software for conducting real-time AI interviews over video,” wrote Jo Constantz of the Financial Times. “A year ago, this idea seemed insane,” added Arsham Ghahramani, co-founder of Toronto-based Ribbon, an AI recruiting startup. “Now it’s quite normalized.”
Normalized? Perhaps. Annoying? Big yes, say some candidates.
“It was the most uncomfortable, fake positivity performance that I’ve had to give, because I wasn’t getting any feedback in real time,” said one jobseeker in a Slate article about the new world of AI interviews. In other cases, the AI interviewers go humorously haywire, with one getting stuck in a loop saying “vertical bar pilates” over and over again.
But everything creates its own negation, and now people are creating AI tools that are built for “cheating” in live conversations. Cluely is the most famous one of these ― it was built to help candidates cheat their way through job interviews, although one reviewer noted that it hallucinated that she had working knowledge of the Malay language.
Even with the hiccups, though, the folks behind all this new tech believe it’s the future of candidate screening, likely to work best in technical assessments, and if used properly can save recruiters and hiring managers time. “We don’t believe that AI should be making the hiring decision,” startup founder Sabashan Ragavan told the Financial Times. “It should just collect data to support that decision.”
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Terry Talk: Beware of Quiet Cutting as an HR strategy
| Reassigning employees instead of laying them off may seem like a smart move on paper. But when done without transparency or support, it breeds distrust, disengagement and a slow erosion of workplace culture. In this Terry Talk, Ahria Consulting president & CEO Terry Gillis explores why Quiet Cutting is a risky strategy for employers, and how it can quietly damage morale, retention and reputation. | | | |
WORKFORCE
North Korea stole your job
Remote work companies have a big problem: North Korean operatives
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THE NORTH KOREAN fake worker scam may be much bigger than just a few cybersecurity firms. A new Wall Street Journal report found the scam ― where a North Korean national pretends to be someone else, works a remote job and funnels money and company data back to North Korea ― to be far more widespread than first thought.
“They work for almost any conceivable sector that uses remote labour,” the report stated. “Sometimes they’re terrible employees and are quickly dismissed. Others last for months or even years.”
“It’s huge, and it’s everywhere,” said Greg Schloemer, a senior threat analyst at Microsoft, who estimated that there are thousands of fake remote employees operating in all sorts of companies. Earlier this year, the FBI arrested an American citizen who had helped run this scheme stateside; in just one operation, best guesses had it that more than $17 million had been siphoned off from over 300 companies.
“These [North Korean] workers are absolutely able to hold down jobs that pay in the low six figures in U.S. companies, and sometimes they can hold multiple of these jobs,” the FBI stated.
What this is also doing is creating headaches for anyone hiring remote labour, particularly in the tech and tech-adjacent sectors. The operations are increasingly making use of AI-generated personas, and even AI-assisted interviews, to help the North Koreans get hired. What makes it even harder is that when you hear the experts describe how North Koreans get hired for these jobs, it sounds eerily similar to how everybody else gets hired for remote jobs.
“IT workers play the numbers game and are applying for remote roles in volume,” Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at Sopho told Wired, adding that they “operate at such a pace that they can make mistakes” in their CVs or make “slip-ups on camera during interviews that can reveal subterfuge.”
On the plus side, a new decidedly low-tech test has emerged for recruiters and hiring interviewers to help separate the North Koreans from everyone else: ask them about Kim Jung Un. "My favorite interview question, because we've interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of ‘How fat is Kim Jong Un?’” said Crowdstrike VP Adam Meyers. “They terminate the call instantly, because it’s not worth it to say something negative about that.”
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PRODUCTIVITY
What happened to the four-day workweek?
All the rage not all that long ago, the four-day workweek hasn’t been forgotten altogether ― some companies have even gone a step further
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ALTHOUGH YOU LIKELY haven’t heard much lately about the grand four-day workweek pilot projects that swept the globe a few years ago, that isn’t because it’s not having any effects. Take Welsh business owner Aled Nelmes, for instance. His company, Lumen SEO, was one of the businesses enrolled in the UK’s four-day week pilot, a switch that worked well for the company.
It went so well, in fact, that Nelmes went a bit wackier with it: a seven-day, 32-hour workweek.
“The flexibility that enables entrepreneurs to be high performing shouldn’t be limited to them only,” he said in a LinkedIn post. “Intrapraneurial staff should benefit the same.”
In practice, there’s a few guidelines to this model. Everyone in the company (which is fewer than a dozen people) has to overlap for at least a few hours a week, and meetings receive a lot of preparation, so time isn’t wasted. But beyond that, he lets his employees plan their week as they like.
“I would argue that, because staff members have more time outside of focused, regimented, structured work, they tend to come into the office with more ideas,” Nelmes told the Financial Times.
It is interesting to look at in the context of those four-day workweek pilot projects. Four-day workweeks are becoming more popular, but are still a tiny minority, showing up in less than one per cent of all job listings in the U.S., Germany, France, the UK and Canada. While it isn’t the overall success the four-day workweek evangelists imagined, the spirit of the idea has persisted in several companies.
Many are “doubtless run by bosses like Nelmes, who are convinced this is the way of the future,” wrote the Financial Times. Other companies, said Joe Ryle, campaign director of the 4 Day Week Foundation, have translated the four-day workweek idea into five shorter workdays. “Even if four days a week doesn’t make sense, many are seeing a lot of sense – and productivity benefits – in reduced hours.”
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