Not all HR Tech Is Bad

In partnership with

The Gold standard for AI news

AI keeps coming up at work, but you still don't get it?

That's exactly why 1M+ professionals working at Google, Meta, and OpenAI read Superhuman AI daily.

Here's what you get:

• Daily AI news that matters for your career - Filtered from 1000s of sources so you know what affects your industry.

• Step-by-step tutorials you can use immediately - Real prompts and workflows that solve actual business problems.

• New AI tools tested and reviewed - We try everything to deliver tools that drive real results.

• All in just 3 minutes a day

Join 1M+ pros

This Week’s Breakdown

In case you missed the news last week, the Is This Still A Good Time? podcast is up and running, and by the time you read this there sill be 4 episodes to listen to. We had an amazing debut, almost cracking the top 100 career podcasts in the first week, and i appreciate the support.

Last week I spent a lot of time talking about HR Tech and some overall takeaways- mostly which were focused on negative things, so this week I did want to spend some time talking about some of the good conversations and products I saw that I think will be a benefit to you, your teams, and employees in general. None of these companies have paid any kind of compensation to be written about, I just happened to find the conversations interesting.

Benefits

One of the best use cases I’ve seen for AI in our world so far is in making benefits easier to understand and more accessible. Benefits are often the most underused and most understood thing at companies, recruiters are often talking about them with little understanding, and the time it takes up from onboarding and HR teams in general because of the confusion is astronomical. There were 2 AI cases that I thought were really interesting after a conversation at HR Tech.

Yuna 

I’m not here to make a commercial for Yuna, but even as somebody skeptical about people using AI for any kind of therapy help, the AI therapy tool was impressive! If you have ever been to therapy you’ll likely notice the clear difference in the way Yuna’s AI talks to you compared to if you try to ask ChatGPT for help or advice.

A big factor why was the impressive Dr Tara Deliberto who has put a lot of time, energy and education into the product. This is something that is not meant to replace therapy or be used in an emergency, but as an extra feature on a benefit package or even something people can use individually, it felt like a product meant to help teams and help companies build themselves as a better place for employees than yet another AI resume scanning tool!

Right here was supposed to be a clip of me demoing the product, but it turns out embedding a video in Beehiiv isn’t that easy, so perhaps I’ll upload and show it another time.

Aptia

Most great use cases for AI may not be shiny and exciting, and I think that’s a good thing. I spoke with Jeff Williams the CEO at Aptia, about their AI benefit guidance tool. Something that helps give employees clear and understandable choices when it comes to benefits. For those of you who have been 1 person HR departments like me, you know what a mess open enrollment is (actually it’s a mess no matter how big your HR department is). A tool that can help employees truly understand and make the most of their benefits based on what they need, save the back and forth with recruiters and HR, and explain the things that I have seen far too many overwhelmed recruiters try to explain at sign up time sounds like a great use of AI to me.

Again, I don’t talk about these products for any kind of sales purpose, but rather, I think there is such a focus on the bad with AI, all the products we don’t need, all the ways it will not help the average person. It was nice having a few conversations with founders of products that are not just being made to replace people, but actually save employer time and help future employees get onboarded.

I guess what I’m saying is, let’s not hit the AI panic button yet!

Recruited in the Wild

Seen on LinkedIn, overheard in Slack, or posted without shame.

What a week on LinkedIn it was, honestly just picking 1 story today feels hard. We saw the return of the awful “I signed an NDA’ advice, we saw an argument about if it’s ok to leave a short stint job off your resume (hint: it is), we even saw a return of the meme I talked about in the very first issue of the newsletter that people keep falling for.

But none of those top Gwen’s post from this week in the ultimate ‘recruiting is so easy, anyone can do it right?’ post. I of course couldn’t resist diving in, but this one just got to me.

Cute graphics, plenty of emojis, and exactly zero connection to how hiring actually works despite the author telling us several times how many TA functions she has led.

First off: the babysitter example.
Anyone who’s ever hunted for childcare knows parents don’t just say, “Can you keep my child safe and happy?” and then hand over the keys to their toddler. I promise you Gwen didn’t either.

Second:

Comparing a one-time toilet repair to hiring a full-time employee who will cost six figures and share Slack channels for the next 40+ hours a week is… something. The stakes, the risk, the ongoing relationship, completely different universe.

Service work is so necessary and important and trade workers should be paid as much as they can make. But if you can’t see the difference in hiring a plumber to fix your toilet and hiring a new leader for your make or break project, well maybe you need to just touch the tiniest blade of grass.

But hey, at least this post nailed the LinkedIn algorithm: frustrated job seekers smash the like button, recruiters become the villains, and we all waste another afternoon arguing over a false equivalence.

As always, if it sounds good in a meme, who cares if it’s true.

Fun to dunk on? Absolutely.

Helpful to anyone actually trying to improve hiring? About as useful as asking a project manager to fix your toilet.

Horror Stories

True recruiting nightmares from the field.
Want to share yours anonymously for a future issue? 

Submit your story Here - It won’t even ask for your name or email don’t worry!

One of the funnest things about recording the new podcast and having so many episodes in the bank already, is hearing everyone’s recruiting horror story 1 on 1. Today I did a very fun recording with a friend and newsletter subscriber Erin Riska who you should be following on Linkedin if only for her monthly breakdown of the job reports in a real and easy to understand way, but really for more reasons than that.

I don’t want to FULLY spoil the story she told me today as it was one of the first times I’ve ever been left saying “I don’t have a similar story to that one”, but let me just tease it by saying…parents….please don’t pretend to be your children on job interviews!

Cope of the Week

Because it’s either this or scream into a pillow.

Coming back from HR Tech and getting ready to be on the road again 3 straight weeks in October for events, I realized something that isn’t about AI or any shiny tool, it’s about the after-conference hangover.

You know the one, you probably get it from vacation too:

• Inbox overflowing.

• Slack messages waiting.

• A notebook full of “great ideas” you suddenly have to turn into real work.

• Zero clue where to start.

It’s easy to treat every good idea you heard like an emergency. It’s just as easy to burn out before any of them become reality.

So here’s my cope: pace yourself.

Pick one thing you learned or want to get into, just one this month.
Write down the rest and let them wait. The best ideas will survive a cooling-off period.

HR Tech reminded me that conferences aren’t about collecting a hundred action items. They’re about collecting perspective. The tools, the trends, even the “game-changers”, they’ll still be there next quarter.

You don’t have to implement everything you heard.

You just have to stay curious enough to keep learning… and sane enough to show up again. Kind of just like recruiting huh?

Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe!

Forward this to someone in TA who's barely holding it together.