For millions of Americans who have grown accustomed to the flexibility provided by their work-from-home arrangements, it's been a gloomy start to the year. As of this month, employees at Amazon and AT&T are required to start showing up in the office five days a week. Then, on Tuesday, news broke that JPMorgan is preparing to revoke the hybrid privileges of about 40% of its workforce. (The other 60% are already required to come in every day). The headlines, the latest in a steady stream of return-to-office announcements, sparked yet another round of freakouts on Reddit, LinkedIn, and countless group texts. But as someone who keeps a close watch on the American workplace, I can tell you that I'm really not worried about the future of working from home. Whatever old-school CEOs like Jamie Dimon and Andy Jassy may think of it, remote work is here to stay.

For one, take a look at the stats. The economist Nick Bloom runs a monthly survey of American workers that tracks the prevalence of remote work. At the peak of COVID, in the spring of 2020, as much as 62% of work across the economy was being done from home. As the pandemic eased, that number came tumbling down — to 37% at the beginning of 2021, 33% in 2022, and 27% in 2023. The work-from-home dream appeared to be fading.

But in the two years since, something odd has happened. Despite all the headlines about companies getting rid of hybrid arrangements, the actual prevalence of remote work has barely budged. Last month, the share of work-from-home jobs remained at 27%. The RTO wars, it seems, have reached an impasse — one in which neither side is able to score any gains.

This impasse is all the more remarkable because of the weakness of the white-collar job market. As I've reported, hiring for corporate professionals has been in a huge slump, which has given employers the upper hand to do whatever they want about remote work without risking a mass exodus of disgruntled staffers. If CEOs were waiting for the ideal market conditions to drag everyone back into the office, this would definitely be the time to do it.

And yet, as the data shows, that hasn't happened — which suggests that CEOs, for the most part, are fine with the policies they have in place today. Even if they quietly wish more employees would come into the office, they don't seem to think it's worth the disruption that would come from forcing the issue.

In fact, when you zoom out and look at the current status of work from home, what you see is nothing short of a sea change. In 2019, Bloom and his team estimate, only 4.7% of work was performed from home. That means the current level of WFH is still six times larger than it was before the pandemic. For all the Amazons and JPMorgans that are reverting to their pre-COVID policies, the norm remains tilted to hybrid work to a degree that would have been unimaginable back in 2019.

In the long run, despite the RTO efforts by the likes of Amazon and JPMorgan, I actually think working from home is almost certain to become even more common. First, given America's slowing population growth, employers will soon find themselves facing a serious labor shortage. That will force them to offer all kinds of perks to attract and retain staff — and the flexibility to work from home is sure to be one of them. Second, the WFH-friendly startups that were founded during the pandemic will continue to grow. They'll not only employ more and more remote and hybrid employees — they'll eventually come to dominate entire sectors of the economy, further cementing the value of work from home. And third, the technology that enables us to collaborate at a distance will only get better over time, reducing what's probably the biggest pain point of remote work.

That's all to say that the reports of remote work's death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated. After all, this is how big societal changes always happen: first comes innovation, then skepticism and fear, followed by a concerted push to return to the good old days. In the scheme of things, the office itself is a relatively recent innovation. Or consider one of the biggest inventions of Twain's time: the telephone. What was wrong with the telegraph, people asked. What's the point of switching to this new thing? Also, could it transmit ghosts? Could the electrical wiring shock you? Even as the devices proliferated, some worried that they portended the downfall of society. "The general use of the telephone," one New York Times writer lamented, "instead of promoting civility and courtesy, is the means of the fast dying out of what little we have left."

That's how laughable all the corporate hand-wringing about work from home is going to sound like a couple decades from now. Remote work, Jamie Dimon once groused, "doesn't work." History is in the process of proving him wrong.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

In 2007, Jesse Burgess joined his family’s payroll business. He quickly noticed that the business’ six payroll clerks were getting bogged down by repetitive, monotonous tasks. So he sought to streamline those tasks by creating workflow automation tools. Several years later, Burgess sensed an opportunity to bring the tools he developed for his family’s business […]

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• The Society for Human Resource Management, known as SHRM, is the world's largest HR association.
• These are the themes that SHRM anticipates will most impact businesses and HR professionals in 2025.
• Job retention, the skills gap, and how to manage polarizing workplaces are top of the agenda.

2025 holds plenty of challenges for employers and HR professionals. Labor shortages are making hiring a nightmare; they're anticipating new regulations and tariffs under the Trump administration, and they have to skill up workforces for AI if they don't want to get left behind.

The Society for Human Resource Management is there to help them.

SHRM is a member-driven organization that researches the biggest issues and innovations impacting today's workplaces and helps give business leaders and HR professionals the tools they need to build a "more civil and productive workplace."

The US-based group has nearly 340,000 members in 180 countries.

SHRM released an outlook of the areas it will be focusing on to best help HR professionals in 2025. These are some of the themes they say will shape the future of work next year.

The ongoing labor shortage

The job market is strong, but the reality for job seekers and employers alike is more complex.

On the employer side, job openings are outpacing active job seekers. That has left businesses struggling to fill openings. Many employers are also "labor hoarding" in an attempt to manage quit rates and prevent labor shortages many experienced after the pandemic.

1.7 million Americans are missing from the workforce compared to February 2020, according to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Supporting businesses as they navigate talent acquisition and retention is a key focus for 2025, SHRM said in its yearly overview.

One of the organization's suggestions for employers was to look at untapped talent pools, such as veterans, workers with disabilities, military spouses, and caregivers. Addressing barriers like outdated policies and insufficient flexibility could help maximize workplace recruitment and retention, SHRM said.

Political changes

The new administration could bring about new regulatory shifts, creating a wave of uncertainty for employers.

SHRM anticipates that businesses will need assistance adapting to new rules and policies and understanding their workforce impact.

2025 could also see a rise in polarized workplaces in connection to "conservative trends in federal courts and agencies," SHRM said in its outlook. Changes could impact workplace diversity initiatives, and the ripple effects of proposed tariffs could hit talent management and compensation strategies.

The organization also highlighted that its civility research unit found nearly 223 million "acts of incivility" per day following the 2024 election.

Common examples of incivility in the workplace include "intentionally interrupting or speaking over others, people being rude or inconsiderate, and gossiping or spreading rumors," according to SHRM.

The group said it would be focusing on equipping chief human resources officers (CHROs) with the tools and knowledge they need to foster resilient and inclusive workplaces.

The skills gap

AI holds huge potential for organizations, but to truly capitalize on the technology, investments must also extend to the workforce.

Currently, workers lack key skills like digital literacy and technical competence to collaborate with AI, creating a need for targeted upskilling and reskilling programs, SHRM said.

The impact of AI on the workforce will be more dramatic than previous technology shifts, SHRM President Johnny C. Taylor Jr. told Business Insider in August.

"We are not being as transparent as we should be with human beings workers about how significantly AI is going to change how we work and what work we do," said Taylor.

SHRM's outlook said that one in eight jobs has already been displaced by AI, and it added that addressing worker concerns about job security will also be a focus this year.

Bench, the VC-backed accounting startup that left thousands of customers locked out of their accounts after it suddenly shut down last week, will be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price in a last-minute deal, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The San Francisco-based HR tech company Employer.com focuses on payroll and onboarding, in contrast to Bench, […]

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Never in the history of work has anyone actually enjoyed looking for it. But the frustration, exhaustion, anxiety, anger, and despondence I've heard from white-collar job seekers over the past year have been unlike anything I've encountered in my 15 years of reporting on the economy. They went to good schools. They worked at reputable companies. They've looked for jobs before, and they thought they knew the drill. But now, in the current job market, they're utterly baffled. None of their tried-and-true approaches to the job hunt seem to work anymore. It's as if they went to sleep in one world and woke up in a scarier one.

In a sense, they have. We're in the midst of a deep white-collar recession, which is generating more unemployed professionals than job openings. And technology has simplified job applications to a single click, flooding employers with way more candidates than they can possibly hope to process. Those two forces have combined to create the mother of all traffic jams, breaking the job market as we know it. Sticking with the same old job-search techniques is a surefire recipe for disappointment. "Do not just apply and hope to get a callback," says Kyle Minton, a longtime recruiter in tech and manufacturing. "I promise you are being buried. We are living in a new age."

But there are ways you can break through the gridlock. To assemble the best job-search advice, I spoke with two dozen experts — recruiters, HR executives, career coaches, résumé writers, and those who run applicant tracking systems and job boards. I asked them for every pro tip they could think of, for every stage of the hiring process — the kind of insider insights they would offer their best friend. They debunked common myths, explained the mindset of recruiters and hiring managers, and provided specific tools for getting ahead. Taken together, their advice offers a concrete guide for navigating the chaos of today's job market. Call them the new rules for job searching — a blueprint for standing out in a world that makes you feel like giving up. "In this environment," Minton says, "I cannot stress enough how imperative it is to go above and beyond."

LAY THE GROUNDWORK

Start by looking within.
If you're still employed, don't assume that the only good jobs are outside your current company. According to data from Greenhouse, an applicant tracking system, internal applicants are five times likelier to land a job than external applicants who have a referral — and 41 times likelier than external applicants without a referral. To get a leg up on your competition, scout out jobs at your company before they're publicly posted. Invite colleagues who are doing the job you want out for coffee and ask them to let you know if they hear of any openings on their team. Networking begins at home.

Make a list of your dream companies.
Given how terrible the job market is, you might assume it's best to play the volume game — to spray and pray, as they say in the marketing business. But that's exactly the wrong approach. Paradoxically, the fact that the market is bad right now means you have to be extra intentional about narrowing your scope. If you're at the entry level, then yes — apply for everything in sight. But if you've got more than a few years of experience, you need to start by thinking hard about the companies you actually want to work for, because you're going to funnel a lot of your time and energy into landing a job at those places.

Keep the list short.
Matt Tague, a tech recruiter turned career consultant, tells his clients to aim for a surprisingly short list of five dream employers, max. "It takes a lot of time to properly research a company," he says. "More dream companies = lower quality research."

Don't be afraid to cold call.
Look at the companies on your list and identify the managers running the teams you hope to join. Even if there are no job openings posted, message the managers and ask to have a quick call with them. The goal is not to ask them for a job — it's to learn about their team and establish a rapport. Not sure what to say? Try using this sample DM created by Tague:

Enlist the help of everyone you know.
Friends. Former colleagues. Neighbors. College classmates. Dog park acquaintances. That guy you met in line for coffee two months ago at that really boring industry conference. Everyone.

GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER ON LINKEDIN

Embrace the cringe.
No one wants to be that person who spends all their time on LinkedIn. But keeping an active presence on the platform is essential: Recruiters and hiring managers rely on it, both to search for candidates and to evaluate applicants. Post and comment frequently — that shows you're engaged in your career and available to respond to a recruiter's DM in a timely manner. And buy a Premium Career subscription. It costs $29.99 a month, and it gives you more messaging credits. You'll need them for all the networking you'll be doing.

Smash that subscribe button.
Remember that list of dream companies you made? Make sure you follow every single one of them on LinkedIn. Recruiters often filter for people who already follow the company, so this is an easy way to make sure you pop up on their radar. "It shows a bit more of that initiative, that resourcefulness, that motivation," says Jenny Diani, a senior director of global technical recruiting at Autodesk. "We want to look at who's really motivated and interested in working at our company."

Optimize your profile with these 4 simple tricks.

1. List your skills. Recruiters want to see more than job titles. Choose five skills to highlight in each job you've had.
2. Fill in the "About" section. Yes, it really matters. Summarize your key qualifications and list the top five skills that are most relevant to the kind of role you want to land.
3. Make the visuals pop. First impressions are key. Post a good headshot, set a cover photo, and make sure the logos of your employers show up.
4. Hide your age. Age discrimination sucks, but it's real. If you're over 40, don't specify the year you graduated from college.

Let your Open to Work flag fly.
Worried recruiters will think something's wrong with you if you use LinkedIn's green banner to signal your availability? Think again. Recruiters not only don't mind #opentowork, but some even prioritize candidates who use it. So turn it on — and then post about it. Do's: articulate the kind of role you want; highlight your skills and key accomplishments; be positive. Don'ts: disparage your previous employer or former colleagues; mention your fear of losing your house.

PUNCH UP YOUR RÉSUMÉ

Hire a professional résumé writer.
"I don't think anybody came out of the womb good at writing a résumé," says Jon Stross, a cofounder of Greenhouse. So hire an expert who knows how to do it right. Prices range from a few hundred dollars for a basic makeover to a few thousand dollars for help with networking strategy and interview prep. I've spoken with quite a few successful job seekers who credit their new gig to their professional résumé writer. But there are a lot of scammy ones out there, so do some Googling to see whether the person is legit and knows what they're talking about.

Beat the AI bots by customizing your résumé for every single job you apply to.
Companies are increasingly using AI to score candidates based on how well their résumés match the job description. And recruiters often prioritize résumés by filtering them for keywords from the job posting. So make sure you use those exact same words in your résumé, and list achievements that demonstrate you've already done what the company says it's looking for. "If you don't take the extra time to tailor your résumé to the job listing," says Avani Prabhakar, the chief people officer at Atlassian, "you stand no chance."

Use a bot to beat the bots.
Customization is time-consuming, but there are online tools that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Teal, for example, compares your résumé to job listings and suggests new bullet points to make them match up more.

But for God's sake, don't put the keywords in white.
For some reason, the internet has become convinced that you can game applicant tracking systems by sneaking extra keywords onto your résumé in a white font that will be visible only to the software. There's apparently a small chance it might work. But some recruiters actually check for "white fonting," and then reject you as dishonest. If you think a keyword is important, stick to black type.

Be careful with the boss vibes.
Many companies are cutting back on the ranks of middle managers, which has forced a lot of senior-level professionals to apply to lower-level jobs. If that's you, don't emphasize your managerial skills in your résumé — you don't want recruiters to think you're above getting your hands dirty. Instead, says Saba Siddiqui, the head of talent acquisition at Gusto, position yourself as a player-coach. Highlight all the ways you continued to pitch in as an individual contributor, even when you were in a supervisory position.

Don't get your heart set on working from home.
Given the return-to-office push, most companies are advertising only for in-office or hybrid roles. Many recruiters don't even bother to look at candidates who live far away. On your résumé, make sure you specify the city and state where you live at the top. If that's far from a company's offices and you're willing to relocate, indicate that next to your current location.

But if you do apply for a WFH role, emphasize the W.
Tailor your résumé to prove you're good at working remotely. After all, WFH is a skill of its own. "We really look for people who are autonomous, who can manage their time in an efficient way, who feel comfortable working in ambiguity, and don't require people holding their hand," says Anastasia Pshegodskaya, the director of talent acquisition at Remote. "These are the skills you would like to see on the CV." Note the roles you've had that were fully remote, and showcase your experience working with far-flung teams.

Ditch the cover letter.
No one reads it. For companies that require one, send in something generic, but don't spend too much time customizing it. The résumé is the far more important document.

START APPLYING

Get to the front of the line.
Many applicant tracking systems present candidates in the order they applied. Recruiters often don't get through all the candidates. And the companies that actually commit to reviewing every résumé will take down the job listing as soon as they get enough applicants, which can happen within days. So make sure you apply as soon as you can. Pro tip: Set up job alerts for your dream companies on LinkedIn so you get a notification the moment a new listing goes up.

Jump the line.
Unless a company specifically tells you not to, send a DM or email introducing yourself to the hiring manager or recruiter. Worried it might annoy them? "I would take that risk," says Steve Knox, the global head of talent acquisition at Dayforce. "Show that you're taking initiative." Nine times out of 10, Knox says, the manager will be curious enough to click on your LinkedIn profile — and if they like what they see, they'll put you on the fast track. Here's a DM one job seeker sent to a recruiter right after she applied for a position. The recruiter wrote back to set up a call, and the enterprising applicant ended up beating out more than 1,500 other candidates to land the role:

Do everything you can to get a referral.
With a referral, according to Greenhouse's data, you're nine times more likely to get hired than a candidate without one. A referral from someone who knows you well is best. But if you're not close to anyone at your dream companies, circle back to those people you cold-called and ask if they can put you in touch with their colleagues on the team you're hoping to join. And don't be shy about asking whether they'd be open to putting in a word for you with the hiring manager — many companies offer referral bonuses for their employees.

Don't be afraid to apply for a job cold.
Can't find a connection at the company? Give it a shot anyway. In one analysis, Greenhouse found that 68% of the hires made by its clients were external applicants without a referral. Your odds will be insanely long, but it doesn't hurt to try.

Pitch your own job.
Four years ago, when I was looking for a new job, I had a bunch of networking calls with editors at Business Insider. I wasn't right for any of the positions they were advertising for, so I pitched them on the job I really wanted: to write features about the American workplace. They liked the idea enough to create a whole new role for me to do exactly that. Not only did it enable me to land my dream job, but it also afforded me a distinct advantage: I was the only applicant.

Infiltrate your target.
Full-time jobs are hard to come by — so consider getting your foot in the door as a contractor. Use this website to look up which staffing agencies your dream companies use, and then contact those agencies directly. "Since their product is people," says Minton, the recruiter, "they are generally more likely to connect with you." Once you're a contractor at a company, you can network on the inside and work your way up to a full-time position.

ACE YOUR INTERVIEWS

Do your homework.
There was a time when senior professionals could wing their interviews on charisma alone. Not anymore. "Right now there's an expectation that you have done extensive research," says Frank Burgoyne, an interview coach for experienced professionals. "And that goes beyond the company website." Read every news article about the company. Watch as many of its obscure sales presentations on YouTube as you can stand. Be ready to show that you already understand the problems the company is wrestling with and why you're uniquely qualified to solve them.

Apply to some "maybe" jobs before the dream ones.
Think of them as preseason warmups. Says Tague, the career consultant: "You're going to get that interview practice in a safer environment, with lower risk, than your one shot at Google."

Get ChatGPT to help.
Give it the job description, your résumé, and your interviewer's job title, and ask it to spit out a bunch of sample questions for you to answer. You can even have it critique your answers, but don't recite its suggestions verbatim. Recruiters can tell when you're regurgitating canned, robotic answers.

Use the STAR method.
If an interview question starts with "tell me about a time that you," your answer should be structured in four steps: situation, task, action, result. "It used to be a nice-to-have," Burgoyne says. "But now companies expect that 100%." Burgoyne tells his clients not only to prep their answers, but also to keep a running spreadsheet of stories formatted in the STAR method. "You'll have that spreadsheet for the rest of your career," he says. "And you should be adding to it regularly."

Don't answer "What's your biggest weakness?" with "I'm a perfectionist."
It's lame, and recruiters will see right through it. Instead, talk about something that was once a weakness and then explain how you overcame it.

Send a thank-you email after every interview.
And not a generic "thank you so much for the interview yesterday." Mention something specific from the conversation that impressed you, or an additional thought you had about something they asked you. Bonus points if you can tie that back to the contribution you hope to make.

Collect your failures.
Got rejected? Treat it as another networking opportunity. Send your interviewers a request for a LinkedIn connection. And ask the recruiter if you can follow up in a couple of months to see if more jobs have opened up. "I can think of quite a few people that have been hired at Autodesk who did not get the first role that they applied for," says Diani. "They followed up either with that hiring manager or the recruiter, and were put in process for another role."

KEEP YOUR COOL

Stay organized.
It's common for job seekers to keep a spreadsheet of the jobs they've applied to. But even more important is keeping a spreadsheet of all the people you talked to along the way. Include where they work, how you met them, a summary of the conversation you had, and when you spoke. Then follow up with them every few months — and hit them up for a referral when there's a job opening at their company.

Don't take rejections personally.
Datapeople, a provider of recruiting analytics, has found that nearly a third of all job postings never result in a hire. "Hiring happens within the context of a whole big messy company with decisions and priorities and delays and personalities," says Tague, who led recruiting teams at companies like Microsoft and Lyft. "Very rarely are they digging into it like, 'Oh, if only she'd said this.' It's not really like that on the inside. There could be internal people you don't know about. There's all kinds of factors that can come into play, but the candidate doesn't see that." So stop obsessing over the reason you were rejected — it probably had little to do with you. Move on.

Build a support group.
You know how married people don't understand the hell that is modern dating? Employed people don't understand how miserable job searching is these days. Make sure you surround yourself with folks who actually get it. Don't think you're alone, because you aren't.

Take breaks, weekends, vacations.
Job-searching burnout is real. Keep it sustainable by not doing it all the time.

Congrats! You got a job!
But if you're smart, you're not done with the job search. Keep networking at your dream companies. Work the room at industry events. Tague recommends setting a goal to connect with two new people a month. The more legwork you do while you've got a job, the easier it'll be the next time you find yourself looking for one. Here's hoping that's not for a long, long time.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

In the business world, there are few areas that artificial intelligence hasn't touched. Many industries are rushing to adopt AI, and the technology is changing how employees collaborate and complete tasks.

Generative AI is a major buzzword for business leaders. But actually integrating AI can be a different story.

"A lot of our clients have dozens of AI pilots everywhere," Jack Azagury, the group chief executive for consulting at Accenture, said at one Workforce Innovation roundtable. "Very few have a coherent business case and a true reinvention and transformation."

How do companies move forward as the novelty of AI wears off? Business Insider's Julia Hood asked members of the Workforce Innovation board how they transitioned their AI pilots into real-world use cases. Board members shared five major ways their companies were moving AI from theory to operations.

"Before we go and tell our clients to embark on AI fully, we want to be an AI-first organization," said Anant Adya, an executive vice president, service-offering head, and head of Americas delivery at Infosys. "We want to show our clients we are using AI, whether it is in HR when it comes to driving better employee experience or when it comes to recruitment."

Members also highlighted employee training and peer-to-peer learning opportunities.

The roundtable participants were:

• Anant Adya, an executive vice president, service-offering head, and head of Americas Delivery at Infosys.
• Lucrecia Borgonovo, a chief talent and organizational-effectiveness officer at Mastercard.
• Neil Murray, the CEO of Work Dynamics at JLL.
• Justina Nixon-Saintil, a vice president and chief impact officer at IBM.
• Marjorie Powell, a chief HR officer and senior vice president at AARP.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Identify early adopters, like human resources

Nixon-Saintil: Because we provide these platforms and solutions to clients, we are usually client zero. We implemented AI across our business and multiple functions, and one of the first things we did was our AskHR product, which I think answered over 94% of questions employees had.

HR employees now spend time doing higher-order work and partnerships with business units instead of answering basic questions that a virtual assistant can answer. I think that's when you start seeing a lot of the benefits of it.

Borgonovo: HR has been leading the way in terms of embedding AI to enhance the employee experience end to end, right before you hire somebody all the way to after they leave the organization. There are tons of opportunities to improve performance and productivity and provide greater personalization.

Invest in ongoing training

Adya: There are certain AI certifications and courses that everybody has to take to be knowledgeable about AI. So we are driving education in terms of what is the impact of AI, what is gen AI, what are LLMs, and how you look at use cases. And certainly educating everybody that it's not about job losses but about amplifying your potential to do more.

Powell: We have hands-on skill building. This past year we posted over 20 AI workshops helping teams integrate AI into their work. We really encourage our staff to participate. We have a product we're using behind our firewall, so they can engage and play with it. We're just telling them go ahead and try to break it, so they can give us feedback on what's working.

There was a team of people who said we want to see how you could use AI with PowerPoint or Excel. And they're finding, well, it's not so good in those things. But as it continues to grow, they'll be ready for that, and they'll know what it was able to do and what it wasn't. I think it's just making it fun, and that way it's not so scary.

Murray: Our internal large language model is now a widget on everybody's dashboard that is accessible on your landing page. Training is super important here to make people comfortable with it. Even if it's just an online module, you have to get people comfortable.

Nixon-Saintil: We've also done companywide upskilling. We had two Watsonx challenges. Watsonx is our AI data platform. This is one of the ways we've upskilled a majority of the organization. The outcome of that is there are some great ideas that employees actually ideated, and they're now implementing those ideas and solutions in different functions.

Borgonovo: Employees want to use AI, and I think they're eager to learn how to use AI to augment their jobs. For that, we built a three-tiered learning approach. One is democratizing access for everybody and building general knowledge of AI.

The second tier is much more role-specific. How do we drive new ways of working by having people in different roles embrace AI tools? Software engineering, consulting, sales — you name it. And then something we definitely want to build for the future is thinking proactively about how you re-skill people whose roles may be impacted by AI so they can become more comfortable doing high-level tasks or can shift to a different type of role that is emerging within the organization.

The other piece is where we're seeing the greatest demand internally, which is for knowledge management. It's gathering information from a lot of different sources in a very easy way.

Another job family that is very eager to get their hands on new AI technology is software engineering. We have taken a very measured approach in deploying coding assistants within the software-engineering community. This year we did a pilot with a subset of them using coding assistants. The idea is to just learn and, based on our learning, scale more broadly across our software-engineering community in 2025.

One of the really interesting learnings from this pilot was that the software engineers who were using the coding assistants probably the best were people who had received training. What we're learning is that before you start rolling out all of these technologies or AI-specific platforms for different job families, you have got to be really intentional about incorporating prompt training.

Unlock peer-to-peer learning

Powell: We have idea pitch competitions and a year-round idea pipeline program where people can put in ideas on how to use AI and share what they've learned. It sparks a lot of peer learning and creativity on our digital-first capabilities to help us with our digital transformation.

Then we collaborate through community. We have a generative-AI community of practice. This is somewhat like how companies have employee resource groups; we have communities of practice as well. They give employees a space to share their techniques and learn from each other and stay ahead of evolving trends. They meet monthly, they have an executive sponsor, and they have all kinds of activities and learning opportunities.

Murray: As we monitored AI use and what sort of questions were being asked, we identified super users across all departments — so the people who were capable of developing the most evolved prompts. I suppose those prompts are now appearing in pull-down menus to help people who maybe aren't as advanced in their use of it, because prompting is a really important part of this. And so the super users are driving everybody else to show them what's possible across the organization.

Find customer pain points to solve

Borgonovo: One of the use cases that drives not only knowledge management but also efficiencies is around customer support. Customer support is probably one of the areas that has been leading the way.

We have a customer onboarding process that can be very lengthy, very technical, involving hundreds of pages of documentation and reference materials. It was our first use case for a chat-based assistant that we processed in terms of streamlining and creating greater efficiency and a much better customer experience.

Reinforce responsible leadership

Powell: We want our leaders, people leaders particularly, to guide employees to use AI effectively and responsibly. We want to make sure they're emphasizing privacy, policy, and efficiency. So we encourage managers to point the staff toward training that we offer, and we offer quite a bit of training.

• Companies use "stealth firing" to quietly reduce staff without public layoffs.
• It involves dismissing employees for minor offenses to avoid public backlash.
• This tactic can harm company culture, leading to low morale and potential legal issues.

Some companies are opting for a new tactic in slimming down employee numbers — "stealth firing."

Meta let go around two dozen staff in October for using their $25 meal credits to buy other items, including laundry detergent and acne pads, while EY fired many more for "cheating" and taking multiple training courses at once.

The Financial Times, which first reported the EY firings, referred to these instances of being dismissed for minor offenses as "stealth firing."

Joe Galvin, the chief research officer at the executive coaching platform Vistage, told Business Insider that this sneaky sacking is "a "covert behind-the-scenes activity" that "violates the principle of respect for the individual."

A corporation might think: "I'm trying to downsize a little bit without saying I'm downsizing a little bit," Galvin said.

"So you go through this process that does nothing but break trust."

Short-term gain for long-term problems

Stealth firing leads from an era of "quiet firing," where companies methodically made employees' roles increasingly uncomfortable and less appealing, such as implementing strict return-to-office mandates.

This trend, along with the quietly agreed-upon severance packages of "silent layoffs," is a tactic to avoid the optics of publicly cutting dozens of staff.

Cynthia Patterson, the founder of the HR consultancy firm PeopleOps.how, who has 20 years of experience in HR across tech, AI, healthcare, and retail industries, told BI that while quietly trimming headcounts in these ways may work in the short term, they can cause serious issues for a workplace.

"Any short-term outcome is offset by the negative cultural impact," Patterson said. "Employees are left second-guessing their own value and stability, creating an environment of anxiety and mistrust."

A lack of trust and stability can lead to low morale, reduced productivity, and a stressed-out workforce.

"This dynamic mirrors the patterns of toxic and/or abusive work cultures, where fear and uncertainty are used — intentionally or not — as tools for behavioral control," Patterson said.

A shift in power

People are also perceptive, and employees who see their colleagues be shown the door for minor indiscretions will only make them wary and dissatisfied.

Patterson told BI companies who push people out in arbitrary ways are mistakenly viewing avoidance as kindness.

"Employee performance management is part of running a business," she said. "And it can't be skipped because it feels uncomfortable or inconvenient to the employer."

Stealth firing, Patterson said, simply exposes a company's inability or unwillingness to have honest, necessary conversations about performance — and "signals to employees that the organization doesn't have integrity."

Galvin told BI that companies willfully harming their reputations in this way may find they are the ones suffering and bleeding talent if an era of revenge quitting hits in 2025.

"The signs are pointing up toward a really strong 2025 — our community is energized, hiring's going back up again, investments are going up, expectations for profits and revenues are up," he said. "The power shifting."

Weigh up your options

It's always a smaller world than you think when it comes to work and looking for your next job, Ciara Harrington, the chief people officer of the leadership training platform Skillsoft, told BI.

"It's in the interest of everybody to keep good relationships," she said. "I don't think anybody really wants to leave a company on bad terms."

Sometimes, companies have to let their staff go, and the best thing for everyone is to do so with respect and honesty. That way, while the news isn't what the employees hope for, they still maintain a level of respect for the company.

The alternative is that employees post on public platforms such as LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, and job review sites about their negative experiences, such as how they felt undervalued and lied to.

Patterson said these stories could reach future employees, customers, investors, and even employment lawyers, opening up companies to potential legal disputes.

"Strong companies know their employees are human beings and deserve to be treated as such," Patterson said.

Galvin told BI that if there are signs that your company is looking to stealth fire you, it's time to start weighing your options.

Even if your employer isn't planning on firing you, if their communication is poor, and you feel unsafe, it's best to get out anyway.

"In the absence of a story, we create one," Galvin said. "If you sense that's happening to you, you either have the direct conversation with your manager or start looking for your next job."

Puffs of smoke rose above a meadow in northeastern Washington as a small test fire danced in the grass a few feet away from me. Pleased by its slow, controlled behavior, my crew members and I, as part of a training program led by the nonprofit organization The Nature Conservancy and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, began to light the rest of the field on fire. The scene had all the trappings of a wildfire — water hoses, fire engines, people in flame-resistant outfits. But we weren't there to fight it; we were there to light it.

It might sound counterintuitive, but prescribed fires, or intentionally lit fires, help lessen fire's destruction. Natural flames sparked by lightning and intentional blazes lit by Indigenous peoples have historically helped clean up excess vegetation that now serves as fuel for the wildfires that regularly threaten people's homes and lives across the West and, increasingly, across the country.

For millennia, lighting fires was common practice in America. But in the mid-to-late 1800s, the US outlawed Indigenous burning practices and started suppressing wildfires, resulting in a massive buildup of flammable brush and trees. That combined with the dry, hot conditions caused by the climate crisis has left much of the country at a dangerously high risk of devastating wildfires. The top 10 most destructive years by acreage burned have all occurred since 2004.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, federal land managers reevaluated their approach to fire and did the first prescribed burns in national parks. We're still making up for lost time: Scientists and land managers say millions more acres of prescribed burns are necessary to keep the country from burning out of control.

But the scale of the task doesn't match that of the labor force, whose focus is often extinguishing fires, not starting them. Responding to the increase in natural disasters has left America with few resources to actually keep them from happening. As Mark Charlton, a prescribed-fire specialist with The Nature Conservancy, told me, "We need more people, and we need more time."

This fall, I outfitted myself in fire-resistant clothing and boots, donned a hard hat, and joined a training program called TREX to better understand how prescribed burns work. TREX hosts collaborative burns to provide training opportunities in the field for people from different employers and backgrounds. The hope is that more people will earn the qualifications they need to lead and participate in burns for the agencies they work for back home.

The program's emphasis on learning, coupled with the support of the University of Idaho's Artists-in-Fire Residency (which helped pay my way), is why I, a journalist with no fire jobs on my résumé, could join a prescribed-fire module of about two dozen more experienced participants. I had to pass a fitness test — speed walking three miles with a 45-pound backpack in under 45 minutes — take 40 hours' worth of online coursework, and complete field-operations training to participate as a crew member. While hundreds of people have participated in TREX burns across the country since the program's inception in 2008, the dramatic growth of wildfires is outpacing the number of people being trained to reduce their impact.

The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of forests and grasslands across the country, burning an average of about 1.4 million acres, roughly the size of Delaware, each year with prescribed burns. It burned a record 2 million acres in fiscal 2023. But it's still not enough preparation, considering wildfires have burned over 10 million acres in recent years and people continue building and living in wildfire-prone areas. "It's a huge workload we have, and we know it," said Adam Mendonca, a deputy director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service who oversees the agency's prescribed-fire program. The agency plans to chip away at the problem with the roughly 11,300 wildland firefighters it employs each year who squeeze the work in during the offseason, when there are fewer fires to fight.

But relying on wildland firefighters can be problematic. "We only have those resources for a short time," said Charlton, who served as the incident commander on the Washington burns I joined this fall. "After a long fire season, people are exhausted. It's hard to get people to commit." Plus, wildfires are increasingly overlapping with the ideal windows to do prescribed burns — often the spring and the fall, when conditions are cooler and wetter, making fires easier to tame.

That was especially true this year: Multiple large fires burned across the West into October. These late-season wildfires, coupled with two hurricanes that firefighters helped respond to, strained federal resources. That month, the nation's fire-preparedness level increased to a 5 — the highest level — indicating the country's emergency crews were at their maximum capacity and would've struggled to respond to new incidents.

In response to the elevated preparedness level, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group urged "extreme caution" in executing new prescribed fires, saying backup firefighters or equipment might not be available. "We get to the point where we're competing for resources," said Kyle Lapham, the certified-burner-program manager for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and the burn boss on the Washington burns.

There's also a qualification shortage. Prescribed burns require a well-rounded group with a variety of expertise and positions — including a burn boss, who runs the show and must have years of training. Charlton estimated that hundreds more qualified burn bosses are necessary to tackle nationwide prescribed-burn goals.

Just as concerning is an interest shortage. The Forest Service has struggled to hire for and maintain its federal firefighting force in recent years, in large part because of poor pay (federal firefighter base pay was raised to $15 an hour in 2022) and other labor disputes over job classifications, pay raises, staffing, and more. The agency is also expecting budget cuts next year and has already said it won't be able to hire its usual seasonal workforce as a result.

Legislation inching its way through Congress could help, though its fate under a new administration is unclear. The National Prescribed Fire Act of 2024 would direct hundreds of millions of dollars to the Forest Service and the US Department of the Interior for prescribed burns, including investment in training a skilled workforce — but it hasn't progressed past a Senate subcommittee hearing in June.

Without a boost in funding, the agency will continue relying heavily on partnerships with nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy and the National Forest Foundation to staff prescribed burns. The Forest Service also recently expanded its Prescribed Fire Training Center to host educational opportunities out West. Critically, though, time is of the essence.

During my TREX training in October, about 20 foresters and firefighters from as far south as Texas and as far north as British Columbia worked beside me. Our group included employees of the Washington Department of Natural Resources and two citizens of the nearby Spokane Tribe of Indians, who have a robust prescribed-fire program of their own.

Over two weeks I got a front-row seat to how much planning (sometimes years) and time a single prescribed burn takes. We conducted several burns in the mountains north of Spokane on the property of a receptive landowner who'd hosted TREX in previous years. He provided the training ground and, in exchange, got work done on his property. This isn't a common scenario — burning on private land can be more complicated, and so more burns happen on state or federal property.

When I arrived, the burn's incident-management team had already put together a burn plan detailing our objectives — reducing wildfire risk to the landowner's house, thinning small tree saplings, knocking down invasive weeds, opening up more wildlife habitat — and the exact weather conditions, like wind speed, relative humidity, and temperature, we needed to safely burn. Prescribed burns on federal lands also go through an environmental review.

At the site, we scouted contained areas we would burn, called units, with trainees making additional plans for how to ignite and control fires. Keeping a fire in its intended location, called "holding," meant lots of prep work, like digging shallow trenches to box the fire in. During the burn, teams monitored smoke and occasionally sprayed the larger trees we wanted to preserve with water when flames threatened their canopies; others poured fuel on the ground, igniting bushes, grass, and smaller trees to slowly build the fire.

Managing the fire didn't end when we finished burning the 30 or so acres. In some cases, it can involve days of monitoring and cleanup. To make sure the fire was out, my crew and I combed through areas we'd burned the day before for smoke or heat. If we discovered something still smoking, we'd churn up the ground with a shovel or pickax, douse the hot spot with water, and repeat. Just when we thought we were done, we'd find another spot we'd missed.

I went to bed those nights dreaming of little puffs of smoke and woke up with small flakes of ash embedded behind my ears. The work was rewarding and exhausting — I left with a deeper appreciation for the workers who do it for a living.

While every prescribed burn is different, it's always a careful equation. Everything needs to line up: supportive communities, the right weather, and, of course, the workers necessary to plan, burn, and extinguish. Only then can you light the match.

Kylie Mohr is a Montana-based freelance journalist and correspondent for the magazine High Country News.

• Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz told BI he considers product, people and tech when picking acquisition targets.
• On Thursday, Deel announced it acquired Assemble to boost its all-in-one HR platform capabilities.
• It's Deel's fifth acquisition in 2024 and 10th since its 2019 launch.

When Alex Bouaziz, the cofounder and CEO of Deel, lines up his next acquisition, he considers three core criteria: product, people, and tech.

Deel needs a clear M&A strategy. The global HR platform has now acquired 10 companies since its 2019 launch. And, on Thursday, it announced its fifth acquisition of the year — Assemble, a compensation management and analytics startup.

Completing acquisitions so frequently means Deel needs a large net to identify the right target.

"For every company we acquire, we speak to 1,000," Bouaziz told Business Insider. "So it's definitely a small ratio of acquisition to targets."

He added, "It's super important for our long-term strategy to pick the best companies in their space, bring them into our product suite, rebuild, and innovate together as a team with a lot more resources."

Deel plans to integrate Assemble's tech within its talent management HR, AI, and payroll tools for an all-in-one platform. The company says the acquisition will help it become a platform that offers payroll, compensation, performance, and other HR tools all in one place.

Acquisition spree

Earlier this year, Deel acquired Zavvy, a German-based people development platform; PaySpace, a payroll company; Hofy, a software firm; and Atlantic Money, a fintech.

Some of those deals have focused on increasing the time of getting a product to market, instead of building it in-house.

Bouaziz said other acquisitions aimed to bring specific talent and skills into Deel, a type of M&A known as aqui-hires. As the company scales rapidly, Bouaziz said it can often encounter a skills gap.

"The one thing that, as we build, we sometimes lack is true knowledge in all areas," he said. "Bringing their brains and their entrepreneurial spirits and bringing them next to us in terms of building innovation and making it better is something that is super positive for the company."

Deel also looks at company culture and integrating tech stacks when picking acquisition targets.

"Even if the product is amazing, even if they are the best of the best, if they don't align with our internal culture and how we see the world in terms of what we want to build for our customers, it's typically not going to work," Bouaziz said. "We would never do an acquisition where the founders and myself didn't see eye to eye in terms of culture."

Post-acquisition, Bouaziz said he typically has the founders of the acquired business report to him to help smooth the transition.

HR tech boom

Deel has grown significantly since it was founded more than five years ago by Bouaziz and Shuo Wang, who met while studying at MIT.

Bouaziz says the company now has over 35,000 customers and has been profitable for the last two years. Deel is valued at $12 billion and has raised $650 million since it was founded.

The company has also grown to over 4,000 employees worldwide in over 100 different countries. It operates as a remote-first company with a work-from-anywhere option.

"The world kind of went crazy with COVID, and I think a lot of people realized that there's enough talent everywhere, and we really wanted to build that infrastructure," said Bouaziz.

Its journey as one of the fastest-ever growing software companies hasn't always been smooth. In March 2023, Business Insider spoke with more than 30 current or former Deel workers about the HR company's rapid scaling, which some described as a grow-at-all-costs approach that required working long hours. Some employees said they were misclassified as independent contractors, which Deel disputed.

Deel reached $500 million in annual recurring revenue in March — and it sees even more scope for growth. Bouaziz says HR tech needs and international hiring have been on the rise for years, creating demand for services like Deel's.

"I think we're a good example of a company that's leading the way on how you get to bring the best people together in order to build the best product for your customers," Bouaziz said.

• Michael Doolin has worked as a HR director for British Airways, PwC Ireland, and DHL.
• Doolin said managers often give subtle signs that they are considering employees for promotion.
• Being asked to represent the company, lead trainings or given new responsibilities are good signs.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Michael Doolin, CEO of Clover HR and former human resources director at PwC, British Airways, and DPD in Ireland. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

A promotion might mean a new job title or an increase in status, it could also represent a pay rise or bring an improvement in your benefits package. A promotion is a sign of progress, of improvement, and sometimes of vindication. It's recognition that hard work pays off.

People are promoted for different reasons. They might have achieved a new professional qualification, like, for those in accountancy, law or medicine. It could come because you've met milestones, brought in new customers, or received positive feedback from clients.

Either way, here are six signs that you might be heading toward a promotion at work.

Changes within your organization

Look out for shifts in your company. Is it expanding or restructuring, or is your boss being promoted? Changes in an organization throw up opportunities all the time, and you may be unexpectedly earmarked for a new role.

However, in some mature organizations, the chain of succession could be more concrete. My second job, for example, was at Ford Motor Company, which was a highly structured organization where your career was mapped out for the next five to 10 years.

This approach works in some companies, but it has a habit of coming asunder when life gets in the way. I think there's a balance to be struck between mapping everything out and being flexible.

However, for many companies workplace reorganization creates space for promotions.

Positive feedback

You should be having regular performance management discussions. If you're receiving positive feedback there, it will give you an indication of whether your employer is happy with your work. You might be asked about your career goals, too, which can be a promising sign.

Being asked to represent your company

Senior managers might encourage you to attend exhibitions or get involved in extra-curricular activities on behalf of the company. They might request that you act as an ambassador for the organization, or you might find yourself being asked to speak at events. While it's no guarantee of a promotion, it's further evidence that you're valued at work and may be considered for one when it comes.

Being introduced to new people

Being sought out to meet new people, whether that's invitations to meetings or introductions to customers, is another important indication that your opinions and contribution to the company are valued.

Being asked for your input

If your boss often asks for your opinion, it's a positive sign. It shows that they respect your judgment and appreciate your feedback. Use these as opportunities to take initiative and prove your worth to your manager. Do so in a subtle way: volunteering, writing proposals, or taking on additional responsibilities. Never forget that making your boss look good is a great way to set yourself apart.

Taking on extra responsibility

Being asked to take on extra responsibility is another signal that you're eligible for a promotion. Common examples of this are being asked to take on more work or new clients. Alternatively, you might be asked to mentor less experienced members of the team or lead training.

If you want a promotion, you should be looking to take on more responsibility all the time, as it shows a willingness to learn and add value. Being given a new responsibility is an opportunity for managers to assess your suitability for a new role. And for you, it's a chance to prove yourself.

Asking for a promotion

If you're unsure whether you're up for a promotion, ask your boss directly. Too often, employees assume their manager knows they want to be promoted. People who are consistently striving for promotions should have a clear conversation about promotions at least once a year.

My advice is to ask your boss, "Can we have a conversation about me and where I'm at?" This conversation might be during an appraisal discussion, it might come up in a car journey, or even subtly over coffee.

You can be direct: make it clear that you think you're ready for advancement and put a business case forward as to why you should be considered. After the discussion, get it documented in writing where you want to be and how quickly you want to get there.

Should you accept a promotion if it's offered?

Many times, we have a classic conundrum where someone is asked to do a different role overnight with little preparation. A promotion may not always be right for you, and you may not choose to accept one if it's offered.

Depending on the degree of ambition, I generally advise accepting the promotion and paddling very, very hard underwater while asking for training, support, and guidance to help you thrive in your new role.

Once upon a time, corporate bosses, associates, and interns alike would set aside their different titles and gather each December for drinks, dancing, and conversation. There would be gourmet dinners, chocolate fountains, DJs, and even live bands. For some, it was a night of merriment and splendor; for others, of awkward small talk, followed by deep regret.

Then the holiday party became endangered. In the wake of #MeToo in 2017, more professionals began rethinking the wisdom of a boozed-up night with their colleagues. The pandemic and remote work delivered a near death blow. In a 2020 survey of about 200 HR representatives by the executive-outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a mere 23% said they opted for seasonal celebrations, nearly three-quarters of which would be held virtually.

But as the return to offices continues, companies are slowly reinstituting holiday parties. Last year, nearly 65% of companies surveyed by Challenger, Gray, & Christmas said they planned to host in-person holiday parties, within sight of the 80% reported in 2016, before the advent of #MeToo. If plans pan out, this year could have before-times levels of corporate holiday cheer.

The return of the office holiday party could be a happier development than many jaded workers are likely inclined to presume. With two-thirds of the American white-collar workforce working remotely either some or all of the time, according to a USA Today survey conducted earlier this year, face time with colleagues and superiors is no longer a default feature of the 9-to-5. That might not be a big deal for everyone, but early-career workers stand to pay the steepest professional price for missing out on the kinds of networking and mentorship opportunities that are likelier to happen organically in a shared physical space. All the while, workers across the board are feeling increasingly lonely, overextended, and disengaged. They need something — anything — to celebrate.

In a work environment punctuated by uncertainty and isolation, it might be premature to let one's inner Scrooge have the final word on the tradition.

From Fezziwig's ball in "A Christmas Carol" to the power-suited backdrop of the 1988 Christmas Eve action thriller "Die Hard," the workplace holiday party has been a fixture of the cultural imagination for generations. But in the mid-20th century, the event garnered its enduring reputation for sloppiness and day-after regret. A 1948 Life magazine photo spread from a Christmas party thrown in the office of a Manhattan insurance brokerage depicts, among other modern-day HR violations, a pantless male executive dancing arm in arm with a young female stenographer and a pair of colleagues leaning in for a smooch beneath a bundle of mistletoe.

Somewhere along the way, festivities evolved from low-key gatherings held at the office to lavish affairs that might include gourmet meals, hired entertainment, and even international travel and accommodation on the boss' dime. The pandemic notwithstanding, the economic pendulum has largely dictated its tilt toward excess or restraint.

As a Toronto-area DJ during the halcyon days of the late-'90s dot-com bubble, Baruch Labunski had a front-row seat to corporate-party splendor. "I went to many and saw a lot of crazy things," he said. He described being flown to DJ holiday parties in far-flung global destinations such as Bora Bora, Palawan, and Ibiza — and, on top of that, getting paid $50,000 to $100,000 per event. (When I asked how many holiday parties he booked in a typical season, he said only "many.") By the time the dot-com bubble burst and the demand for his services cooled, Labunski had tired himself out of the DJ booth and pivoted to a career in marketing.

Economic recovery in the mid-2000s spurred a holiday-party renaissance, only to be dashed once again in the 2008 recession. A few years later, Wall Street firms were reportedly back to enjoying hush-hush holiday festivities reminiscent of their heydays. The free-money firehose of the ZIRP era was in full force, and excess was back in style.

Danielle Kane, who was a reporter for a niche New York City financial-services publication between 2015 and 2017, said that one year her company flew the entire staff of 50 to 75 people to Berlin. "Hotels and flights were paid for, there was an experiential dinner at the Berlin TV Tower, and then they paid for everyone to get into a fancy club afterwards," she said. "It was a late night, and I've never experienced a company holiday party like it since."

For all their fun, these often cringe-inducing affairs earned a bad rap — one that may come to bite younger workers.

Despite some companies' largesse, the general workforce's enthusiasm for holiday parties has long been mixed. In a 2017 survey of American workers by Randstad, 90% of respondents said they'd rather receive bonuses or extra vacation days than attend a company holiday party. "The ideal situation," Constance Noonan Hadley, an organizational psychologist, told me, "is to offer activities that foster employee social health (such as a holiday party) without asking them to sacrifice their financial health (such as a bonus) or their mental health (such as time off)."

Companies squander the opportunity to make holiday gatherings meaningful in all sorts of small but critical ways. Hadley said the Christmas-specific focus of many company holiday parties could be alienating to workers who follow non-Christian religious traditions. Parties are often held at inconvenient times and places — too late on a weeknight for parents, in a location that has expensive parking or is hard to access. Holiday parties at big firms can also be loud, hot, and crowded, which makes it difficult to have meaningful conversations or meet new people.

Well-planned company holiday parties, on the other hand, can be a boon to employees' overall work experience and even strengthen company culture. A study of workers at several German companies in 2019 concluded that parties could encourage social bonding, especially when employees' feedback steered the planning. The study suggests, for example, that icebreaker activities that get people from different parts of the organization talking help build camaraderie, despite the eye rolls they may initially provoke. Over time, that can contribute to a happier and more cohesive work environment.

For early-career workers, the benefits can be more pronounced. Rick Hermanns, the president and CEO of HireQuest, a global staffing company, said social events could help make up for the "intangible aspects of career growth and camaraderie between colleagues" that younger workers may miss out on when they're partly or fully remote. In a 2023 Adobe poll of more than 1,000 Gen Z workers at midsize and large US companies, 83% of respondents said a workplace mentor was crucial for their career, but only 52% said they had one. While holiday parties aren't the be-all and end-all of workplace networking, they provide a critical opening to build and fortify connections.

"When I look back at my early career in banking in Los Angeles, I appreciated the time I had to walk into a senior executive's office or grab a beer after work with colleagues," Hermanns said. "Those are the intangibles you can't quantify yet ultimately impact your career growth." Simply put, face time matters.

It makes sense that Gen Z and millennial workers would be more enthusiastic about workplace holiday get-togethers than their Gen X and baby-boomer counterparts. "Company leaders need to help Gen Z — as well as millennials, whose workplace experience was hugely disrupted by COVID — to build strong interpersonal workplace relationships," Hubert Palan, the CEO of the product-management company Productboard, told Business Insider last year.

Given that much of the global workforce feels lonely on the job, it's not just the youngest workers who need a social boost. A new study Hadley coauthored evaluating workplace loneliness and remedies found that the loneliest people at work were those who were offered the fewest social opportunities by their employer. "In fact, the number of social offerings provided was one of our most predictive variables in terms of whether someone was socially connected at work or not," she told me. Hadley also found that while fully remote work did seem to increase the risk of loneliness, it was less significant of a variable than whether a person was introverted or worked for an organization that held regular social activities for staffers.

The German study suggests that a holiday party can serve as the ritual capstone for these more routine coworker events, making year-end hobnobbing just a little extra special. While the ideal party activities will depend on an organization's culture, a few basic considerations — such as hosting the event somewhere besides the boring old office — go a long way. Elements of fun help too, whether they take the form of a themed photo booth, a creative dining experience, or, yes, a DJ.

A dash of festive foresight can make the difference between the raunchy affairs of yesteryear and a few hours of meaningful, PG-rated bonding between coworkers. "A nice holiday event gives people a break in their wallets and signals that the leaders value personal connections and socializing," Hadley said.

For a company's youngest workers, the benefits may last a professional lifetime.

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

Over the past two years, American businesses have been engaged in a rapid-fire restructuring of their corporate hierarchies. In the name of "flattening," they've been waging war on middle managers — trimming an entire tier of supervisory jobs that Mark Zuckerberg derided as nothing more than "managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work." Following Meta's lead, Citi reduced its 13 layers of management to eight. UPS axed 12,000 of its 85,000 managers. And in September, Amazon announced plans to increase its ratio of workers to supervisors by at least 15%. "I hate bureaucracy," CEO Andy Jassy declared, echoing the zeal for "efficiency" that Elon Musk, one of the pioneers of the current corporate flattening, is now seeking to unleash on the halls of government.

But here's the thing: It's not just that tens of thousands of middle managers have lost their jobs. It's that the jobs themselves have been eliminated — and they may not be coming back.

To test that theory, I asked Revelio Labs, a workforce analytics provider, to crunch the numbers for me, using its database of job postings aggregated from across the internet. It divided employees into two buckets of managers (senior leadership and middle management) and two buckets of lower-level employees (experienced associates and junior workers). Then it looked at how many job openings employers are posting today, compared with the hiring heyday of 2022.

What the data reveals is stark. Earlier this year, when white-collar hiring was at its lowest point, openings for junior roles — entry-level positions requiring little to no prior experience — were down by 14%. But hiring had plunged by 43% for middle managers and 57% for senior leaders. If you had any sort of management experience, your job prospects were bleak.

Since then, though, we've seen a significant rebound in job postings for almost everyone — except middle managers. In October, employers were still advertising 42% fewer middle-management positions than they did in April 2022. Which means that those who lost their jobs in the Great Flattening are now facing a whole new horror: There aren't any positions left for them to take.

The assault on middle managers dates back to the 1980s, when globalization gave rise to a new philosophy of management that prioritized cost cutting over everything else. Supervisors — earning big salaries for rubber-stamping the work of their subordinates — became an easy target. Trim the fat, the thinking went, and the efficiencies will follow. From 1986 to 1998, one study found, the number of managers reporting to division heads dropped by 25%. At the same time, the number of managers reporting directly to a CEO nearly doubled.

Executives got the flattening that they wanted. But it's unclear whether getting rid of middle managers actually made companies run more efficiently. As I wrote last year, one study found that businesses with fewer layers of management were able to deliver their products faster. But study after study found that when middle managers do their jobs right, they bolster performance more than either top executives or ground-level employees. Supervisors do real work. They motivate. They mentor. They communicate critical information to and from different parts of the company. They smooth out glitches and spot opportunities. They're the ones who keep the trains running.

But now is an especially bad time to be an experienced supervisor. According to an analysis by Live Data Technologies, another workforce analytics provider, middle managers made up 32% of layoffs last year, compared with 20% in 2019. And as the data from Revelio Labs shows, companies appear to have no intention of refilling those supervisory roles, even as they resume hiring for lower-level jobs. That has created a double whammy for middle managers: There's a sharp spike in job seekers, and they're competing for an increasingly small universe of open roles.

Over the past year I've heard from hundreds of managers mired in this double whammy. What's struck me is how eerily similar their stories are. They all come across as smart and articulate. They're all in their late 40s to 50s. When they got laid off from their supervisory jobs, they didn't expect their job search to be too difficult. After all, they'd spent decades honing their skills and climbing the corporate ladder, often at leading companies. Surely, all that experience had to count for something. But despite sending out hundreds of applications, they can't get anyone to return their calls. They're utterly baffled, and they all have the same question: What is going on here?

It's the question I've been asking, too — combing through government data, talking to employers and economists, studying applicant-tracking systems. Because so many of the frustrated job seekers are older, I thought maybe we were seeing some new form of age discrimination: Call it the Curse of the Gen X Professional. But it's only after seeing the data from Revelio Labs that I finally understand what's going on: There just aren't enough supervisory jobs to go around anymore.

In response, many displaced managers have swallowed their pride and started applying to jobs lower on the corporate food chain. As Revelio Labs' data shows, nonmanagerial jobs are faring much better these days — and you'd think companies would be thrilled to get the experience and know-how of seasoned professionals on the cheap. But take the example of a former middle manager I'll call Rick, who is 54. After getting rejected for all the supervisory jobs he could find, he widened his search to include entry-level positions — only to be rejected for being overqualified.

At this point, all Rick wants is a chance to prove himself. "Forget the titles, forget all that other stuff," he told me. "I just need a job. My unemployment runs out in about 30 days. I'll come in and do a great job for you."

This is the paradox that lies at the heart of the Great Flattening: The very experience that should be a selling point for senior leaders has become a liability. Some have tried deleting former jobs from their resumes, to hide their supervisory experience. Others, like Rick, omit the year they graduated from college. One former chief operating officer, whose search has gone so poorly that she's now applying to be an executive assistant, told me she addresses her overqualified-ness in her cover letters. "I understand that my résumé has some big titles on it, but let me tell you who I am at heart," she writes. "I really want to be doing this, and I'm not wedded to the title."

What all the out-of-work managers want to know is: When is the hiring freeze for supervisors going to thaw? That depends, in large part, on whether companies come to view the flattening as a success. Many CEOs insist they aren't getting rid of middle managers just to save money. They think having fewer layers of management will, as Zuckerberg put it, create a "stronger" company that can build "higher-quality products faster." That hints at a dark prospect for managers like Rick: The rung of the corporate ladder they spent their careers reaching could be gone for good.

There's a chance, of course, that the current craze for corporate flattening could ease over time. Companies are already discovering that having few middle managers is placing an enormous strain on their operations. The supervisors who survived the purge have been forced to take on much larger teams, and they're burned out to a crisp. Gen Zers, deprived of their mentors, are increasingly disengaged. Departments are more siloed than ever, with no one to do the tedious and thankless and essential work of coordinating across different teams. The best hope for managers like Rick is that CEOs are getting a real-time refresher in the value of managers.

"I'm not at that point in my life where I'm ready to take that step back," Rick told me. "I just want to work with good people and enjoy what I'm doing. I could go to Domino's and start delivering pizza. But I know I can do a lot more than that."

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

• Job seekers may face 'love-bombing' from hiring managers during interviews.
• Love-bombing involves excessive praise to keep candidates interested without real intent.
• Experts advise setting expectations and keeping options open to avoid being manipulated.

If a hiring manager is excessively complimenting you and telling you you're the top candidate during an interview, you may be being "love-bombed."

The term originated as a way to describe the manipulative tactics some toxic people employ in romantic relationships to hook in their victims, showering them with affection, gifts, and promises for the future, only to later flip the script and show their real selves.

But the same pattern may apply to the workplace, too. Many job seekers complain of inconsistent behavior from hiring managers, CNBC reported, being flattered and praised one minute and ghosted the next.

"Love-bombing during job interviews happens all too often when recruiters or hiring managers want to keep you interested in them while they figure things out behind the scenes," Renee Barber, the global director of recruiting for TYR Talent Solutions who has over 20 years of experience in the recruitment industry, told Business Insider.

"They may overhype your chances to keep you interested," Barber said. "Especially if they're not ready to make a decision or they need to buy time without being direct about the actual situation."

Janine Chidlow, the managing director of EMEA at the global talent firm Wilson, told BI that love-bombing not only disrupts a candidate's career expectations "but also raises questions about organizational integrity and employer branding."

"This phenomenon isn't new," she said. "But its frequency and impact have surged."

How to recognize love-bombing

It's looking like the job market may see a boost next year. But white-collar hiring is still in a slump, with tech jobs being hit the hardest.

Love-bombing may serve as a "morale-booster" for both candidates and interviewers, Chidlow said.

Amanda Fischer, an executive leadership and career coach who is the founder of AMF Coaching & Consulting, said that some recruiters and hiring managers want everyone they are interviewing to feel optimistic about the role so they don't lose out on the best candidates.

They may also want to create a strong connection so the candidate to make them less likely to negotiate further.

"In this particular instance, that is a highly manipulative move," Fischer said.

It may not always be a scheme, though, and some recruiters and hiring managers may be love-bombing without realizing it.

"They could genuinely be excited about a candidate and might not see how the excessive compliments could backfire," Barber said.

There are plenty of ways to recognize love-bombing during the interview stages.

According to Barber, some signs are excessive compliments, like being told you're exactly what the company is looking for, or that you're the best candidate being interviewed, or being given unrealistic promises, such as if they talk about you "being a great fit for the team" or "starting soon" before they've actually made a decision.

Fischer told BI that pressure for a quick decision is also "a huge red flag."

"From my perspective, there are very few circumstances where you should accept a role the moment it's offered," Fischer said.

Barber agreed, adding that if there is a long delay or no communication after the interview, "it's a sign that the praise might have just been a way to keep you interested before they made their decision."

What to do about it

Love-bombing during the interview process is symptomatic of deeper issues in recruitment, Chidlow said.

"While it may yield short-term gains in market perception, the long-term costs — disillusioned candidates, damaged reputations, and high turnover — far outweigh the benefits," she said.

"By prioritizing transparency and respect, organizations can foster genuine connections with candidates, ensuring a healthier, more productive recruitment process."

If you think the person on the other end of the interview desk is love-bombing you, it's good to set expectations early, Barber said.

"Before you wrap up the interview, feel free to ask when you can expect to hear back and what the next steps are," she said. "This can help you keep track of the process and avoid getting strung along."

Barber also recommended following up after the interview, sending a thank-you email, and asking for feedback.

"This allows you to gauge whether the praise was sincere and whether the company is genuinely interested," she said.

"If something feels off, trust your instincts," Barber added. "If it all felt too polished or disconnected from your experience, be cautious."

Keeping your options open is also a good move because being in a stronger position yourself makes you less likely to fall for manipulative tricks.

"Don't put all your eggs in one basket," Barber said. "Otherwise, you could be waiting around for a response that might never come."