• Donald Trump is stacking his second administration with a slate of Silicon Valley insiders.
• The president-elect has tapped at least a dozen tech leaders for government roles.
• These are the businessmen, tech gurus, and venture capitalists who will help Trump govern.

President-elect Donald Trump is stacking his second administration with a cadre of Silicon Valley insiders.

In recent months, Trump has tapped a number of tech executives for a wide range of official government roles while elevating several other industry vets to less formal advisory positions.

Those joining the Trump administration in any official capacity will be subject to federal conflict of interest laws that prohibit government employees from having a hand in anything that could directly affect their financial interests, said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former Chief White House Ethics lawyer under George W. Bush.

Private sector employees who join the government are generally required to sell any related financial holdings or recuse themselves from specific matters, Painter told Business Insider.

Exceptions exist, however, including at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a cost-cutting committee that will exist outside of government. Its leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, won't be government employees, nor will they have to divest themselves of their businesses.

Here are some of the tech personalities Trump has tasked with helping run the federal government:

Elon Musk

Trump's pick for: Co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency

Background: Elon Musk is the world's richest person and the founder of several major companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and xAI. He also bought X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2022 and currently serves as its CTO.

Musk, who spent at least $277 million supporting Trump and the Republican Party during the 2024 cycle, has said his super PAC will remain active in the midterms. In the months since the election, Musk has remained close to Trump's side and waded into political issues beyond his capacity as the DOGE co-head, like congressional budget negotiations.

Vivek Ramaswamy

Trump's pick for: Co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency

Background: Vivek Ramaswamy founded the pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences and Strive Asset Management, an investment fund supported by conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Though he ran for the Republican presidential nomination, Ramaswamy will join Musk in overseeing DOGE. Ramaswamy has said that he expects "certain agencies to be deleted outright."

Musk has said he wants to slash some $2 trillion from the federal budget, and the DOGE co-heads outlined their cost-cutting agenda in a lengthy opinion piece. Federal outlays hit $6.75 trillion in 2024, so the proposed cuts could run up against mandatory spending for entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Ramaswamy and Musk have criticized overregulation and the size of the federal workforce in particular.

JD Vance

Trump's pick for: Vice President

Background: Before rising in Republican politics, JD Vance worked in Silicon Valley, including at Peter Thiel's venture capital firm, Mithril Capital. He eventually started his own VC firm in 2019, Narya Capital, whose early backers included Thiel and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. According to his vice president and senate disclosure forms, Vance still has a stake in Narya Capital Fund I, Narya Capital Fund II, and Rise of the Rest Seed Fund.

David Sacks

Trump's pick for: White House AI and crypto czar

Background: The venture capitalist and former PayPal COO founded the enterprise social networking platform Yammer, acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012. He now works at the VC firm Craft, which he co-founded in 2017.

Sacks was also an angel investor in companies such as SpaceX, Uber, and Palantir. As a member of the "PayPal Mafia," Sacks has worked with other tech titans like Musk and Thiel. The "All-In" podcaster will develop a framework for digital currency as the chair of Trump's Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets.

Scott Kupor

Trump's pick for: Director of the Office of Personnel Management

Background: Scott Kupor is a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and was one of the company's first employees. Kupor has said he looks for "egomaniacal" founders. He managed a16z's growth from $300 million in assets under management to more than $40 billion, according to the firm's website. Before joining a16z, Kupor worked in various capacities at Hewlett-Packard, the software company Opsware, and in M&A at Credit Suisse First Boston and Lehman Brothers, according to a16z's website.

Sriram Krishnan

Trump's pick for: Senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Background: Most recently, Sriram Krishnan was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Before joining a16z, he ran product and engineering groups at X, Meta, and Snap, according to a16z's website. The firm said he began his career at Microsoft as a founding member of Windows Azure. Krishnan was a16z's main contact with Twitter after Musk bought it in 2022, and he interviewed the Tesla CEO on a pandemic-era audio show.

Trump wrote on X that Krishnan would work closely with David Sacks to focus on "ensuring continued American leadership" in AI and help coordinate government policy about the technology.

Ken Howery

Trump's pick for: US ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark

Background: A cofounder of PayPal and Founders Fund, Ken Howery was the US ambassador to Sweden under the first Trump administration. In announcing Howery's appointment, Trump wrote on Truth Social that for "purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity."

Trump proposed the same idea in 2019 — which the island and Denmark rejected. Greenland is an autonomous dependent territory of Denmark, a member of NATO, and a US ally.

Jacob Helberg

Trump's pick for: Undersecretary for economic growth, energy, and the environment at the US State Department

Background: Jacob Helberg is a senior advisor to Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Palantir, a data mining company co-founded by Thiel, has several government contracts and counts the US federal government as one of its biggest clients. Helberg is a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He has propelled the effort to ban TikTok in the US and is also the author of "The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power."

Michael Kratsios

Trump's pick for: Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Background: Michael Kratsios is a managing director at Scale AI. He served as chief technology officer during Trump's first administration and has been working on tech policy for the transition, according to Politico.

Trump wrote on X that Kratsios will work closely with Sacks and also serve as an assistant to the president for science and technology. He also said that Kratsios had received a Distinguished Public Service Medal from the Defense Department.

Emil Michael

Trump's pick for: Undersecretary of Defense for research and engineering

Background: Emil Michael was the chief business officer at Uber and COO of Klout, a now-defunct social media company that ranked users' online social influence. Previously he served as special assistant to the Secretary of Defense. He built several companies during his career, the first being Tellme Networks in 1999, according to his website. Microsoft acquired Tellme Networks in 2007. Michael has invested in or advised various companies, including Stripe.

While at Uber, Michael led the company's work in China and built its Uber for Business unit, according to his bio.

Lynne Parker

Trump's pick for: Executive director of the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology

Background: Parker previously served as Trump's deputy Chief Technology Officer and was the founding director of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office. She has served as associate vice chancellor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and as director of the AI Tennessee Initiative, according to the university's website. UT credited her with leading development of several "landmark" national AI polices, including some concerning federal use of the technology.

Paul Atkins

Trump's pick for: Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission

Background: Paul Atkins, a vocal crypto supporter, is the founder and CEO of risk management consultancy Patomak Global Partners and has been the co-chair of the Digital Chamber's Token Alliance, an industry group, since 2017. He served as an SEC commissioner under President George W. Bush.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that Atkins "recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before." If confirmed, Atkins will replace the current chair of SEC, Gary Gensler, who has drawn the ire of much of the crypto industry over his regulatory efforts.

Jared Isaacman

Trump's pick for: Administrator of NASA

Background: The billionaire SpaceX astronaut founded Shift4 Payments, a payment processing firm. His nomination comes only months after he completed the first commercial spacewalk. Isaacman, who dropped out of high school and started two companies, has commanded several space missions for Musk's SpaceX.

He flew twice to space in SpaceX's Crew Dragon — for flights he commissioned, funded, and commanded, as BI previously reported.

Jim O'Neill

Trump's pick for: Deputy Secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services

Background: Jim O'Neill is a Silicon Valley investor who served as acting CEO of the Thiel Foundation, helping to found the organization's fellowship. In 2012, he worked with Thiel to launch Mithril Capital Management, the VC fund that eventually hired Vance, and worked there until 2019. He was briefly the CEO of the health organization SENS Research Foundation and sits on the board of ADvantage Therapeutics, which focuses on therapies for neurodegenerative conditions.

Gail Slater

Trump's pick for: Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice

Background: A known tech advisor, Slater has worked for various tech companies, including as a lawyer at the Internet Association, a defunct lobbying group representing companies including Google, Facebook, and Amazon. She also worked at the streaming platform Roku.

• Remote work is harder to find. That could push workers to consider small firms or self-employment.
• Some bosses point to a desire for higher productivity, but remote work can boost engagement.
• Some roles, like those with tight deadlines, might be better suited to being in the office.

A couple of years ago, not long after getting divorced, Sherita Janielle wanted to make a big move.

So, she put most of her belongings in storage and headed from her pandemic redoubt in Austin to sunny Lisbon. After more than a month in Portugal's capital, Janielle eventually made her way to Colombia, Uruguay, and Argentina.

"I've been popping in and out of places," she told Business Insider. In between, she often returns to the US to see family and friends — and swap out her wardrobe.

Shifting her career from finance to marketing allowed Janielle to work from wherever, a luxury she's come to prize. It's one that fewer workers might enjoy in 2025.

Only about half of full-time workers can do their jobs remotely, according to polling firm Gallup. And among those, some who work for big-name companies like Amazon are increasingly seeing an end to workdays spent in sweatpants and camera-ready shirts as companies mandate a full RTO.

So, to keep or land remote roles, which are already harder to find than in the pandemic era, workers might have to consider going off on their own or looking to smaller firms.

Productivity worries

There's no consensus on whether a full RTO is "better" than hybrid or entirely remote roles. Bosses demanding that workers show up more in person often cite a desire to maintain culture, spur innovation, and foster collaboration. Some point to concerns about productivity.

Nicole Kyle, who researches the future of work, said that IRL work doesn't actually guarantee increased productivity and performance. However, these metrics can go up when employers allow for more remote or hybrid setups, said Kyle, who's cofounder of CMP Research, in part because workers feel more autonomy.

"Nothing is less engaging to employees than not having flexibility and choice," she said.

Gallup notes that full-time remote or hybrid workers tend to have "significantly higher" engagement than on-site workers.

Even so, there are times when being in the workplace makes sense, said Lisa Walker, a managing partner at the executive search firm DHR Global. She told BI that for roles like those in operations or where there's a short-term deadline, remote work can present challenges.

"You want to walk down the hall. You need an answer. You need to react," Walker said. That's harder on Slack.

Going off on your own

A decade ago, after years spent working in offices at big agencies, Curtis Sparrer cofounded a fully remote PR and marketing firm. Too often, he said, startups had to choose between paying rent or making payroll.

"I said, 'What if we never had to make that choice?'" he told BI.

Sparrer and his business partner have grown the firm, called Bospar, to about 70 people. In the early days, the company relied on conference calls and text messages to keep workers connected. Now, it uses tools like Slack and video calls.

The firm's productivity isn't a worry, Sparrer said, because workers are in frequent contact with each other. If someone does slack off, managers will address it, he said. Otherwise, he sees the quiet of home as a boon to productivity.

"When it comes to thoughtful, focused work, nothing beats work from home because that's the way you cut down on distractions," Sparrer said.

To help keep workers connected, the firm occasionally brings people together in person, though not to work.

"They want to do all the cultural things, but they absolutely do not want to work," he said. That's because the firm's employees report they do better work independently. So, they instead use in-person gatherings to connect with colleagues.

Focus on output

Deborah Perry Piscione, cofounder of Work3 Institute and coauthor of the forthcoming book "Employment is Dead," told BI that focusing on output rather than where the job gets done can be savvy for employers.

"I don't understand what the fear is. At the end of the day, this is not about control. It's about output and productivity," she said.

Piscione said that early in her career, working in Washington, DC, there was an expectation that employees should be at their desks from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., no matter what. She said she never understood why she had to stick around if she was more efficient or skipped lunch to wrap up her work early.

Increasingly, Piscione said, employers and employees need to view work as a partnership. That's especially important in the face of technology like artificial intelligence that could eliminate roles or rejigger how people do their jobs.

Besides, she said, workers have more ways of getting by than only a few years ago.

"We're in this hyper, super gig economy where I don't have to take your crap anymore," Piscione said, referring to overbearing employers.

For Janielle, the globe-hopping marketer who describes herself as an older millennial, an additional remote job looked enticing: chief nomad officer. She applied for and got the role at Shift, which makes a web browser aimed at boosting productivity. The goal of her work is to demonstrate that it's possible to get a lot done from anywhere, she said.

Janielle said she enjoys showcasing what's doable. She's been to some 45 countries and said the more she travels, the more she meets others who are succeeding outside the office without sacrificing productivity.

"There's still a lot of space in the economy for these remote workers to thrive," she said.

Do you have something to share about remote work? Business Insider would like to hear from you. Email our workplace team from a nonwork device at [email protected] with your story, or ask for one of our reporter's Signal numbers.

• Kyle Ankney is looking for a remote role in PR because he has cerebral palsy.
• Ankney's insurance covers in-home care, complicating in-office work.
• The 34-year-old has found there are fewer remote roles in PR — a broader trend in the workforce.

Kyle Ankney, 34, lives near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and works in public relations, including running his own firm. He's looking for a remote role in PR because he has cerebral palsy, which limits his physical abilities, and his insurance covers in-home care. Business Insider has reviewed medical records that confirm his diagnosis. This essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I never really wanted to run my own PR agency. Yet a client who didn't want to lose me convinced me to start my own firm. Now, the client is going on an indefinite hiatus and isn't sure if they'll return.

So, for the past few months, I've been trying to re-enter a traditional PR agency-type role, to have a team to grow — to do all the things I enjoy, minus running a business. I'm looking at, I would say, mid-senior level or something around director level.

I've been doing this work for more than 10 years, quite successfully — not to toot my own horn.

One recruiter told me I was super qualified but said I was probably hitting bumps because when you get to my level of experience, many people are expected to manage teams. Then, the recruiter told me I might have to consider looking for a more junior role because most managing jobs would be in person.

Some of the conversation now about remote work goes beyond it just being a perk. It's almost like it's a drawback for some employers.

My condition requiring the nurse three times a day is the reason that remote has gone from a luxury for me to now being a necessity.

The way my insurance works, it only allows the nurse to come to one address. So, even if I were to find a job here in South Florida, I would still have to be remote because of that.

Getting this care took decades

It took me 20 years on a waiting list to get this level of home care by a nurse covered through Medicaid. If I leave Florida and go anywhere else, I lose those services and have to go to the back of the line.

Needing extra help from a nurse started four years ago when I was 30. It changed my world in the worst way. It now feels like the cerebral palsy and the wheelchair and all of the other BS that comes with it is nothing in comparison to needing the nurse to help me go to the bathroom. This I literally, physically, cannot handle on my own.

So, it's been a rough year trying to run a business, trying to find a job — it's just been a lot. I'm not trying to be completely unrealistic, but having as much resistance as I've had has been surprising just because you're taught, at least in society, that the more senior you become and the more experience you get under your belt, the easier it is to make connections and find opportunities.

As someone who's managed a team of six, I know how difficult it was to direct them remotely because there was a lot of oversight needed to make sure that mistakes weren't being made. There was a lot of back and forth, and ultimately, I was able to figure out how to do that quite well at my agency.

I try to reiterate whenever I have opportunities to meet with anyone in my field that working from home is necessary and that I've figured out how to manage a team remotely. I say, "I understand that this may be a point of hesitation for you. However, I've been able to navigate it this way for so many years."

When the recruiter told me I should consider more junior roles, my ego was like, "That's absurd." Yet now that I've been looking for four months, which feels like four years, my savings are drying up, and I'm not making ends meet. I've been lowering all the search criteria and the salary range and I'm not really finding a bunch more.

The last time I was looking for a job, I got remote positions just by chance, but I would have been able to do in-office if it was absolutely required — and now I cannot.

There are fewer remote roles

In 2020, because of the pandemic, I saw a lot of PR opportunities becoming fully remote. It was a game changer for me in terms of opening up opportunities. But because I've been running my own agency for several years now, I hadn't been paying attention to what was remote versus hybrid versus in-person. I was shocked by the level of swing back.

I've reached out to everyone I know in PR, which is a substantial group. They're saying things like, "I'll send people your way."

I have looked up every agency I wanted to work for, and I wrote a blunt email. It wasn't, "Hey, I need a job." It was, "Hi, I respect you. I admire you. I need advice because here's what I'm running into. I would love the opportunity just to pick your brain." That has been successful in the sense that I have had three or four conversations with people at different agencies, yet no one is quite hiring.

If there's a role that I'm particularly interested in, I'll go to RocketReach, I'll look for the best email that I can find, and I'll say, "I've already applied. Here's my situation." I continue to follow up to try to make myself stand out.

You have to try. I'm shocked by how many postings and emails I've received that say, "We're not hiring for this role, but we want to collect résumés." Or if you apply for positions, you get "We're on pause." Or it's just complete ghosting. I've experienced all three.

I don't know if this is the best- or worst-case scenario, but I recently interviewed with an agency, and it went to six rounds. The role was listed as remote. Then they were like, "You know, we might need travel to be involved, so we have to take this a different direction."

You would think you would know that at round one. I don't just blindly apply to jobs. I read for things like whether travel is required. That particular posting said nothing about travel. So there have been a whole bunch of hurdles.

It's just a game of resilience at this point — just holding on and crossing your fingers and praying.

Do you have something to share about what you're seeing in your job search? Business Insider would like to hear from you. Email our workplace team from a nonwork device at [email protected] with your story, or ask for one of our reporter's Signal numbers.

• Nearly 75% of executives said in a survey they'd mandate at least three days a week in the office in 2025.
• Many companies cite collaboration, productivity, and culture as reasons for office return.
• RTO mandates could lead to higher turnover, especially among women and skilled workers.

Many bosses with an RTO policy in place plan to ask employees to spend more time in the office next year.

In a recent survey from Resume.org, nearly three-quarters of execs at companies that have already implemented some form of an RTO policy said they would require workers to be in the office at least three days a week by the end of 2025.

The November survey of 900 business leaders underscores a general trend of bosses demanding to see more heads bobbing atop cubicles in the new year.

Some of the companies demanding more face time instead of FaceTime are big-name employers like Amazon, AT&T, and Starbucks.

In the Resume.org survey, 73% of respondents whose companies already have an RTO rule said they would require workers to report to the office at least three times a week by the end of 2025. Almost one in three expect to require workers to come in every workday, while only 2% expect to allow workers to show up once a week or less.

While many employers calling workers back to the office point to productivity — as respondents did in the Resume.org survey — being in person doesn't necessarily boost how much gets done, said Nicole Kyle, who researches the future of work.

She told Business Insider that many studies suggest productivity and performance don't drastically change when workers aren't side-by-side. Instead, such metrics can remain steady or even increase if an organization allows more remote or hybrid work, Kyle, the cofounder of CMP Research, said.

Various studies have come to conflicting conclusions on how remote, hybrid, or fully in-office work impacts productivity — and one complicating factor could be the matter of how best to define or measure productivity.

Bosses might not care if you quit

Employees, in some cases, have pushed back — often unsuccessfully — against RTO mandates. Yet many business leaders don't regard these mandates as asking too much of the people they're paying to do a job.

In the survey, about one-third of bosses said they were worried workers would quit because of the RTO policies, while 49% said they weren't very concerned or weren't concerned at all. Of those surveyed, 18% were uncertain.

About seven in 10 execs said the reason to have workers back IRL is to promote collaboration and teamwork. Nearly six in 10 said the move was aimed at improving communication. And about half pointed to a desire to strengthen the organization's culture and raise productivity.

Lisa Walker, a managing partner at the executive search firm DHR Global, told BI that some employers can benefit from bringing back workers because it allows more experienced people to mentor newer workers. She said that's often harder to do when workers aren't in person.

"To get the junior people into the office, you need to get the senior people back to the office," she said.

In the Resume.org survey, four in 10 respondents said they wanted to use office space that might otherwise lie fallow.

It's understandable that bosses wouldn't want to let sometimes pricey real estate go unused, though strict in-office rules can also have a cost.

Researchers from the University of Pittsburg and other academic institutions recently reported that S&P 500 companies that require workers to return to the office subsequently experience "abnormally high" rates of workers quitting and have a harder time filling open roles.

The researchers found that those leaving are often female, more senior, or more skilled. The findings are based on the employment histories of more than 3 million tech and finance workers, as reported on LinkedIn.

"The return-to-office mandates are having pretty specific and negative impacts and causing brain drain from companies," said Kyle, who wasn't involved in the research.

Perhaps with those types of concerns in mind, some leaders have said they likely would only tighten the RTO screws if productivity suffered. Among them, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that the company wouldn't require workers to come to the office as long as they remained on task when working from home.

Do you have something to share about your employer's RTO plan, something else at work, or in your job search? Business Insider would like to hear from you. Email our workplace team from a nonwork device at [email protected] with your story, or ask for one of our reporter's Signal numbers.

• Would you answer a late-night text message from a recruiter after a job interview?
• The message is a test to help determine whether someone is a good fit for a job or a culture.
• William Vanderbloemen said that not texting back isn't a dealbreaker, but a fast reply is a plus.

You go to a job interview at 1 p.m.

At about 10 p.m., you get this text: "Hey, Tim. This is Ben. I work at Vanderbloemen. I was out of the office today. I heard you were there. Heard that everyone was really impressed with you. I'm sorry I didn't get to meet you. I would love to connect with you sometime. Hope that can work."

Do you reply? If so, how long does it take you?

Your decision might affect whether you're hired.

The test's creator and occasional proctor is William Vanderbloemen. He runs an executive search firm in Houston. Vanderbloemen's company uses the text-message test after job interviews for certain roles at his own hard-charging firm or for jobs where clients expect workers to be super responsive.

Texting back quickly might up your chance of snagging the job, at least at Vanderbloemen's 45-person firm.

Sounds simple enough. But the text is also a reminder of the always-on pressure that's pushed some workers to ditch hustle culture. Trial by text message joins other offbeat quizzes meant to help determine whether a job candidate should get an offer letter. There's the spouse interview over dinner. And there's the coffee-cup test: A hiring manager shows those who come for interviews where the kitchen is, offers them a coffee, and then rejects those who don't bus their dishes afterward.

The text-message test is also a reminder of how it can be difficult to land a job even as the overall US unemployment rate is low. Yet in areas like tech that have been slow to hire, some workers are left sending out huge numbers of résumés. And when job seekers do get a bite, interviews can drag on for round after round.

Vanderbloemen was quick to note that how you respond — or don't — to an after-hours text from someone saying they're with his firm won't keep you from getting a job. And he said that even responding within 24 hours would put most candidates far ahead of their competition.

"We're just terrible as humans at responding," he said.

But text back within the one-minute response time his sales and marketing teams operate by? "Then we're like, 'Yeah, no, he might be the same kind of crazy that we are,'" Vanderbloemen said. "Is that normal for every job? No. Would it work for every company? No."

The test came about after Vanderbloemen hired some people who seemed promising but then didn't deliver on the company's fast turnaround time for clients, which he said is essential for some roles. That led Vanderbloemen to determine he had to measure for speed — before making a hire — for jobs in areas like sales and marketing.

So, about a decade ago, Vanderbloemen asked one of the people on his team to text someone who'd been great in an interview. The colleague sent the text at about 10:30 p.m., and the candidate responded right away. Bingo.

Vanderbloemen, the founder and CEO of Vanderbloemen Search Group, decided the text-message test could be a good measure of whether a candidate would mesh well with a client with a move-fast culture. He compared it to pulling off a successful organ transplant by finding tissue that matches.

"Oh, you do things the way they do," he said. "Doesn't make it normal. Doesn't make it right. But you guys match each other."

Switching the interview location

Vanderbloemen doesn't rely just on the text-message test. One time, in New York City, he got turned around and realized he didn't have time to make it to the coffee shop where he'd planned to meet a job candidate. So he contacted the man and asked whether they could meet somewhere else. The man responded: "No, I don't mind. I like change."

Vanderbloemen was impressed. Now, he sometimes changes the location of an interview 30 minutes before it's scheduled to take place to see how a candidate responds.

He said it's not something he does all the time. Some jobs don't require that kind of flexibility or speed. Even with the text message, he said, it's often someone at his firm, not him, who might send it. As the boss, he realizes it's more intimidating if it comes from him.

"It's not fair because I'm the guy with the name on the door, and now I am being kind of just abusive," he said.

Setting up some rules

Vanderbloemen, who has a degree in religion and philosophy, said his company has guidelines meant to protect its workers from needing to be on at all hours. After-hours emails should get a response within 24 hours, he said. Evening Slack messages are rare though they should get a response that night "because that's like Defcon 3," he said. "Defcon 2 would be if I text you after hours, I need an answer like now," he added. "And if I call you after hours, pick up."

Vanderbloemen said the firm enforced the rules. It meant he and some colleagues had to quit a group text about "Game of Thrones" on Sunday nights.

He said he's received "some pretty negative feedback" about the text-message test.

"My answer to that is, 'Hey, I'm glad to know you feel that way. I don't think you'd be happy working here,'" Vanderbloemen said.

He said the test still has its place in a world where some workers are trying to avoid being on call all the time.

"For our company, particularly certain teams within our company, it's a direct indicator to us of whether you are dysfunctional like us," he quipped.

An earlier version of this story appeared on October 12, 2023.

• Demand for AI skills is expected to grow in 2025, driven by tech and non-tech firms.
• Tech industry hiring could rebound after several slow years, driven by demand for AI skills.
• AI skills are often scarce, with high vacancy rates for roles like natural language processing.

People and companies are placing big bets on artificial intelligence. One of the safer ones is that demand for workers with AI skills will continue to grow.

Labor market watchers told Business Insider that in 2025, as in 2024, many employers will likely be eager to hire people with skills in AI — like machine-learning specialists who train models, one of this year's most-talked-about roles — but also in wider areas that touch the technology.

In the tech industry, which has experienced years of lackluster hiring following a pandemic-era surge, there are early signs of a rebound, Hannah Calhoon, VP of AI at Indeed, told BI.

If that continues, she said, hiring will likely include roles involving AI.

Another area of demand, Calhoon said, could come from employers that aren't tech firms yet that need people skilled in incorporating off-the-shelf AI tools into their businesses and datasets.

However, unlike the tech giants, these employers aren't likely to try to build their own AI platforms, she said. So, rather than trying to recruit data scientists and those machine-learning engineers, these companies might instead want workers who can help decide which AI instruments to use and how to incorporate them into their workflow.

"What they're going to be looking for is people who understand those systems and can help them implement those tools in their business," Calhoon said.

That's likely to translate to increased demand in 2025 for roles involving AI implementation and transformation — jobs like applications administrators or solutions architects, she said.

There are other signs that the demand for talent involving AI is picking up.

Last week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that the company is experiencing "a big hiring surge" and working to fill thousands of roles to help sell products, including those involving AI. Benioff said the company has 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions it's opened.

Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, likewise recently talked up AI's potential. At an event with President-elect Donald Trump last week, Son said that the Japanese conglomerate would invest $100 billion into the US over the next four years and create at least 100,000 jobs in AI and related areas.

Already, other employers are looking to grow around AI. According to Indeed, job postings mentioning AI that saw the biggest growth in the first 11 months of 2024 were senior scientists, software engineering managers, research engineers, and researchers.

AI know-how is scarce for some roles

The market may be growing, though it can be hard for employers to hire in some AI-related areas. The talent firm Randstad reports that it's twice as difficult to find and hire senior-level workers skilled in AI and automation as it is for other senior-level jobs in different industries.

Vacancy rates for roles involving specialized AI skills, like developing natural-language processing models, are as high as 15%, Randstad found. That's about double the overall job vacancy rate in the US. Randstad's estimate on AI jobs is based on an assessment of some 10 million job postings and 136 million résumés in the third quarter of 2024.

According to Randstad, employers worldwide are having the hardest time finding workers skilled in natural language processing, predictive modeling, and "stakeholder communication." The firm notes that this is partly because such abilities are specialized yet also in demand across industries.

In the US, Randstad said, the vacancy rate for jobs that require skills like natural language processing stands at 14%.

Starting from a small base

Indeed recently reported that, as of September, the share of US job postings that mention generative AI or related terminology was up 3.5 times year over year.

Yet that doesn't mean that all employers are looking for GenAI whizzes. Indeed found that only 2% of employers globally included skills related to AI in their job descriptions. By comparison, more than 20% called for basic computer skills.

Nevertheless, Calhoon said, employers' demands for AI skills are only likely to grow.

"Maybe not next year, but three or four years from now, in many roles, there will be an expectation that people will have basic fluency in being able to use some of these platforms," she said.

That's likely in part because it's not only major employers that will expect workers to have AI skills.

Andy Schachtel, CEO of Sourcefit, an offshore staffing firm, told BI that businesses of all sizes are looking to AI to boost efficiency.

The US Chamber of Commerce found in a mid-2024 survey of 1,100 small businesses that four in 10 reported using generative AI, up from 23% in 2023. About three-quarters of small businesses surveyed said they plan to adopt emerging tech like AI.

That could add to the already surging demand for leaders who are experts in AI. According to a review of more than 35,000 public and private companies in the US by Altrata, a research firm focused on executive data, the number of people in the role of chief AI officer or its equivalent — a job many people may not have heard of until this year — was up 70% year-over-year through late October.

That demand is likely one reason that workers with AI skills or who possess capabilities working with AI tools are, on average, 34% more likely to change jobs, according to Randstad.

Nicole Kyle, who researches the future of work, told BI that even for parts of a business where AI might be expected to take on a good share of the workload — like call centers —its adoption would likely increase demand for other roles.

She said that in the case of call centers, for example, those added roles might include positions involving data governance and data cleaning, as well as customer experience. That's one reason Kyle, who's cofounder of CMP Research, said she remains optimistic about AI's impact on jobs.

"I do think net-net, it will create jobs the way other technological advancements have," Kyle said.

• AI tools can help reduce the need to attend some work meetings and boost productivity.
• These apps can summarize meetings, answer workers' questions, and train employees.
• This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.

Matt Martin knows about meetings run amok.

He's the CEO and cofounder of Clockwise, which aims to help people manage their work calendars so they have more time to get things done — and not just sit in meetings.

Earlier this year, in a bid to be more efficient, he started using an artificial-intelligence tool called Granola to help him take notes in meetings and summarize takeaways and to-dos.

The result for Martin is time saved and "actually pretty damn good notes," he told Business Insider.

Efforts to reduce the sting of meetings are perhaps as old as meetings themselves. Yet the imperative can feel more urgent thanks to our propensity, hardened during the pandemic, to wedge more gatherings into our calendars.

Now, thanks to AI, we might soon have fewer work meetings — or at least attend fewer. It's likely, according to execs leading the development of the technology, that corpulent calendars will be no match for AI-powered notetaking apps capable of being everywhere all at once.

And AI meeting bots won't serve just as digital scribes. They'll resemble all-knowing, indefatigable assistants able to take on tasks like answering questions on our behalf, interviewing job candidates, and training workers, execs told BI.

The boss' avatar

Sam Liang generally has as many as 40 meetings a week.

It's not practical for him to attend each one, so sometimes he sends an AI stand-in. This is easy enough for Liang since he's the CEO and cofounder of Otter, an app that records audio from meetings and produces a real-time transcript using AI.

Liang told BI he uses Otter to forgo some meetings. He then reads the summaries or listens to the recording. Liang expects more leaders will soon do this.

He estimated that perhaps 20% of C-level executives would use AI avatars to attend routine meetings on their behalf by the end of 2025.

In his case, Liang has an avatar that acts like a "personalized agent." Otter trained the AI using seven years' worth of Liang's meetings, along with emails and some Google docs he wrote on topics like product principles, Otter's strategies, and why the company does certain things.

"When people ask me those questions, my avatar can answer probably 90% of those," Liang said.

This knowledge can flow to new hires at Otter. Liang said his AI avatar could use what he's said and written to explain his vision for the company, its strategies, and its origin, for example.

A view of the future

The ramifications of having an ever-present AI available to document our workdays — and beyond — will be similar in scale to that of the introduction of the internet, said Terry Sejnowski, a distinguished professor at the University of California, San Diego, who's a neuroscientist and the author of the book "ChatGPT and the Future of AI."

"Nobody predicted the impact it was going to have on our lives," Sejnowski said. "Same thing here. It's going to take decades."

He said keeping track of meetings and other interactions would go well beyond capturing audio or video. Sejnowski sits on the scientific advisory committee for Softeye, a startup developing glasses intended to work with a smartphone to serve as an AI assistant. Similar attempts have been made, of course. Remember Google Glass?

Ray-Ban Meta glasses allow users to take photos and videos. In September, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said updates to the glasses aimed to let users translate certain languages, scan QR codes, and capture images of what they've seen so they can refer to them later when, for example, they need to buy something.

Softeye's plan, Sejnowski said, is to have glasses that constantly recognize objects and people around the wearer and provide related information. He said they would also take snapshots and store them, along with the time they were taken. That would make it possible, he said, to reconstruct where a user was — and rely on the AI assistant.

"You can ask it questions," Sejnowski said. "Did I promise anything to this person?"

Highlight reels of meetings

Richard White, like so many other desk workers, found himself stuck on endless Zoom calls during the pandemic.

He found it frustrating to take notes, jump to another call, and have little time to clean up his takeaways in between. Plus, White said, even good notes weren't always reliable after too long.

"Do you really remember what was important?" he said.

Four years ago, White started Fathom, a company that uses AI to capture video and generate notes from meetings.

People don't necessarily want a transcript, he said, though it's often necessary for AI to work its meeting magic — including generating notes, making to-do lists, and updating data on customer-relationship management.

White said that what most meeting-goers are after, aside from a list of action items, is a better recall of the ephemeral and unstructured information that's often delivered at these gatherings. Showing up, White said, is often the only way to access it.

He said AI notetakers would be able to produce highlight reels of key meeting moments. The goal, White said, would be to reduce "meeting inflation" by enabling fewer people to attend them while maintaining information flow.

"You'll have an AI that actually goes out and listens to every meeting in your org and comes back and tells you, 'Here's the five minutes of content you should pay attention to today,'" White said.

White said an accessible record of all but the most sensitive meetings within an organization could serve as a basis for identifying gaps in training or generating feedback. That's in part because AI can now accurately discern sentiment and tone — something that's become possible only in the past six months to a year, he said.

Beyond that, he said, AI meeting bots will be able to act on ideas. So if someone in a meeting proposes creating a document, the AI would have a draft ready soon after.

White doesn't expect we'll necessarily each have individual bots that go to meetings on our behalf. He said that would quickly result in meetings swimming with AI avatars.

The best approach, White said, would be to use a "federated" system where all the meetings are accessible. That way, anyone not in the meeting could access the content through a personal agent that lives in the cloud, he said.

White said bosses could ask AI for instances in which a meeting was positive or when participants grew frustrated. A search might take the form of, "Give me a pricing discussion that didn't go well," he said. That goes well beyond parsing a transcript for the word "price," he added.

"The tech is finally there, and it's really good," he said.

An interview with AI

AI could also help document meetings with prospective employees, said Alan Price, the global head of talent acquisition at Deel, a global human resources company that helps employers hire abroad. Price told BI that Deel had begun using AI meeting tools to reduce the time and personnel needed to hire for roles like customer service.

That's important because when Deel posts that type of job, Price said, the company might soon have some 4,000 applications. So Deel uses an AI bot to conduct an initial interview with promising candidates. Then, a recruiter can evaluate the summary of the interview and, if necessary, review the audio and video to determine whether the candidate should move on to an interview with a person.

Price said that rather than spending 30 minutes on a single interview, a recruiter could review five or six interview summaries in that same time.

That bump in efficiency has enabled a single recruiter to hire 30 to 35 candidates within about two weeks, he said.

"The recruiter makes the decision," Price said, "but it's streamlined."

• AT&T is requiring many office employees to work on-site a full five days a week starting in January.
• The telecom giant previously accommodated a hybrid schedule in its return-to-office push.
• The news comes as Amazon has delayed some RTO plans due to capacity issues.

AT&T's return-to-office mandate is set to get more strict in the new year.

The Dallas-based telecom giant confirmed to Business Insider that it is requiring all office employees to work on-site five days a week starting in January. The change follows about a year of AT&T accommodating a hybrid schedule in its widely publicized office push.

In the summer of 2023, CEO John Stankey said workers would be required to report at least three days a week to one of nine corporate hubs: Dallas; Atlanta; Los Angeles; San Ramon, CA; Seattle; St. Louis; Washington; Middletown, NJ; and Bedminster, NJ. The company previously supported more than 300 offices across the US.

Thousands of affected employees faced the choice of relocating or finding a new job, with some 18,000 management employees opting to return to one of the hubs, according to AT&T's proxy statement this year.

Now, some workers who may have gotten used to hybrid schedules will soon be required to log eight hours a day, five days a week at the office.

"The majority of our employees and leaders never stopped working on location for the full work week — including during the pandemic," a company spokesperson told Business Insider.

In multiple social media posts, Reddit users on the AT&T subreddit voiced concerns about whether the offices have enough capacity for employees.

AT&T told BI it is updating its facilities amid the policy change.

"As we continue to evolve our model, we are enhancing our facilities and workspaces, adapting our benefits programs, and incorporating best practices to ensure our employees are best equipped to serve our customers," the spokesperson said.

This week, BI reported that Amazon was delaying its 5-days-in-office mandate for some employees due to workspace shortages at some locations. While most locations are on track to be ready on January 2, internal documents indicated some employees will be delayed until as late as May.

"We continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in a September memo announcing that employees were expected to be in the office every day of the week.

AT&T is also expanding its footprint in Atlanta, where the company signed a lease earlier this year on two office buildings it had previously vacated, CoStar reported.

Shares of AT&T are up roughly 40% in 2024 so far, outperforming the S&P 500's 27% return in the period. The telecom giant reported mixed third-quarter results in October, adding more new wireless subscribers than Wall Street expected but coming up slightly short for overall revenue as the land-line business declines.

The RTO push comes as some big-company CEOs say they're frustrated with hybrid work setups. Many job seekers have also found that it's getting harder to find a remote job or one that's hybrid.

At the same time, some employers appear to have settled into a tentative truce over how often workers are required to show up at the office.

In an October survey of nearly 7,500 organizations globally, the recruiting company Korn Ferry found that the share of employers requiring workers to report to the office five days a week had dropped to 43% from 89% before the pandemic ushered in a global experiment in remote work.

If you are an AT&T worker who wants to share your perspective, please contact Dominick via email or text/call/Signal at 646.768.4750. Responses will be kept confidential, and Business Insider strongly recommends using a personal email and a non-work device when reaching out

• Morning interviews may yield higher scores due to interviewer bias, research shows.
• Bias in hiring can be influenced by the time of day, affecting candidate evaluations.
• AI tools could reduce this, offering fairer assessments than manual methods.

If you get to choose when to schedule a job interview, you might want to grab a coffee and go for a morning slot.

That's because some people conducting interviews tend to give higher scores to candidates they meet with earlier in the day compared with the afternoon, a startup's review of thousands of interviews found.

It's not an absolute, of course, and candidates can still kill it well after lunchtime. Yet, in a job market where employers in fields like tech have been slow to hire, even a modest advantage could make a difference, Shiran Danoch, an organizational psychologist, told Business Insider.

"Specific interviewers have a consistent tendency to be harsher or more lenient in their scores depending on the time of day," she said.

It's possible that in the morning, interviewers haven't yet been beaten down by back-to-back meetings — or are perhaps still enjoying their own first coffee, she said.

Danoch and her team noticed the morning-afternoon discrepancy while reviewing datasets on thousands of job interviews. Danoch is the CEO and founder of Informed Decisions, an artificial intelligence startup focused on helping organizations reduce bias and improve their interviewing processes.

She said the inferences on the time-of-day bias are drawn from the datasets of interviewers who use Informed Decisions tools to score candidates. The data reflected those who've done at least 20 interviews using the company's system. Danoch said that in her company's review of candidates' scores, those interviewed in the morning often get statistically significant higher marks.

The good news, she said, is that when interviewers are made aware that they might be more harsh in the afternoon, they often take steps to counteract that tendency.

"In many cases, happily, we're actually seeing that the feedback that we're providing helps to reduce the bias and eventually eliminate the bias," Danoch said.

However, she said, interviewers often don't get feedback about their hiring practices, even though finding the right talent is "such a crucial part" of what hiring managers and recruiters do.

She said other researchers have identified how the time of day — and whether someone might be a morning person or an evening person — can affect decision-making processes.

An examination of more than 1,000 parole decisions in Israel found that judges were likelier to show leniency at the start of the day and after breaks. However, that favorability decreased as judges made more decisions, according to the 2011 research.

Tech could help

It's possible that if tools like artificial intelligence take on more responsibility for hiring, job seekers won't have to worry about the time of day they interview.

For all of the concerns about biases in AI, partiality involved in more "manual" hiring where interviewers ask open-ended questions often leads to more bias than does AI, said Kiki Leutner, cofounder of SeeTalent.ai, a startup creating tests run by AI to simulate tasks associated with a job. She has researched AI ethics and that of assessments in general.

Leutner told BI that it's likely that in a video interview conducted by AI, for example, a candidate might have a fairer shot at landing a job.

"You don't just have people do unstructured interviews, ask whatever questions, make whatever decisions," she said.

And, because everything is recorded, Leutner said, there is documentation of what decisions were made and on what basis. Ultimately, she said, it's then possible to take that information and correct algorithms.

"Any structured process is better in recruitment than not structuring it," Leutner said.

Humans are 'hopelessly biased'

Eric Mosley, cofounder and CEO of Workhuman, which makes tools for recognizing employee achievements, told BI that data created by humans will be biased — because humans are "hopelessly biased."

He pointed to 2016 research indicating that juvenile court judges in Louisiana doled out tougher punishments — particularly to Black youths — after the Louisiana State University football team suffered a surprise defeat.

Mosley said, however, that AI can be trained to ignore certain biases and look for others to eliminate them.

Taking that approach can help humans guard against some of their natural tendencies. To get it right, however, it's important to have safeguards around the use of AI, he said. These might include ethics teams with representatives from legal departments and HR to focus on issues of data hygiene and algorithm hygiene.

Not taking those precautions and solely relying on AI can even risk scaling humans' biases, Mosley said.

"If you basically just unleash it in a very simplistic way, it'll just replicate them. But if you go in knowing that these biases exist, then you can get through it," he said.

Danoch, from Informed Decisions, said that if people conducting interviews suspect they might be less forgiving after the morning has passed, they can take steps to counteract that.

"Before you interview in the afternoons, take a little bit longer to prepare, have a cup of coffee, refresh yourself," she said.

• Bill Belichick's departure from the NFL to coach at the University of North Carolina is a big move.
• Belichick's deal highlights college sports' further shift toward professionalization.
• Name-image-likeness opportunities are reshaping college sports and changing the jobs of coaches.

Revered football coach Bill Belichick's departure from the NFL says a lot about the ascendance of college football amid lucrative sponsorships in the era of the transfer portal, fast-growing NIL opportunities, and revenue sharing within the NCAA.

Word on Wednesday that the eight-time Super Bowl champ signed a five-year agreement to serve as head coach of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels rocked the sports industry.

"We are embarking on an entirely new football operation," UNC Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham said at a press conference Thursday. He said Belichick's pro experience played a factor in his hire. "The future of college athletics is changing, and we want to be in the forefront of that."

The Athletic reported Belichick will be pocketing $10 million a year. UNC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.

Of course, college sports — and especially football — have always been big business. But recent changes underline the move toward allowing more money to flow into programs and athletes, and further professionalize what is still considered amateur athletics.

Scott Fuess, Jr., a professor of business at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who studies the economics of college sports, told BI that Belichick's hire is "a very obvious, public-facing signal" of how college football is becoming more like the pros.

"What we're doing is we're NFL-izing collegiate football," he said.

Another indicator of the shift in college sports? More schools are hiring general managers for their football programs, Fuess said. Their focus is on bringing in talent and financing it, something that's all the more important in the name, image, and likeness — or NIL — era. NIL allows players to be paid by brands and other sponsors for the use of their name, image, or likeness.

Fuess said that in the upper ranks of collegiate football — specifically within the power conferences — "you're going to see arrangements that look more like NFL programs."

Belichick's move is part of a bigger trend

Belichick's hire isn't the only signal that managing a college sports team is looking a lot more like managing a pro team.

In September, longtime ESPN reporter Adrian Wojnarowski left the outlet to become general manager of the men's basketball program at St. Bonaventure University — where he went to school — to work on NIL deals and recruiting.

And Belichick will be getting some help at UNC from Michael Lombardi — a sports host and former NFL exec who said Wednesday night that he'll serve as the general manager of the Tar Heels program.

For Belichick, there are family ties to UNC. His father was an assistant football coach for the Tar Heels in the '50s. And The Guardian's Ollie Connolly, citing anonymous sources, reported last week that as part of his deal, Belichick sought a guarantee that his son would succeed him as head coach — which he reported that UNC is open to.

Patrick Rishe, executive director of the Sports Business Program at Washington University in St. Louis, told BI that Belichick's move doesn't necessarily portend an exodus of NFL coaches to college towns because Belichick's situation was unique.

"I don't think Alabama or Ohio State are going to be recruiting Andy Reid away from the Chiefs," he said, referring to Kansas City's head coach.

Still, Rishe said, his move is a reminder that coaches are free agents just as players are.

Rishe said one of the biggest forces animating college football's bulk-up is money flowing from NIL collectives. He said collective money, already used to recruit players, could also be directed toward bringing on coaches.

The collectives gather money from donors and distribute it to players. For example, at Fuess's University of Nebraska, the 1890 Initiative — its resident, independent NIL collective — raises money for athletes in exchange for donor perks like merch and invites to membership events. Its website says it partners with athletes "to help them build personal brands through athletic endorsements, brand partnerships, and NIL compliance protocols."

An expanded job

Fuess said that until recently, college athletes were limited in transferring to other programs. Now, that's no longer true because of the transfer portal window, which in October was reduced for Division I football and basketball players to 30 days. Because of that, he said, college coaches must work harder than ever to keep players happy.

"Their free agency is freer than in professional sports right now," he said, referring to college players.

Fuess, who also serves as his campus's faculty representative to its athletic department, said college coaches increasingly have to know how to spot talent, how to pay for it, and how to keep it.

That means there could be more people who come from the NFL, though they could also come from elsewhere in college athletics, he said, because the cultures of the NFL and college football are different. Plus, there's also NCAA revenue sharing in the wings, where, beginning next academic year, schools are expected to be able to share athletic department revenues with student-athletes.

"Collegiate sports is a little bit more of a wild wild west than the very buttoned-down world of the NFL," Fuess said.

He said that some college football programs seeking to ascend to the top or remain there are likely to do so by demonstrating big funding commitments or making high-profile hires.

Fuess pointed to a statement days ago by Purdue University President Mung Chiang introducing the Boilermakers' new football coach, Barry Odom, that the university would "invest more than ever before in athletics."

A hire like Belichick represents a similar move, Fuess said.

"Everybody knows his name. Everybody knows his coaching success. Everybody knows about him," he said.

If you want to remain a high-profile program, Fuess said, "you're going to want to demonstrate as best you can that you are committed to doing this."

• Some US workers are embracing AI, seeing it as a career booster.
• A survey from KPMG US found that half of workers believe automation has helped them at work.
• Training is the primary lever employers have for retaining workers, a KPMG exec told BI.

Some US workers appear to be warming up to artificial intelligence.

In a KPMG US survey, half of respondents said automation — including AI — has boosted their professional abilities. Just shy of half said that automation would bring new career opportunities.

By comparison, 28% of workers said they might lose their jobs to automation, which has been widely touted as a concern. In a survey of managers last year, KPMG found greater unease about the possible toll of technological gains.

The latest findings are notable because they appear to indicate that workers are becoming more conversant with tech like AI — and not just ignoring it or fearing that it will replace them, John Doel, a principal in the KPMG US human capital advisory practice, told Business Insider.

"As adoption increases, people are getting more comfortable with the impact that's going to have on their careers," he said.

About seven in 10 surveyed said they use "automation tools" at least weekly, and one in three said they use them daily.

Doel said the rates at which workers are adopting the technology suggest that many are chipping away at a "fear factor" that might have existed around AI.

KPMG US surveyed more than 1,800 US workers at companies with more than 5,000 employees. About six in 10 of the respondents were managers.

Building skills to build their career

Some eight in 10 respondents agreed with the idea that building skills is important for their career. And about one in four workers said chances to learn are one reason they're staying in their jobs. Meanwhile, 22% said having the opportunity to learn and build their skills made them consider different roles.

Doel said that should be a sign to employers that investing in workers is a way to keep them. In the past year, he said many workers, particularly younger ones, have considered leaving their jobs. The employers that are helping their workers add skills are more likely to hang onto them.

"It's the No. 1 thing they could do" to retain workers, Doel said.

Even with training, however, limiting quitting could be a challenge for some employers years after the job-hopping frenzy of the Great Resignation. In the survey, 42% of employees said they'd considered leaving their roles in the past year. Millennials, who represent the biggest slice of the nation's workforce, were the most likely age group to say they'd considered it.

The main reasons workers thought about it weren't new: About one-third pointed to work-life balance, while a similar share identified insufficient pay. Another third said "feeling disrespected" at work animated their thoughts of resigning.

Doel said it's also not surprising that the survey highlighted a gap between what workers want and what employers want regarding where work gets done.

Five years since the pandemic rejiggered how many workers do their jobs, flexibility around where they work remains key for many employees. Seven in 10 survey respondents said remote work helped them balance the demands of their jobs with caretaking responsibilities.

Even as some high-profile employers — including Amazon, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs — have called workers back to the office, workers in the survey indicated they liked some degree of autonomy even though they see the office having benefits.

Forty-seven percent of survey respondents reported being more productive in the office, while 62% said the social aspects of working in the office helped foster a stronger corporate culture and their own sense of belonging.

Ultimately, Doel said, it appears that many employers and their employees have settled into a truce on the issue.

"That's not the top priority of organizations anymore," he said, referring to return-to-office mandates. "We've kind of reached a homeostasis."

Using AI for work-life balance

In some cases, Doel said, workers appear to be eyeing tech like generative AI as an avenue for achieving better work-life balance.

"They're looking at GenAI as one of the enablers of a more flexible work environment," Doel said. Workers who use tools like it to get their work done more efficiently might feel they could have a greater say in how they structure their jobs, he said.

Employees also see other areas where they could enjoy more flexibility. Two-thirds of respondents said they believed that a four-day workweek of 32 hours could achieve the same level of productivity as a 40-hour week. And 45% said efficiency gains from GenAI could help make a four-day week more feasible.

"They think it's going to allow them to be more flexible in their work-model contract with employers," Doel said, referring to workers' views on GenAI.

• Job seekers with prestigious schools or employers on their résumés can benefit from a "halo" effect.
• Yet education and experience are not reliable indicators of job performance, an expert told BI.
• Some employers are shifting focus to skills and behaviors to improve hiring outcomes.

Job seekers who are attractive, who went to the right school, or who worked at the right company can enjoy a so-called "halo effect" that outweighs other factors that often are better predictors of how well someone will perform in a role.

While they look good on paper, that's a problem for employers and many job seekers, executives told Business Insider.

Shiran Danoch saw firsthand how bias can affect hiring. Early in her career, she thought she'd found the perfect candidate for a role she was trying to fill.

Yet after Danoch's boss interviewed the woman, he called Danoch into his office.

"He said, 'Why did you bring her here? She isn't one of us,'" Danoch told BI.

It slowly occurred to Danoch that her boss's problem was with the candidate's ethnicity despite what Danoch saw as her obvious fit for the role.

There's a lot of work to do to reduce bias that unfairly hurts — and helps — candidates, said Danoch, an organizational psychologist who's the CEO and founder of Informed Decisions, an artificial intelligence startup that aims to help organizations reduce bias and improve their interviewing processes.

Danoch estimates that perhaps as many as nine in 10 hires either suffer or benefit from a bias that shapes the interviewer's perceptions of the candidate's aptitude for the role.

She said this means people who aren't a great fit could end up landing the role, and candidates who would do the job better might be sidelined.

Education and experience aren't sure bets

Danoch said analysis of thousands of interviews on the Informed Decisions interview platform, combined with findings from broader academic research, highlights that "dominant-skill" bias is a prominent risk.

"When you're interviewing a candidate, there might be one specific skill that paints your overall impression," she said. Often, Danoch said, that is "effective communication." That can mean job seekers who are strong communicators can talk their way past their weaknesses.

Another risk is being wowed by grads from top schools or those who worked at high-profile companies. Substantial bodies of research have shown that education and experience aren't good predictors of how successful someone will be in a job, she said.

Meantime, it's easy to see why a hiring manager might assume someone who'd worked at one big-name tech firm might be a good fit for another. That's not always the case, according to Alan Price, the global head of talent acquisition at Deel, a global HR company that helps employers hire abroad.

He told BI that in past roles at other companies, there was often a push to focus on Ivy League grads or people who'd worked at certain tech firms. That made it hard for candidates coming from small startups, for example, to get hired, he said.

"You'd work at Facebook. You'd work at Google. You'd go to LinkedIn. There's a merry-go-round," Price said.

Yet he said those in sales, for example, who had halo résumés by virtue of having been at top companies, weren't always the strongest contributors when it came to basic metrics like how much revenue they brought in.

"The top people weren't only coming from the big, established organizations," Price said.

Hiring for skills

To improve the quality of its hires, Price said, Deel reformatted its interviewing process to focus on behaviors and less on factors like education and experience. That's led managers to report being more satisfied with the work they were getting from new hires, he said.

Price said it's not that experience doesn't count. Instead, it's evaluated alongside factors like functional skills for doing the job, behaviors, and motivation. To gain insight into skills, Deel will often have job seekers complete assessments.

That can help root out candidates who might toss around industry buzzwords, though they might lack some abilities.

"Because you've worked here and you've worked on this problem type, my assumption is, from a halo CV perspective, you're going to be really good," he said.

Price said that because some job seekers might stay at an organization for two to three years, hiring managers could take that to mean the candidates are good at what they do.

Yet "that is a big assumption," he said.

Some employers have announced efforts to look more at abilities rather than pedigree. In some cases, this can mean waiving degree requirements.

However, David Deming, a professor of political economy at Harvard's Kennedy School, previously told BI that even as some employers do away with prerequisites that candidates for some roles have a bachelor's degree, those doing the hiring might still consider whether a candidate has one.

"Firms are wanting credit for removing a requirement, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're changing their hiring at the end of the day," he said.

Strong communicators can win out

Danoch, from Informed Decisions, said one reason strong communicators can benefit from a halo effect in interviews relates to those doing the hiring.

"Because a lot of interviewers are inexperienced in interviewing, that's what grabs them," she said, referring to a candidate's communication chops.

While such abilities are often among the soft skills many employers say they value, Danoch said being able to communicate well isn't likely to be the only attribute needed for a role. Even if communication is important, she said, it shouldn't be the sole factor for hiring.

Danoch said the halo effect can be problematic if it leads employers to hire candidates who might not be the best fit. Conversely, she said, a "shadow effect" can result in capable job seekers being discounted.

"The candidate is either all good or either all bad," Danoch said.

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• AWS said developers spend most of their time on non-coding tasks, impacting productivity.
• It introduced Amazon Q Developer — an AI agent to aid developers — at the re:Invent keynote on Tuesday.
• But junior engineers are concerned AI tools like Amazon Q could reduce coder demand.

Artificial intelligence could give coders more time to code. Programmers aren't sure whether that's a good thing.

In a post Tuesday, Amazon Web Services said developers report spending an average of "just one hour per day" on actual coding.

The rest is eaten up by "tedious, undifferentiated tasks," AWS said. That includes learning codebases, drafting documents, testing, overseeing releases, fixing problems, or hunting down vulnerabilities, AWS said. The company didn't say where it got the data.

AWS CEO Matt Garman spoke to the developers in the audience at the company's re:Invent keynote on Tuesday, introducing a tool he said would give them more time to focus on creativity. Amazon Q Developer is an AI agent that AWS is rolling out in two tiers with free and paid options.

The announcement is another indication that technology like AI could upend the way many coders do their jobs. Some have argued that AI will remove some of the tedium from tasks like creating documentation and generating basic code. That could be great for coders' productivity — and perhaps for their enjoyment of the jobs — yet it could also mean employers need fewer of them.

GitLab has reported that developers spend more than 75% of their time on tasks other than coding. Several veteran software engineers previously told BI that the time they spend coding is perhaps closer to half.

Software engineers on job forums like Blind are discussing how much they should rely on an AI assistant for their work. Some have asked for recommendations for the best agent, and receive mixed replies of "your own brain" and genuine reviews. Others worry that AI has already become a crutch in their coding process.

AWS isn't the only tech giant offering AI to coders. Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently said that AI generates more than a quarter of the new code created at the search company. He said the technology was "boosting productivity and efficiency." Workers review the code that AI produces, Pichai said.

"This helps our engineers do more and move faster," he said. "I'm energized by our progress and the opportunities ahead, and we continue to be laser-focused on building great products."

The rise of AI could be worrisome for newbie programmers who need to develop their skills, according to Jesal Gadhia, head of engineering at Thoughtful AI, which creates AI tools for healthcare providers.

"Junior engineers," Gadhia previously told BI, "have a little bit of a target behind their back."

He said that when an AI tool touted as the "first AI software engineer" came out this year, he received texts from nervous friends.

"There was a lot of panic. I had a lot of friends of mine who messaged me and said, 'Hey, am I going to lose my job?'" Gadhia said.

• Brian Chesky and Nvidia's Jensen Huang avoid one-on-one meetings with subordinates.
• "You become like their therapist," Chesky told Fortune.
• Yet one person who studies meetings said making an employee feel heard can have "amazing" outcomes.

Meetings are the main way Airbnb's Brian Chesky gets work done. Yet he says the one-on-one format with a direct report is fundamentally flawed.

"Almost no great CEO in history has ever done them," the Airbnb chief said in a recent interview.

That's because when an employee "owns the agenda," they bring up subjects managers don't want to discuss — and "you become like their therapist," Chesky said. Topics can also arise that would benefit other people at the company to hear, but instead, they're sequestered in a one-on-one.

Of course, there are certain times when a one-on-one makes sense, Chesky told Fortune in the interview — such as when an employee is having a difficult time personally and needs to confide to a boss privately.

But generally, he said, they're just not productive on a regular basis.

Chesky isn't alone. Although he has many direct reports, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also prefers to skip one-on-one meetings.

"I don't really believe there's any information that I operate on that somehow only one or two people should hear about," Huang said at Stripe Sessions earlier this year.

Making employees feel heard can have 'amazing' outcomes

While some leaders are cracking down, one expert previously told Business Insider that, when conducted correctly, one-on-ones can boost employee engagement, productivity, and overall happiness.

"The outcomes associated with effective one-on-ones are amazing," said Steven G. Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist who's also a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of "Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1:1 Meetings."

Rogelberg previously told BI that one-on-ones are more successful when the worker leads the conversation. He said managers should dedicate roughly 25 minutes a week and focus on the personal needs of employees as well as the practical aspects of the job.

Many managers avoid that first component, Rogelberg said, because it takes more effort.

But at the same time, workers need to do their due diligence, he said — showing up prepared to talk more than half the time. Some fruitful topics include: challenges, how a manager can better support a worker, and what's going well and what could be improved.

'Nitpicking sessions'

Chesky isn't the only boss who's over the one-on-one. In May, Aditya Agarwal, a former Facebook director, wrote in a post on X that after more than a decade of conducting such meetings with those who report to him, he determined they did more harm than good.

"They condition people to do spot checks on happiness and constantly be critical about things that aren't ideal. In practice, 1:1s descend into nitpicking sessions," Agarwal wrote as part of a thread.

Agarwal added that bosses should give feedback every three to six months rather than weekly. That approach, he said, could drive managers to pick up on patterns and give "holistic" guidance rather than weekly spot checks.

• A few months ago, I started using an AI notetaking app, Granola, in meetings.
• I take notes and then after the call, the AI builds a more fulsome outline of the conversation.
• Taking notes on what's most important helps us get more from meetings, Granola's CEO said.

A few minutes after I'd hopped on a call with a tech founder, he mentioned that he'd started using an "amazing" AI notetaking app.

It was helping him capture the various decisions and to-do's that came up in the many meetings that punctuated his calendar.

I was intrigued. I'd tried artificial intelligence tools for summarizing interview notes and transcripts. The results were often great at capturing themes, yet the AI tended to sweep past the details, pithy comments, or intriguing ideas I would tend to highlight.

It was like getting a book report from someone who'd only skimmed the reading.

Not long after my call with the tech founder, I downloaded the app, which is called Granola, on my Mac. It's a desktop tool, for now. An iOS version is on its way and Windows after that.

I've been using Granola since midsummer, and it's changed my meetings. To be clear, I also use a different app to get a full recording of the call to ensure my reporting and quotes are accurate. But what delighted the founder who tipped me off to Granola is also what I like best: I get to shape the outline for the notes that the AI generates.

My kind of notes

When I began using it, I allowed Granola to synch with my calendar. A few minutes before, I get a prompt to join a meeting. When the call begins, I then get permission from whomever I'm talking with to record the conversation. (Granola also has a prompt that pops up at the bottom that reminds users to get the OK to transcribe calls.)

The notetaking window in Granola is pretty much a blank page, which I like because it's a clean UX. I can drop in a title or use the one populated by what's on my calendar.

Once things begin, I only type what's most important, and the AI follows my lead. I can type just a few words and know that, after the call, with a click, Granola will build an outline around the points I flagged.

That's a huge help and different from the summaries I often get from other AI tools. Plus, I also always look back at the untidy notes I took in case something in the AI version feels off.

If I take no notes at all — which is rare — Granola will still deliver a pretty sharp summary complete with subheads and bullets.

The biggest benefit for me is that I worry less about scribbling down each thing that I might later deem important. In essence, I can be more present.

That's a frequent comment from users, Chris Pedregal, Granola's CEO, told me over a call in which we each took notes with the app.

In fact, given the whac-a-mole way many of us work — quickly triaging the messages that bombard us throughout the day — AI notetaking apps could have our back.

Pedregal said he was surprised when the company began hearing from users that they'll often zone out during a meeting to respond to an urgent Slack or WhatsApp message, then go back to Granola and pop up the transcript to read what they missed.

That's notable, in part, because in a recent survey, 57% of Granola users reported being in leadership roles. Pedregal said that supports the narrative that many top execs might be more excited about AI than some rank-and-file workers.

Pedregal, 38, cofounded Granola in March 2023. He's from the US, though he and the company's staff are based in London. Granola is focused on the American market and has US investors, he said. The company recently completed a $20 million Series A round. Google acquired Pedregal's prior startup, Socratic, in 2018.

Finding the sweet spot

The benefit of having an AI notetaker, I've found, is more than knowing I don't have to worry as much about details in the moment (though I'll always double-check afterward). Pedregal said the reason the app doesn't record audio is to make it less invasive.

The things I type are often the points that stand out because they're unique — or questionable — and that I want to think or ask more about.

Pedregal says jotting down a few notes during a meeting — but not being slavish about capturing everything — is the sweet spot. Unless we're trying to multitask, that middle path often enough, he said, to keep us tethered to the conversation and engaged with what speakers are saying.

I admit I've felt good while in meetings on busy days knowing that the safety net is there.

• Job seekers are bulking up their résumés with extra details to stand out in a competitive market.
• Experts warn that overly detailed résumés can be hard to navigate and may hinder job prospects.
• AI tools and keyword stuffing contribute to longer CVs, but concise formats are still best.

It might be time to put your résumé on a diet.

In recent years, a competitive job market has ramped up the temptation to trick out résumés with added details about our skills and professional accomplishments, several career experts told Business Insider.

Yet a swole document can also be harder to navigate.

"You want to make your résumé a sales page, not a Wikipedia page," Madeline Mann, a career coach and CEO of Self Made Millennial, told BI.

Many job seekers believe that including extra detail will help show off their qualifications to employers. But, Mann said, employers have specifics they're seeking on a résumé — often what's outlined in the job description.

"You do not want it to be a treasure hunt for them to find those things," she said.

A year-end résumé cleanup

With the end of the year approaching, it might be a good time to take a fresh look at what's on your résumé as many employers tend to advertise new roles in January. Plus, an uptick in job postings for recruiters in some industries indicates that stepped-up hiring might soon follow.

Doing some trimming for the new year can help because as word counts on CVs creep higher, more employers might have to search for what they need.

A review by LiveCareer of some 50,000 résumés in its database found that, on average, they had nearly doubled in length from 2018 to 2023 as more job seekers did things like adding a section highlighting their skills.

LiveCareer also found that the number of people devoting résumé real estate to certificates, languages, and other accomplishments had about doubled.

James Neave, the head of data science at the job site Adzuna, told BI that he'd also seen CVs balloon. On average, the word count of the US résumés in its database has increased by about 40% since August 2021, he said.

Stay relevant

Neave said one culprit behind résumé creep could be the inclination to inject our professional calling cards with all of the keywords from a job description.

So-called keyword stuffing, where you add the operative words or phrases that appear in a job posting to your résumé, is nothing new. Yet more people hunting down jobs might be focusing on that in an attempt to shoulder their way past the applicant-tracking systems that most large employers use to sort résumés.

Jasmine Escalera, a career expert with LiveCareer, told BI that many job seekers feel the need to include more keywords, skills, and components like accomplishments in their résumés simply to stay afloat in a competitive job market.

But it's easy to overdo it, she said. Adding too much risks having a recruiter overlook what's most important.

Escalera recommends job seekers use distinct sections to help make their résumé easy to read. She suggests working from the top down by starting with a professional summary. Unlike the "objective" that once took the top spot, the professional summary should focus on how the candidate can contribute to what the employer is seeking, Escalera said.

But, unlike an objective that once might have been a sentence or two, professional summaries often get loaded up with how long we've worked, various skills, and the value we'd bring to a job, she said.

"There's much more going into this thing to be able to stand out," Escalera said.

Next up is a skills section. For people applying for roles with quantifiable results — like sales or marketing — it can be wise to then include a section on career accomplishments. Following that would be experience and, last, education.

AI doesn't always help

While using AI to write or revamp résumés hasn't been a thing for very long, Mann said that the technology could explain at least some CVs' newfound heft. That's because while the tech can help draft and proof résumés, AI can also bring its own risks, she said.

"It's the average of all the resources that are out there, so it creates these incredibly generic résumés," Mann said.

The reason, she said, is because many people have been writing résumés in rather generic ways for a long time so that's the bulk of what AI has been trained on.

Stick to two pages — maximum

For years, the advice has broadly been that newbie workers should keep their résumé to about a page. More seasoned workers, the thinking often goes, should cap their CVs around two pages and not go beyond three.

That advice still holds, Adzuna's Neave said.

"If I get a CV and it's like four or five pages, I'm inwardly groaning already," he said. That's because it's just harder to work with, Neave said.

He recommends people with five years or less of work experience cap a résumé at a page. For longer-tenure workers, two pages should suffice in most cases.

Focus on your most recent experience

Mann, from Self Made Millennial, said that because employers tend to care about your most recent work, it's best to focus the experience section on the past decade or about the last four roles.

For most experience beyond that, she said, it's often sufficient to drop in a bullet for that role or just name the jobs. It's still important that the résumé be an accurate portrayal of your career path, Mann said, but going into detail on the old stuff often isn't useful for employers.

"If a company is interviewing you and you're constantly going back 10-plus years to answer their questions, that is going to probably hurt you," she said. "They are more interested in what have you been up to lately."

Do you have something to share about what you're seeing in your job search or in the workplace? Business Insider would like to hear from you. Email our workplace team from a nonwork device at [email protected] with your story, or ask for one of our reporter's Signal numbers.

An earlier version of this story appeared on September 8, 2024.

• It's that time of year when workers often think about ways to boost their careers.
• Workers might consider building their AI skills to stay competitive, an executive told BI.
• Volunteering and side hustles can also enhance skills, empowerment, and career opportunities.

It's that time again: a new year with fresh opportunities to improve our work and ourselves.

Alongside starting that gym routine or giving up ultra-processed foods, you might consider taking steps that could help you boost your career as 2025 unfolds.

Taking action can be important because workers tend to hold greater responsibility for the shape of their careers than they did five to 10 years ago when employers played a bigger role, Lisa Walker, a managing partner at the executive search firm DHR Global, told Business Insider.

"You have to be vigilant about managing your own career," she said.

Here are three ways you can level up your career in 2025, according to workplace experts.

Boost your AI abilities

Sean Barry, the vice president of talent acquisition at Allstate, told BI that workers should try to become more proficient in artificial intelligence.

He said it's essential to realize that the technology will put a premium on a new set of skills for many people — like how to create an appropriate prompt for generative AI.

"That is not a skill that anybody talked about two years ago, and it's critically important now," Barry said, adding that people who are better at this will likely do better in their careers.

One way to improve your AI skills is simply to use it. Start by trying out chatbots and seeing what works.

It's become a cliché to say that AI won't replace you, but someone who knows how to use it will. Yet there are areas where AI might replace humans, which is why a better understanding of how AI works can be beneficial.

That's advice Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has given: If you're worried that AI will take your job, get better with the technology.

Kiki Leutner is cofounder of SeeTalent.ai, which is developing tests run by AI that would simulate tasks associated with a job to help the hiring process. She told BI that, traditionally, employers tended to use such tests for more senior roles only where it was worth the money and effort. Or, Leutner said, a company might give a software developer a coding task to measure proficiency.

Leutner said Generative AI can let employers test far more job seekers and across a broader range of roles than would otherwise be practical. Plus, she said, AI-run assessments can collect insights that previously were difficult to capture, such as how someone might interact with others.

Success in such areas often involves the soft skills employers say they're seeking and many bosses contend too many workers lack.

Share your skills by volunteering

You might feel too busy at work, yet carving out some time to help others can help you. A recent study from the University of Oxford found that volunteering proved more effective in boosting worker well-being than other interventions.

It's especially beneficial if it involves using your skills to assist others, according to Leila Saad, CEO of Common Impact, a nonprofit that connects companies and their workers with other nonprofits.

Saad told BI that many nonprofits lack the resources to meet all of their operational needs. So, when workers with that expertise can help, it benefits both the organization and the worker, she said.

"It feels good to give back skills you've honed over your entire career," she said.

That often trumps something like showing up for a one-off event like painting a school or planting trees, Saad said.

Beyond that, she said, workers — and their employers — can benefit if the employee might develop additional skills through volunteering.

Jennifer Schielke, the CEO of the staffing firm Summit Group Solutions and the author of "Leading for Impact," previously told BI that volunteering — even after something traumatic like losing a job — can help those newly out of work get a sense of perspective.

"If you have time to volunteer, go do it," she said. "Go get some encouragement by sitting alongside someone who has it worse than you do."

Consider starting a side hustle

Side hustles get a lot of attention when they're lucrative, yet there can be other benefits. They can be limited to weekend jobs, so workers' weekdays aren't too full. In other cases, side hustles might relieve burnout.

They can also make workers feel empowered.

Daniel Zhao, the lead economist at Glassdoor, told BI that workers in some industries feel stuck in their 9-to-5 roles because of lackluster hiring. That might be one reason more workers are picking up side hustles.

Zhao pointed to data gathered by Glassdoor and the Harris Poll. In a February survey of about 1,100 US adults, 39% reported having a side gig. The share was higher among younger workers: Fifty-seven percent of Gen Zers and 48% of millennials reported doing work in addition to their primary roles.

"Workers are much more willing to experiment nowadays," Zhao said. He pointed to rates of entrepreneurship, which he said "skyrocketed" during the pandemic.

Zhao said it's good news that entrepreneurship rates remain elevated following a "fairly weak" 2010s and said it indicates America's entrepreneurial spirit has recovered.

New business applications in the US have jumped to 431,000 a month in 2024, up 47% from 293,000 a month in 2019, Zhao said.

"Not only is that an opportunity for people to supplement their income on the side, but it also opens up new opportunities, new ideas, new technologies that can potentially boost the economy in the long run," he said.

An earlier version of this story appeared on November 30, 2024.

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• McKinsey, Bain, and BCG are top strategy consulting firms with low acceptance rates.
• These firms, known as MBB, serve Fortune 500 companies and offer competitive salaries.
• MBB firms provide prestigious exit opportunities, often leading to senior roles in various sectors.

McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group — collectively referred to as MBB — are widely considered the top three strategy consulting firms in the world.

Sometimes referred to as the Big Three, MBB firms are among the most prestigious consulting firms and their clients include many Fortune 500 companies as well as government agencies.

CEOs often turn to these firms for their expertise in business strategy and solving complex problems, whether it's handling mergers and acquisitions or budgeting and cutting costs.

Jobs at MBB firms are famously difficult to land and are among the most sought-after positions for MBA students at top schools. The acceptance rates for these firms is less than 1%. Applicants to top business schools are also far more likely to be accepted into MBA programs if they come from an MBB.

MBB firms typically offer highly competitive salaries, generally paying more than other consulting firms, and often come with demanding work responsibilities and expectations.

MBB firms are also well known for the exit opportunities they provide — employees at these firms are highly sought after for other jobs and often end up with senior positions at Fortune 500 companies, startups, hedge funds, and private equity firms, or start their own companies.

The Big Three is sometimes confused with the Big Four, which refers to the professional services firms Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC. The Big Four are the largest accounting firms in the world though they also offer consulting and other services.

The MBB firms are strategy and management consulting firms. Here's how they compare.

McKinsey & Company

McKinsey is typically considered the most prestigious of the Big Three. It's also the oldest and was founded in 1926.

Headquartered in New York City, McKinsey is also the largest of the MBBs, with more than 45,000 employees across 130 offices worldwide.

McKinsey generated around $16 billion in revenue in 2023 and is led by Bob Sternfels, who serves as the firm's global managing partner and chair of the board of directors.

McKinsey told Business Insider it receives more than one million job applications each year and that the company planned to hire about 6,000 people in 2024, about the same as the year prior.

That would mean McKinsey hires around 0.6% of applicants.

McKinsey's average base salary for new hires out of undergrad is $112,000 and for MBAs $192,000, according to the company Management Consulted, which provides students with coaching for consulting interviews.

McKinsey is notorious for its demanding workload, with even entry-level analysts working 12 to 15 hours a day. One former employee told BI that the experience took a toll on her mental health but she came away with confidence and a Rolodex of contacts.

Boston Consulting Group

BCG was founded in Boston, where it is still headquartered, in 1963. The company had 32,000 employees as of 2023 and 128 offices worldwide.

BCG had a global revenue of about $12 billion in 2023.

BCG is led by Christoph Schweizer, who has served as CEO since 2021, and Rich Lesser, the Global Chair of the firm.

BCG's head of talent, Amber Grewal, told BI more than one million people apply to work at the company each year and that only 1% make the cut.

Amid the boom in generative AI the firm is hiring for a wider mix of roles than it did in years past. "It's going to change the mix of people and expertise that we need," Alicia Pittman, BCG's global people team chair previously told BI.

The average base salary at BCG for hires out of undergrad was $110,000 in 2023 and about $190,000 for MBAs and PhDs, according to Management Consulted.

Bain & Company

Bain was founded in 1973 and is also headquartered in Boston.

The smallest of the Big Three, Bain has around 19,000 employees with offices in 65 cities around the world.

Bain's revenue in 2023 reached $6 billion, according to the Financial Times.

Bain is helmed by Christophe De Vusser, who serves as the worldwide managing partner and CEO.

Bain's average base salary for undergrads in the US is around $90,000, while for new hires with an MBA or PhD it was around $165,000, according to Management Consulted.

Despite the grueling hours and high expectations, Bain is known for a collaborative culture.

"We have a motto, 'A Bainie never lets another Bainie fail,'" Davis Nguyen, a former consultant at the firm, previously told BI. "We all work together from entry-level associate consultants to senior partners. I think that is what makes Bain's culture what it is — that we all work together to achieve a goal and make everyone around us better."

Bain is also considered the "frattiest" of the top firms and is known for a "work hard, play hard" culture, according to Management Consulted.

• Marc Andreessen argues against sharing too many personal details at work, urging professionalism.
• His comments come as some pandemic-era norms on remote work and DEI appear to be shifting.
• Experts suggest balancing authenticity with professionalism to maintain workplace harmony.

Marc Andreessen doesn't need to know everything about you.

The famous VC dismissed the notion of "bringing your whole self to work," arguing that certain things aren't appropriate to share in the office and beyond.

"Leave your full self at home where it belongs and act like a professional and a grownup at work and in public," the cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz wrote in a recent post on X.

Andreessen isn't the first to reject the idea. Yet his remarks come as workplace norms appear to be drifting further from pandemic-era mores around everything from office attire to remote work to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Megan Reitz, coauthor of the book "Speak Out, Listen Up," previously told Business Insider that bringing your whole self to work might sound good — or at least make some workers feel like their bosses care about their people as, well, people. Yet the advice often comes with limits, she said.

"When managers and leaders say, 'Bring your whole self to work,' they're leaving out the terms and conditions," Reitz said.

Those terms might involve sensitive topics like politics. In April, Google fired over two dozen employees who staged sit-ins at the company's California and New York offices.

At the time, CEO Sundar Pichai warned in a memo to employees that some actions weren't appropriate for the office.

"This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics," he wrote.

Andreessen's comments follow a contentious US election. On an episode of their podcast, "The Ben and Marc Show," Andreessen and A16z cofounder Ben Horowitz celebrated Donald Trump's reelection. Andreessen said Trump's win was an antidote to the "repression" that he and other crypto industry founders had experienced under President Joe Biden's White House.

An effort to encourage authenticity

The idea of showing up at work with all of your flags flying grew in popularity in the 2010s, Ella Washington, a professor of practice at Georgetown University, has told BI. However, she said, it has to be within reason and in accordance with what's acceptable at an organization.

"It is said in a way that is supposed to encourage authenticity, but the reality is in most workplaces, you can't bring your whole self. You can likely bring your whole professional self," Washington said.

She said that those in charge at work need to define what's acceptable, and then workers can determine whether the organization's stated values comport with their own.

"When it comes to business, it shouldn't be just based on our personal politics. And I know that's difficult for people to say because it's like, 'OK, wait. I can bring my whole self to work, but I can't talk about politics,'" she said.

Jake Telkamp, an assistant professor at the Hull College of Business at Augusta University in Georgia, previously told BI that fraught discussions over politics at work tend to leave people feeling depleted.

That, in turn, can leave them feeling less inclined to help their coworkers, he said. Besides, Telkamp said, the fights aren't likely to change someone's mind.

He said leaders and workers should instead focus on making people feel valued regardless of their background.

"When there was a high level of that, it reduced that negative effect of having liberals and conservatives on a team together," Telkamp said.