Hunter S. Thompson went to Las Vegas in March 1971 to write a glorified photo caption. Sports Illustrated wanted about 250 words on the Mint 400 desert motorcycle race.
He turned in 2,500 and the magazine rejected them. I know the feeling of overwriting.
A month later he went back for the National District Attorneys Association’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Rolling Stone ran the result as a two-part serial in November of that year, and the book followed in 1972. Thompson said he put a fictional framework over what started as journalism, and part of that framework was squashing the two trips into one.
I’m doing a version of that, I guess.
He had a month between trips. I have five days. (Point: me)
His assignment was 250 words and it turned into a book about the American Dream. Mine is whether an HR agent works. (Point: Thompson)
If all goes to plan, you should be getting this in your inbox as I am in the air.
Rising was 17,000 people at one vendor’s conference. HR Tech is more than 7,200 people and 400 vendors who each want to tell you theirs is the one that works. Also, a shout out to the four of those vendors sponsor 3Sixty Insights’ coverage this year, so thanks to Insperity, Paylocity, Tavio and Lytiqs.
Both shows will give me the same story about AI in HR. I’m going in with four questions about what’s pushing it, and they’re for the whole floor.
Where are AI agents doing real HR work?
Every vendor will have an agent on a stage. Very few will have one that has handled real employee requests long enough to break something.
What’s pushing this is that employees don’t want another portal. They ask in Slack, Copilot or ChatGPT, and the vendors are following them there. Redii is launching a benefits agent that lives in Slack, Claude and ChatGPT, which is great for the employee.
My guess is that it’s a problem for anyone who charges per seat, because an employee asking a chatbot isn’t logging in to anything. The HRIS and payroll systems behind the chat window aren’t going anywhere, and they still hold the data. So I think the real fight at this show is over who owns the chat window and who just becomes the database behind it.
Are companies building talent or just buying and cutting it?
Junior hiring is down and AI is getting blamed for the layoffs. I don’t buy that AI is the main reason. A cut makes a stock price happy this quarter, and AI is a good story to tell about it.
Forrester expects half of AI-attributed layoffs to be reversed. Careerminds surveyed 600 HR professionals who had made layoffs and found that 55.1% never formally considered reskilling or redeployment. Then there’s IBM, whose CHRO says the company is tripling U.S. entry-level hiring after rewriting every job.
I want to find out whether IBM is the exception or just the one willing to say it out loud, and what it cost them in training and manager time.
How do you know the candidate, and the data about them, is real?
Gartner found that 39% of 3,290 candidates used AI during the application process, and it predicts that one in four candidate profiles will be fake by 2028.
AI took the cost of applying, and of faking an application, down to almost nothing. Volume goes up, recruiters can’t read it all, and so they buy tools and data to do the reading. Every recruiting vendor says its data is better than the next one’s. Both of those things can’t be true at once, and I plan to ask each side how it knows a person exists and what it does when the check fails.
Who owns pay now?
The cause here is a law. Pay ranges in job postings pulled pay out of the comp team and put it in front of recruiters and hiring managers. The EU’s pay transparency deadline was June 7, and only four of 27 countries made it.
A recruiter can’t post a range for a job family with inconsistent leveling. So somebody has to decide what the job is worth before the posting goes up, and I want to hear who that is now and who takes the blame when the number is wrong.
I am in early Tuesday and out late Wednesday. 36 hours in Vegas. What could go wrong?
What else is going on this week?
HR Tech Preview: I Have Some Questions. Steve Smith is bringing four questions to HR Tech in Vegas, including whether the frontier models are here to partner or replace and who’s accountable when an agent gets it wrong.
Reference Checking With James Lord. I love this episode of Laurie Ruettimann‘s Punk Rock HR, where James Lord of Refapp explains that a background check tells you about convictions while a reference tells you about character. Reference checking has changed a lot (and not).
How to Use Salary Ranges to Improve Your Job Posts. SHRM research found 66% of organizations that list pay ranges said applicant quality went up, and Katrina Kibben has good advice to go with it: keep the range narrow.
Workday Rising Road Report. Mike Wood‘s road report from Workday Rising covers the fixes and new tools Workday showed off. It was great spending some quality time with him last week.
Why B2B Software Vendors Are Struggling: The Marketing and Sales Mistakes Costing You Deals. Nick Biron‘s 3Sixty Insights video covers longer sales cycles, fewer leads and more deals lost to “no decision,” all despite AI investments. I’ve seen these over and over again.
$4.9B Went Into HR and Work Tech Through Q3. Right in time for HR Tech, George LaRocque has his Q3 numbers: half the money landed in 11 deals, and deal count is up 14%.
The Context Economy. Brian Fink says an AI agent can surface 500 plausibly qualified engineers before your coffee cools, so the future of recruiting is better context, not better search. Context is going to be one of the biggest levers.
High Token Costs of AI Are Pushing Corporates Away. Josh Bersin says his clients tell him some Workday and SAP tools may cost $20 or more in tokens each time an employee files an expense report. People at Workday Rising were clamoring for cost controls too.
Senior Vice President of Whatever. The old rules keep getting revisited, and Robin Schooling points to a study finding listings for salaried manager jobs jumped 89% right around the FLSA overtime threshold.
This Requires a Revolution. Maybe We Start With the Book. Jess Von Bank‘s book, Mother of Disruption, launches October 27 with the ebook up for pre-order now, and I can’t wait for this one (my review is coming next week).
Recruiting Brainfood: Issue 523. Hung Lee keeps capturing the biggest news in recruiting and beyond, and issue 523 includes CFOs forecasting a hiring decline and Synthesia’s “Impossible Job Interview.”
What I’m Questioning This Fall Event Season. Chris Havrilla argues agentic AI is turning the consolidation-era strengths of SAP SuccessFactors, Workday and Oracle into vulnerabilities, and he has good questions for the fall event season.
PERM Suspension: US Talent Impact. The Talent Intelligence Collective reads the October 8 PERM suspension of eight employers as mainly a Microsoft and Adobe event, with an estimated 3,200 green-card cases stalled. It’ll be an interesting ride for these companies.
Sometimes Nothing Keeps Me Together at the Seams. Jason Seiden walks through the songs that mean something to him, from Van Halen’s “Right Now” to Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” the last song he remembers hearing before becoming a dad. I love a good song lyric.
Pen Pal. Love this: Tyler Weeks found a poem on Wikipedia during a funk he calls The Doom and wrote one back to Walt Whitman, and a three-and-a-half-year correspondence followed.
Who Gets Paid. Another SHRM whoops: Kristy McCann opens her roundup with a jury ordering SHRM to pay $400,000 to an applicant with Type 1 diabetes and a medical alert dog, ten months after a different jury hit it with $11.5 million.
Who Decides What Counts as Work? It’s good to see Jackye Clayton posting more, and her roundup covers Santos v. Lidl, where the Second Circuit revived a wage claim from an employee who had to arrive 15 minutes early.
30 Years in HR. Still Learning From My People. After 30 years in HR, Seth McColley says relationships and community are what matter, and the HRSouthwest Conference reminded him of it. ABL: always be learning.
HC Insider: Oct 2026. Kyle Forrest‘s latest roundup is another great one, with a webcast stat: only 5% of organizations report substantial progress on the cultural changes AI requires.
Faster Isn’t Better. I’m a fan of this one from Felix Wetzel, who says removing admin only makes recruiters faster and does not make a single hire better.
Founders Want a Free Review of Their AI Governance Tools. Soribel Feliz gets DMs from founders wanting a free review of their AI governance tools, and asking about budget gets her blocked, ghosted, or told they’re not paying. Hey guys, I don’t think we need to do this.
Why AI-Generated Text Is Like Processed Food. So much of this rings true for me. Steve Hunt compares AI-generated text to processed food, cheap and bland, and cites The Economist’s point that much of the pain of writing is the pain of thinking.
Some of the Scariest HR Tales Involve Worker Classification. The spooky HR tales from Tami Nutt are good, like the one about departments hiring contractors HR didn’t know about.
Joining the Global Power 150 Women in Staffing 2026. Eynat Guez, CEO of Papaya Global, made the Staffing Industry Analysts Global Power 150 Women in Staffing list, so congrats to her and the other winners.
Welcome Lemon, the Strategy Firm for HRTech. Congrats to Sarah White on her new venture.
In the news
Workday Expands AI Ambitions With C1.ai Identity Platform Acquisition via CIO
Slack Steps Out From Behind the Desk via The AI Economy
20 CHRO Exits in 2026: What’s Driving Health System HR Turnover via Becker’s Hospital Review
Third of Young People Have Fallen for a Recruitment Scam, Survey Finds via People Management
NRF Forecasts 4.2% Holiday Sales Growth, Muted Seasonal Hiring via Retail Dive
Katie Zacharia and the Real Problem With Workers Embellishing Their Credentials via Business Insider
Wanted: Chief Small Talk Officers. Awkward Applicants Welcome via Axios
LinkedIn’s New AI Recruiter Is Looking for You. Can It Find You? via LinkedIn
HelloFresh Workers Claim Physical Abuse and Denied Bathroom Breaks in Class-Action Suit via The Guardian
Anthropic’s New Fund Could Help Address AI’s Impact on Jobs and Workers via The Economic Times
What NLRB’s New General Counsel’s Course Means for Employers via HR Daily Advisor
DOL Suspends 8 Employers From PERM: What It Means via Boundless
US Lawmakers Propose Raising H-1B Salary Threshold to Nearly $140,000 for Some Workers via ETHRWorld
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh Keeps October Rate Hike in Limbo, Warns AI Could Trigger a ‘Very Bumpy’ Transition: ‘No Free Riders’ via TradingView
Are Your Workers Actively Sabotaging Your AI Rollout? via Human Resources Director
EEOC Chair Signals Scrutiny of Labor Unions Over Discrimination via SHRM
Anthropic Apparently Offering $190,000 for an Executive Assistant, Despite Agentic AI Advances via Fast Company
Employees Feel Like They’re Working a ‘Two-Job Job’ Amid AI Transformation via HR Brew
AI Will Handle Many Tasks, Though Most Workers Believe It Won’t Replace Them, Survey Finds via Staffing Industry Analysts
Robots Can Handle a Third of Physical Jobs, but Not Yet Cost-Effectively, Anthropic Says via HR Dive
Flexible Work Is Not a Location Policy. It Is a Test of Organisational Trust via Workplace Insight
That’s it for the week!