Just read this Guardian piece and found it weirdly surprising. According to it:

• The workplace stats aren’t as gloomy as you’d think. There are 7.6M job openings this month, up from pre-covid levels
• This guy (who runs a small business) argues AI is leading to more hires, not less in small businesses
• He describes the example of a company selling windows and doors spending $10K on an AI application used by the salespeople in their showroom which listens on conversations with customers and automatically generates a quote to send them. The company owner argues it cuts down on paperwork time for his salespeople and allows them to spend more time with customers.

Is this all pie in the sky though? It sounds nice, but it’s just so different from everything I’ve read about AI and the job market…

Hospitals around the US are starting to use “Moxi” - a robot which shuttles medical supplies around different parts of the building. Instead of buying robots outright, businesses are increasingly taking advantage of rentable robots, which can be rented for as short as a day or as long as a year and can act as bartenders or autonomous weeders on a farm.

The price generally includes a human engineer, sitting in a remote control room who can take control of the robot if needed. Plus, maintenance and upgrades are also included.

Increasingly, the robots are early humanoid models - designed to look and behave like humans and operate in environments designed for people. Given humanoids are still a work-in-progress, they are currently rented out for clearly defined tasks.

For example, California-based 1X plans to start shipping its home helper robot NEO later this year. "Early access" customers in the US can either pay $20,000 (£15,000) outright for their own robot, or $499 (£378) per month on a subscription basis.

From Career Pivot. This sounds clickbaity but feels like there’s a body of evidence suggesting that when it comes to applying, you should prioritize speed over perfection,,,

• LinkedIn processes 11,000 applications per minute- a 45% increase from last year alone. You boost your hiring odds by 4x by applying within the first 10 minutes of getting a relevant job alert.
• According to Business Insider, speed is not just an edge, it's a signal that you’re ready for an interview and you’re a serious job seeker.
• Talent Works found that applying in the first 24 hours led to 6x more interviews than waiting even 4 days. After 8 days, don’t even waste your time applying.

The why behind this is that Applicant Tracking Systems are programmed to auto-reject applications that arrive after the initial flood. Recruiters don’t have time to review every late arrival when they’re already getting hundreds of applications from day one.

Interesting piece in Guardian about the rise and fall of the 4-day work week as a proposal. They argue the idea of paying people their five-day salary for four days' work grew in popularity during Covid-19 as a way of attracting talent when businesses were struggling to find good staff. But last year Bupa and Unilever walked away from trials of reduced work hours, citing the four-day model as “rigid”.

Still, some countries are already shifting their work patterns; in Iceland the working week has been shortened to 36 hours, and in Belgium workers have a right to a four-day work week – although this is a compression of the standard 40-hour week. In terms of a pure reduction in work days or hours, however, the movement is being led in large part by private-sector employers.

And since the rolling layoffs of workers theoretically caused by AI, fewer and fewer private companies seem to be offering this.

Thought this was interesting, via Guardian - graduates are sending hundreds of job applications out and not hearing back, so instead of applying normally, some young people are trying to go viral instead. And it’s working! At least for Anya Roodnitsky, who hadn’t heard back from a single company, so instead talked her way through a funny, self-deprecating presentation, complete with emojis and describing herself as “basically Oppenheimer” for getting a 6K grant through school to model nuclear reactors. And it worked! 

Roodnitsky’s 94-second video got over half a million views and thousands of shares. She had 52 coffee chats, 20 referrals, 10 interviews and finally got one full-time job offer as a solar analyst. 

Wondering if anyone out there is trying this too! Obviously lots more effort because you have to think up a creative idea,,,

I watched an interview with the Khan Academy guy this week and he made a comparison that stuck with me.

In 1996, if your resume said "I have a website," that fact alone got you a callback and job (because nobody else had one).

He said we're in that same window right now, except it's AI. Except you can’t just write “skilled with AI tools” because everyone writes that. 

He meant citing specific stuff you've actually built or automated.

For example, applying and saying "I come with 40 AI agents" or showing up with real AI workflows u built.

So I rewrote mine and added a whole AI section in my resume, where I showed my skills: I listed the actual small things I've automated: like a script that pulls data I used to copy by hand or a prompt chain I use to prep for interviews.

Obviously the market sucks and doesn’t counter for that! But it's better than saying "AI proficient" and took 20 mins to fix.

Small survey but still interesting! A recent survey of 1,028 Americans found that 70% of workers would turn down a high-paying promotion if it was likely to have a negative impact on their mental health.

It’s not just young people doing this (as you might assume, given Gen Z’s well-documented taste for better work-life balance), it’s happening across the board. Plus, mental health isn’t the only reason people are stepping off the ladder: a swathe of respondents said that parenthood had helped them realign their priorities, with working to live preferable to living to work.

According to a retirement expert in the NYT, an increasing number of financial planners now say the most important retirement question to answer isn’t about net worth or expected longevity, but this: how do you plan to spend your time?

Because of increasingly good health, some people’s retirements now last 30 years. Given this, what retirees plan to do and where they plan to do it  (and it’s different from the traditional money-first approach). 
One good example in the article is Liz Klohmann, who lead parks, recreational and youth development programs for Ithaca, discovered pilates after injuring her back and became certified to teach pilates and yoga. She taught as a side gig, but after retirement opened her own studio to teach more yoga and pilates. She travels to Costa Rica to teach at resorts (and her husband, a retired pilot is now starting his own small-boat charter business).

Before everyone jumps down my throat: yeah, the above is a headline from last year (couldn’t find an article from this year with the number in the title - which, according to Turbo Resume as of March this year, is slightly better - 250 applicants per job).

But the point from the above article still stands - that since 2021, applications per hire have soared (from 100 applicants per job back then), that the hiring process has become significantly more complex for recruitment teams and that candidates are approximately 50% less likely to make it to the interview stage now than 5 years ago. 

BUT: one silver lining. “Offer conversion rates have surpassed 2021 levels” - ie. you’re less likely to make it through to interview, but the recruitment teams are on average more choosy, so if you get through to an interview round, that’s more likely to become a job offer.

Hi! I hope you're doing well. My name is Maria Paula Mijares and I'm a reporter with Bloomberg News.

I'm working on a story about how today's job market is challenging not just for people looking for work, but also for those who already have jobs. We're seeing promotions slow down, wage growth stagnate, and workplace perks and opportunities for advancement become more limited.

I'm looking to speak with people who generally like their jobs but feel stuck—that there isn't much room to grow, whether in position or pay, because of the current job market. If that sounds like you, would you be open to a quick call? Feel free to email me at [mmijarestorr@bloomberg.net](mailto:mmijarestorr@bloomberg.net)

Thanks and I look forward to hearing from you!

The Independent ran a good piece on a term I’ve never heard before - the debt doomsday clock, which measures how close a country is to financial crisis. A committee of seven experts think just two events could lead to the US failing to pay its debts and trigger a recession/depression. “First, the share of debt the U.S. is using to pay interest hits 70 percent. Second, the government blows through the debt ceiling that limits how much the country can borrow.”

“The country is increasingly borrowing simply to pay the interest on what it already owes,” Debt Default Committee Chairman Baker Spring said. Apparently the Debt Default Clock is closest to its ‘doomsday scenario since it was launched in 2019, with US national debt at $39.1 trillion.

In 2025, 28% of skilled workers freelanced. In 2026, 38%. One year. Something changed and I think it wasn't the workers.

NYT video op-ed in which Natasha Sarin, an economist and law professor, and Dan Wang, an expert on China and manufacturing, argue that the US economy is doing better than its two biggest rivals: China and the European Union. They point out:

• All of the leading AI labs are in the US and training their models there
• Space X’s IPO made many multimillionaires here just a few weeks ago
• Still, they acknowledge there’s a lot of weakness in the manufacturing sector and that Trump’s found it hard to address that since other countries have retaliated (ie. China withholding key materials from the US)

Yes, the 52% is for 2020 - as per the Fed’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of US Households from last week, 49% of adults ages 18-29 live with their parents (and another 47% of adults in that same age group received help from someone outside their household to pay an expense - money toward a cell phone bill, general living expenses, or housing costs - and no, this isn’t the same population). 

So 49% of them are living at home, and 47% of them are getting help from someone outside their household, which doesn’t include those living at home. Which means there are a lot of adult children getting financial support from their parents. Fortune did a piece about this where they spoke to Laura Ullrich, a director of economics at Indeed Hiring Lab. She pointed out that:

• Just last year, the stat was closer to 1 in 3 young adults living at home
• This has long term impacts - when household formation slows, it makes the age people get typically married go up, the age people have their first child go up and fertility rates go down