This year has been a wild ride for talent acquisition.

It began with a palpable sense of panic across TA. But over the course of 2025, I’ve seen leaders start to get a handle on AI: how it’s changing work, reshaping hiring, and what it means for their own careers.

Most of us have experimented with AI, personally and professionally. We learned what worked, and then what worked changed again, sometimes in a matter of weeks.

That isn’t going to stop in 2026. If anything, the only constant will be change, and it will be coming faster than ever.

Since taking over ERE Weekly, I’ve worked to make this newsletter a trusted voice for the TA community, a place to make sense of what’s changing in our work.

It’s a privilege to have your attention. My commitment to you is simple: even as AI slop becomes easier and easier to produce, the ideas here will — for better or worse — always be my own. And I’ll keep doing my best to cut through the crush of PR and hype.

This is the last ERE Weekly of 2025. I’m going to be taking a much-needed holiday break, but we’ve got big plans for next year, beginning with the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit.

We received incredible feedback from the last Summit, especially the quality of the sessions — the full videos are on ERE Pro — and the sense of community at the event. Next year we’re doubling down on the intimacy of the Summit, focusing on connection and quality conversations between our attendees and speakers.

As always, we’re going to focus on practitioner voices. If you’re doing something genuinely innovative and are willing to share it on stage, please reach out. We review every speaker proposal, and we’re building what we believe will be the strongest agenda in talent acquisition by curating for quality. We’d love for you to be part of it.

Happy holidays, and thank you for reading.

— David

P.S. If you found this newsletter valuable, chances are your colleagues will too. Feel free to forward it along—and if it landed in your inbox by way of a friend, you can subscribe here to get the next one directly.

Featured Story

Would You Hire a UC Grad?

UC San Diego’s admissions review found a nearly 3,000% jump in freshmen with math skills below high-school level, with about one in eight now needing remediation. Raghav Singh argues employers can no longer treat elite degrees as a reliable signal of baseline competence and should pivot to skills-based assessments, tighter onboarding diagnostics, and audits of AI screens that overweight education pedigree. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Unemployment rate hit a four-year high last month. The government shutdown caused the BLS to skip its October report, so this month’s data is particularly important. The November numbers beat expectations, but the bigger picture is not good. Over 100,000 federal jobs were lost in October, while healthcare hiring remains the only consistent sector with growth. (CNN)

DEI Died This Year. Maybe It Was Supposed To. Hands-down the best summary of the current state of DEI that I’ve read, from the corporate lip-service that spawned an industry in the wake of the George Floyd killing to the current cultural backlash. (Wired)

AI is triggering a quiet hiring comeback for some entry-level talent, say public company CEOs. A new Teneo survey cited by Business Insider says 67% of public-company leaders anticipate more entry-level hiring in 2026, suggesting firms will reconfigure teams around AI rather than simply cut headcount. At the same time, 59% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say that they view AI as a threat to their job prospects. (Business Insider)

US bank executives say AI will boost productivity, cut jobs. On the other hand, the productivity increases that companies expect to see from AI and automation has them continuing to predict more efficiency and less jobs. (Reuters)

The top 5 most common ways people say they're using AI in the workplace. According to a new Gallup poll, the percentage of employees that use AI daily has surged by 150% from Q2 to Q3 this year. (Business Insider)