AI Is Driving Down the Cost of Outplacement

I just got back from three days at Cub Scout Adventure Camp with my family. Three glorious days of sun, slingshots, fishing, and time with our boys, who loved every minute.

This was my second year at the camp, and the tents have no electricity. Power strips in the dining area are the main place to charge devices, and last year, they were jammed with cords and devices. This year, only a handful were plugged in during meals.

Screens, chatbots, and AI slop are only making us hungry for connection and more face-to-face time with our friends and community.

That need for connection is one reason I’m looking forward to the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit on November 10-11 in San Diego. It’s a chance for our community of talent acquisition professionals to step away from the day-to-day, spend time together, and compare notes on the exciting changes and challenges shaping recruiting.

U.S.-based employers cut over 440,000 jobs in the first half of 2026, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The vast majority of those departing workers will not receive the kind of individual career coaching and job-search support traditionally associated with outplacement.

Traditional outplacement is a high-touch service employers purchase for workers who are being laid off. Historically, it has been delivered through a hands-on relationship with a human career expert who works directly with the employee on résumé and LinkedIn positioning, job-search strategy, networking, and interview preparation.

That level of support is expensive and usually tiered by seniority. Executives may receive months of individualized coaching, while lower-level employees usually get nothing at all. The model was built around human time, which made it difficult to extend meaningful support across a large workforce reduction.

Pelgo, a career-transition startup founded by former Boxed CEO Chieh Huang and former Cognizant CEO Francisco D’Souza, is an example of new technology disrupting an established category by sharply lowering the price and expanding the potential customer base. The company raised $5.5 million in a pre-seed round before emerging from stealth in February, and Huang said its clients have used the service to support offboarding in seven countries across four continents.

Layoffs can produce a surge of questions from departing employees. Pelgo is intended to serve as a first line of support, answering routine questions about COBRA, retirement accounts, severance, and benefits while routing individual or sensitive cases to an HR representative.

For exiting workers, the platform compares their résumés with available positions, identifies relevant experience, suggests how that experience should be emphasized, and flags skills they do not have. It also provides AI agents that help workers find and apply to jobs.

Pelgo’s basic service starts at $20 per departing employee per month, although there are more expensive options that include access to a human coach.

It is too early to know whether Pelgo’s AI-based outplacement services will deliver meaningful results for laid-off employees, but the price makes outplacement feasible for employee groups its clients would not have supported before. 

“There’s no coffee shop on earth that would provide [a barista] with a $2,000 outplacement service,” Huang said. “But if it’s 20 bucks, they start to think, ‘Well, this person did really well for us.’”

— David

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More Recruiting Insights

LinkedIn adds a button to report AI-generated ‘slop’. The day after I wrote in this newsletter about LinkedIn’s growing slop problem, LinkedIn announced a new "Seems like AI slop" button to report low quality content and the removal of the AI tool that rewrote posts using AI. I polled my talent acquisition connections on LinkedIn, and you all seem skeptical. (TechCrunch)

Greenhouse announces Notetaker. Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait announced that the company has released an AI notetaker that joins virtual interviews, records and transcribes conversations, and drafts notes tied to scorecard questions for interviewer review. (Daniel Chait)

Tech firms are bringing job interviews back in person to stop AI use. According to the article, some tech companies are adding in-person interview rounds because AI tools can help candidates complete virtual coding tests or answer questions without revealing their actual abilities.

I’ve read a few anecdotes about this, but the vast majority of the people I am talking to are adding more automation into their interview process, not backing away from it. Is this happening at your company? (Business Insider)

Webinars

Hiring Changed. Recruiting Didn’t. How TA Teams Can Level Up Now

August 4, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Hiring has changed dramatically since 2020. Most recruiting models haven’t. TA teams are being asked to act as strategic advisors, market analysts, and operational problem-solvers – often with fewer resources and higher expectations than ever before.

Mike Rasmussen will take an honest look at why more tools, more activity, and more reporting haven’t automatically produced better hiring outcomes. He’ll show what it looks like when TA teams stop managing requisitions and start shaping decisions. (ERE)

Candidate Fraud AMA with Stacy Donovan Zapar

August 11, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Fraud Squad founder Stacy Donovan Zapar will lead an interactive discussion on how candidate fraud is changing hiring and what teams are seeing in their own pipelines. The session will explore a shift from reactive detection toward prevention, smart friction, and more resilient hiring processes, while previewing the deeper conversation she will bring to the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit. (ERE)

How to Hire for AI Fluency Now That It’s a Critical Skill

August 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Drawing on patterns from more than 60,000 AI-enabled technical interviews, CoderPad’s Bayo Ojuri offers a practical framework for defining, assessing, and scoring AI fluency by role. The webinar focuses on realistic exercises, fresh questions, consistent criteria, and observable signals that help hiring teams distinguish genuine capability from polished but shallow answers. (ERE)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

San Diego, CA
November 10-11, 2026

Talent acquisition is moving fast. The best leaders are not just chasing trends. They are comparing notes, testing new approaches, and learning from practitioners who are already deep in the work.

This November, the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit comes to San Diego for two days of practical insight, honest discussion, and peer-to-peer learning. You’ll hear real examples from recruiting teams tackling today’s biggest questions, from AI and automation to candidate trust, quality of hire, hiring manager alignment, employer brand, and recruiting at scale.

Experience the future of talent acquisition next month. We hope to see you there! (ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)