Career development

 3h

AI hiring is creating a sea of sameness


Claire Bahn is a serial entrepreneur, CEO, and Founder of Claire Bahn Group (CBG), a leading strategic marketing communications and branding agency. CBG specializes in public relations, strategic communications, personal branding, executive branding, reputation management, social media management, video production, podcast production, and promotion.

Ironically, human resources may be one of the... first business disciplines to automate away some of its own humanity.

AI is already deeply embedded in hiring. It screens résumés, helps match candidates to roles, drafts outreach and increasingly shapes how employers and applicants connect. That's no longer theoretical. Recruiting is now the top HR function where organizations are using AI, according to SHRM's 2025 research.

Most of the conversation around AI adoption in HR has focused on efficiency. Faster screening. Better matching. Less administrative burden.

Fair enough. Hiring is hard, and most HR teams are under pressure to do more with less.

But there's another side to this shift that's getting far less attention: The more hiring is shaped by AI, the more candidates are learning to present themselves for AI. And the more they do that, the more interchangeable they become.

That's the real risk I see right now.

See also: AI: How HR can look beyond the 'noisy now'

We're creating a candidate pool full of polished, optimized, algorithm-friendly professional narratives that sound strong at first but are increasingly hard to distinguish from one another. The same keywords. The same structure. The same tone. All of it cleaned up, smoothed out and often generated by the same invisible machine.

To be clear, this isn't an anti-AI argument. I'm not suggesting HR leaders abandon useful tools or go back to manually sorting every application. AI can absolutely make hiring more efficient, and there's real value in that. But we need to be careful not to hand over the most important part of the job.

HR teams aren't just there to process applicants faster. Their role is to identify people with judgment, communication skills, credibility, adaptability and real potential. That gets much harder when everyone is being trained, directly or indirectly, to sound the same.

That should matter to candidates, of course. But it should matter just as much to CHROs and HR leaders.

When the hiring process gets flooded with carbon-copy applications, speed may increase, but clarity doesn't always improve.

The candidate who knows how to optimize for an AI-shaped process may not be the same candidate who brings the strongest judgment, the clearest thinking or the best long-term fit. SHRM recently reported that 19% of organizations using automation or AI in hiring said their tools had overlooked or screened out qualified applicants.

That one-in-five number should get HR leaders' attention. At that point, the question is whether AI is helping identify the best talent or simply rewarding optimization.

Are we building a stronger hiring process or just a faster one that misses the point?

What makes this even trickier for HR leaders is the false-positive problem. A candidate who has been heavily optimized for AI-driven hiring may look exceptionally strong on paper while revealing much less depth in practice. The résumé is cleaner. The language is sharper. The interview answers are more polished. But polish isn't the same thing as judgment, and fluency isn't the same thing as fit.

When hiring systems reward candidates for sounding right rather than being right, organizations run the risk of mistaking presentation for substance. That doesn't just make it easier to miss qualified people. It also makes it easier to move the wrong people forward with more confidence than they've actually earned.

For years, job seekers were told to refine their narrative and communicate their value clearly. That wasn't bad advice. But now we're in a different environment. Candidates aren't just polishing their message; many are outsourcing it. They're using AI to rewrite résumés, tailor LinkedIn profiles, generate cover letters, prepare for interviews and smooth out every rough edge in the name of presenting well.

The result is a strange kind of sameness. Everyone looks polished. Fewer candidates feel memorable. And memorability matters more than most people want to admit.

Hiring is about bringing in people to add value

When employers hire, especially at the leadership level, they're not just hiring a checklist of qualifications. They're hiring someone they trust to think clearly, communicate well and add value in rooms where judgment matters. They're hiring for how someone can handle pressure, ambiguity and responsibility. Those things become much harder to assess when everything has been over-optimized.

This is where authenticity stops sounding like a buzzword and starts carrying real weight.

In an AI-heavy hiring market, authenticity becomes more valuable because it's one of the few things that's still difficult to fake well. A distinct point of view, a clear voice, a believable career story and examples rooted in real experience all help someone stand out in ways generic résumé polishing can't.

For CHROs, this means the hiring process can't be reduced to a purely automated exercise. AI can support recruiting, but it shouldn't override years of hiring instinct and experience. AI is a supportive tool. Not a replacement.

AI can help with sorting, summarizing and reducing repetitive work. It can help screen candidates faster. It can help hiring teams move with more consistency. But it shouldn't be a substitute for human judgment, especially when assessing traits such as trust, communication, leadership presence or strategic thinking.

The future of getting hired can't become a contest to see who can best optimize themselves for some software. And the future of hiring shouldn't be built around who stands out after being filtered through the same machine.

The organizations that land the best hires will be the ones that use AI to reduce friction without erasing discernment. They'll move efficiently, but still leave room for real evaluation and conversation.

In a hiring market increasingly shaped by AI, the real differentiator may be the one thing a machine can't fully manufacture: A person who sounds unmistakably like themselves. more

Maria Peres


Career development 18h
I work as a waitress in a small restaurant. When another waitress job opened, I suggested hiring my 19-year-old daughter. She needs a part-time job while studying. But the manager said no. He thinks we might be dishonest and cheat him. I don’t understand how we could do that or why it’s a problem when my daughter works with me. Can you explain?

  • Hope Bediako

    3h

    Also, many organizations do not engage several me,bers from the same family. Not even partners of staff members.

  • Kenneth Nwala

    16h

    It’s understandable that you feel confused. From the manager’s perspective, hiring close family members in the same workplace can raise concerns about... conflict of interest, for example, favoritism, covering for each other, or handling money together in ways that might be harder to monitor. Even if you and your daughter would never do anything dishonest, managers often try to avoid situations where family ties could create doubts or make discipline more complicated. In short, it’s less about you personally and more about a general workplace policy to protect fairness and trust. more

Career development

 5h

Sandburg Hosting Free Community Career Development Series | Prairie Communications, LLC


This spring, Sandburg is hosting three separate career development workshops that are free and open to the entire community. Associate Director of Workforce Development and Community Education Jessa Morgan shares the details:

"Held on our Galesburg campus and led by our Career Development Coordinator Tracy Engstrom, we start up with 'Power Up Your LinkedIn Profile' on April 21 from noon to 1 pm.... It will be in our Building G, Room G108A. It is about helping people stand out online, building their network, and attract job opportunities," says Morgan.

"Continuing with this type of series, we have the 'Resume 911' on May 12 from 8 to 9 am. You can bring your resume, or you can start from scratch and get quick, practical feedback. Then we will go into an 'Interview Bootcamp' on May 19 from 4 to 5 pm. We will walk through real interview questions and strategies, so people can feel confident walking in," Morgan adds.

Links to register for these workshops with Sandburg can be found on their names above. more

Career development

 8h

Why China jobseekers use dating apps for work, recruitment sites for matchmaking


Chinese jobseekers are now turning to dating apps to search for work, while some recruitment platforms have become places to connect for dates instead.

The youth unemployment rate in China among the 16 to 24 age group, excluding students, has remained above 16% since last July. Many young people express their frustration over the increasing challenges of finding a job. Some report applying for... hundreds of positions daily but receiving only a few responses.

In this landscape, some individuals have taken an unconventional approach by seeking jobs on dating apps.

They openly express their job-hunting intentions in their profiles, or seek networking opportunities after matching.

One Chinese woman recounted matching with a man with whom she did not initially feel a spark, but soon discovered he worked at her dream company.

He ultimately assisted her in planning her career and referred her for a position.

Another jobseeker mentioned her preference for using dating apps for job searching, noting that people tend to respond more respectfully.

Conversely, some individuals are utilising recruitment apps for dating.

One user shared a screenshot where she inquired about a recruiter's relationship status on a job-seeking platform.

A human resource professional recalled inviting a woman to consider a position at her company. Though the job application did not succeed, they ended up having such an engaging conversation that they became friends.

In 2024, Boss Zhipin, a major online recruitment service provider in China, rebranded its company rating platform, Kanzhun, into a dating app.

Its promotional slogan is "Looking for dates is like screening résumés.."

Unlike many other platforms that may allow users to misrepresent their job and assets, Kanzhun claims to verify user information, including name, profile photo, educational background, job, income, marital status and personal assets.

For instance, to verify income, the app requires users to upload a screen recording of their individual income tax application.

Additionally, it restricts users from swiping through candidates' profiles unlimitedly, presenting only 10 profiles each day - similar to a job interview.

When users indicate their preferences, the app offers several job-related options, such as "working in state-owned enterprises" and "having start-up experience".

The concept of a recruitment-turned-dating app has resonated well with many, who believe it helps prevent dishonesty and acts as an effective means of risk control.

A founder of a high-end matchmaking platform that caters exclusively to graduates of top universities noted that material conditions have increasingly overshadowed emotional connections, becoming a date's most valued attribute over the past decade.

This shift is also evident in the trend of referring to partners as "teammates" and "roommates," suggesting a relationship based on collaboration rather than romance.

However, not everyone is comfortable using these two types of platforms interchangeably. Some users complain of harassment from job recruiters because of their attractive profile photos.

One woman shared that while she was job hunting, a divorced man professed his love to her. "Who knows how troubled I was?" she wrote, accompanying her post with the screenshot on social media.

Searching for jobs on dating apps also carries risks, including the potential for personal information leaks or encounters with scammers impersonating recruiters.

Zhang Yue, a lawyer with the Shanghai Quncheng Law Firm, pointed out that this is largely due to the lack of verification mechanisms on these dating platforms.

Moreover, users face challenges in protecting their rights if their information is misused on dating apps. - South China Morning Post more

Anonymous member


Career development 1d
Hi! I had a job interview and everything was going well, but I got stuck on the question about my weaknesses. If I tell the full truth, I feel like I’ll never get hired. But if I hide the negative parts and they show up later at work, that won’t be good either. What should I do? Should I be completely honest or only partly?
1   

  • Kenneth Nwala

    16h

    The best approach is to be strategically honest. Choose a real weakness, but frame it in a way that shows self-awareness and growth. For example,... instead of saying “I’m disorganized,” you could say, “I used to struggle with prioritizing tasks, but I’ve been improving by using project management tools and setting clearer deadlines.” This way, you’re not hiding the truth, but you’re showing that you take responsibility and actively work on improving. Employers value honesty combined with problem-solving and self-development. more

    1

  • Randall Giancaterino

    21h

    Tell them: "My challenge is that I struggle with a "work-life" balance. I tend to have a strong work ethic."

    1
Load more...

Emil Kaminsky


Career development 5d
Hi! Need some advice. There’s a woman in my team who has a difficult life situation - she has two kids and takes care of her elderly mother. She often makes mistakes in her reports. I’ve been quietly fixing them and not criticizing her.
But lately I’ve been thinking about replacing her with someone who makes fewer mistakes. I know this would really upset her.
What would you do in my place?

1   

  • Taher Mashud

    22h

    As she makes mistakes and you always correct them, you are part of her problem-solving. Engage her in conversation with a little criticism, and she... may change, instead of sacking her to sorsen her plight. more

    1

  • Moses Bol Alier Pach

    2d

    From the context that " experience is the best teacher" personal call her and have a close door meeting with however before revealing out the reason... you called her, preliminarily have some discussions regarding her situations in order to calm her,this would make us consider you as one of the close co_workers and will certainly gain trust from you. Later inform her about the meeting .
    Don't forget that she is capable that's why you employed her first however the dramas she is going through are the one causing the mess
     more

    1
Load more...

Career development

 9h

Forget Job Search, Start Building Your Next Adventure


Forget Job Search, Start Building Your Next Adventure

Why displaced tech workers should stop searching for the old role and start co-designing a new pathway.

There is a particular kind of shock that comes when a tech, or any worker, loses a job in the middle of an AI-driven labour squeeze.

What usually follows is recognisable and deeply human: people revise their résumés, reach out quietly to... former colleagues, scroll job boards late into the night, and try to convince themselves that the market has tightened but not fundamentally changed, that this is painful but temporary, and that the next rung is still there if they search hard enough. In the first phase of displacement, most people are not thinking like founders. They are thinking like wounded employees. They are trying to get back onto the ladder they were just pushed off.

That reaction makes sense because it is exactly what the old social script trained them to do. For decades, the promise was broadly legible. Families prepared children for launch, education supplied the bridge, employers absorbed them into the first rung of adult work, and progression was meant to turn effort into stability. The script was never perfect, and it never worked equally for everyone, but it was coherent enough that millions of people could build a life around it. That coherence is now weakening, and tech workers are among the first to feel how exposed that makes a person.

The trouble is that many displaced workers are not facing a market that is merely nervous. They are facing categories that are thinning. In some cases, the old job is not simply harder to get. It is becoming less necessary in the form they once knew. That is why job search alone may not be enough as a psychological or economic strategy. The person who loses a role in a shrinking category can spend months trying to re-enter a market that is quietly redesigning itself against them. The labour-market promise has not only weakened at the edges. In some places, it has begun to withdraw from the middle.

This is where the conversation has to become more honest than the usual work-futures commentary. Big change not only produces fear. It also produces openings or opportunities, though they rarely arrive in a comforting form. They arrive looking unstable, ambiguous, and slightly frightening. If you are inside that kind of shock, opportunity is unlikely to feel like a bright horizon. It is far more likely to feel like the unnerving possibility that the old map may no longer be the right map, and that you may have to design something rather than simply find it.

One of the deepest ironies of the AI transition is that the same system that makes a worker expendable inside the old firm may, for some, become the collaborator that helps them build the next rung themselves.

That sentence should not be romanticised. Dispossession is real, and some households do not have the financial runway, emotional margin, or spare capacity to treat a layoff as an entrepreneurial invitation. Some workers will need another job quickly, and there is no dignity in pretending otherwise. This is not a universal rescue story; it's one viable redesign path for some, especially for people with judgment, who are confident they understand a real problem space, and who have enough household stability to survive the unstable early phase. The caution matters because false hope is only another form of cruelty.

But the opportunity is real enough to deserve serious attention.

For a displaced tech worker, the old instinct is to search for the nearest surviving version of the old role. That may still be the right move in some cases. Yet another question is now pressing forward: has AI lowered the minimum scale required to build something smaller, leaner, and more sovereign than a traditional firm job ever allowed?

That question becomes more plausible once entrepreneurship is stripped of startup mythology. The strongest version of this path is not "build it, and they will come." That fallacy belongs to a cheaper fantasy of business formation.

The more serious path is customer-backed co-design. Customer-backed co-design is not an abdication of authorship. It is a way of grounding authorship in lived demand rather than fantasy. It begins, not with performance, but with service. It begins with the possibility that, in the middle of disruption, a person might still make something useful, careful, and genuinely worthwhile for people they can help.

Customer-backed co-design matters because it changes the order of operations. The displaced worker does not begin with a polished answer and then hunt for demand. They begin with a real frustration in the world, a group of people already living with it, and a willingness to shape the offer through contact with the people it is meant to serve.

A displaced worker does not begin by guessing what the market wants. They begin with a live problem-space, which means starting where pain, inefficiency, delay, or unmet need is already visible.

An experienced product manager might notice that small professional-services firms are drowning in fragmented client onboarding, proposal revisions, and follow-up administration, then sit down with several owners and co-design a lightweight service that combines AI-assisted intake, proposal drafting, and project tracking around the workflow those firms already use.

A laid-off software engineer might see that independent allied-health clinics are losing hours each week to patient communications, form handling, and post-appointment summaries, then work with two practice owners to shape a service that reduces administrative drag while fitting the privacy, tone, and rhythm of their actual work.

A former customer-success lead might realise that small B2B companies are buying AI tools but failing to integrate them into everyday team behaviour, then co-design an "AI workflow reset" offer with operators who are frustrated by tool sprawl and low adoption, blending process redesign, staff training, and practical implementation support. In each case, the founder is not starting with an abstract idea and then looking for a market. They are starting where a market is already hurting.

That changes the venture's emotional architecture. The first customers are not passive buyers waiting at the end of a funnel. They become early witnesses, practical critics, and co-shapers of something that is still taking form. That does not remove risk, but it does alter the emotional burden. Instead of trying to summon certainty in isolation, the founder begins in dialogue with reality. The business stops feeling like a performance of confidence and starts becoming a disciplined act of listening, shaping, and offering.

AI then changes the economics of that path. The same tools that helped make workers expendable inside the old firm may also lower the threshold for building something viable outside it.

We should stop pretending that human primacy is still the baseline condition of knowledge work. In speed, scale, recall, and first-pass cognitive output, AI has already altered the hierarchy, and capitalism will not spend its momentum trying to restore the old one. Once a cheaper form of capability becomes available, the dominant system no longer treats human primacy as sacred to be defended. It treats it as a cost to be challenged. That is why the more serious task now is not to wait for the old hierarchy to return, but to design a human future under the new conditions.

Used well, AI tools can support prototyping, administration, research, service design, communications, documentation, scheduling, first-pass analysis, and content production. They can handle work that once made a solo practice or a tiny firm feel impossible. They can allow one person or two trusted peers to operate at a level of capability that previously required a much larger team.

That is part of the unsettling truth now entering view: the technology that compresses labour inside the corporation may also compress the minimum viable size of a new venture outside it.

Still, this path has to be handled with discipline, because co-design can easily slide into custom chaos. If every early customer gets a different version of the business, the founder becomes trapped in endless bespoke work. The point is not to surrender the business to every preference voiced in the room. The point is to co-design the problem and the core offer while the founder continues to do the architectural work. The customer helps surface what matters. The founder decides what becomes the repeatable core. That is the difference between responsive design and strategic drift.

This is also where the deeper human distinction matters. The worker most likely to navigate this path is not simply the best technician. It is the person who can define a problem well, interpret context, exercise judgment, hold boundaries, and turn scattered signals into a coherent offer. In other words, the move is away from point-solution identity and toward systems thinking. It is away from "I perform this one function" and toward "I can understand the problem, shape the offer, test it in reality, and stand behind the consequences." That is why this path sits so naturally beside the larger argument that human value now has to be defended at the level of reasoning, accountability, and coherent judgment rather than repeatable output alone.

There is another reason this path matters. People who have spent years inside corporate systems are often waiting for clarity before they move. They want the whole map. They want assurance that the dots will connect before they take a step. But redesign rarely arrives that way. A person may see, at first, one live problem, two interested customers, three rough conversations, and a fragile first offer that is not yet elegant. That does not mean the path is wrong. It may simply mean they are at a stage where reality has to answer questions that planning alone cannot. Some of the most important reconfigurations in a life only make sense in reverse, once movement has already begun.

That is why fear of mistakes becomes so important here. A person leaving the corporate frame can feel that every false start is evidence that they should retreat to job search alone. But if they are trying to build something new in a changed market, mistakes are not always proof of failure. Often, they are the cost of refining taste, discovering what customers actually value, and learning where the real shape of the business lies. A venture born from labour shock will almost never emerge fully formed. It becomes more coherent through contact, revision, embarrassment, correction, and the stubborn willingness to improve what first arrives in rough form. That is not a weakness of the path. It is often the path.

Seen from that angle, the displaced tech worker is not only facing a labour crisis, but also a design question.

This is my brief homage to Steve Jobs. He understood something that matters to everyone who experiences being tossed out of their job. In Apple's tribute to Steve Jobs, Make Something Wonderful, the deepest thread is not startup mythology, founder glamour, or the fantasy of instant vision. It is the idea that a human being can respond to the world by making something careful, useful, and worthwhile for people they may never even meet. That matters in this context because the displaced worker is not being asked to perform entrepreneurial theatre. They are being challenged to look at a real-world frustration, work with the people living in it, and shape something that genuinely helps. Seen that way, building a business is not only a survival strategy. It can also become an act of service, care, and authorship under changed conditions.

There is another Steve Jobs thread running beneath this whole question. Not the cult of genius, but the quieter discipline he returned to again and again: make something wonderful, trust that some dots only connect in reverse, and do not treat mistakes as proof that the path is wrong. For a displaced worker trying to build under pressure, that sequence matters. You may not see the whole future in advance. You may only see one real problem, one possible customer, one rough offer, and several awkward early attempts. But that does not make the effort naïve. It may be exactly how a more viable future starts to take shape.

Do you keep placing your economic dignity entirely at the mercy of a thinning corporate ladder, hoping to be readmitted to a structure that has already shown how quickly it can discard you? Or do you at least consider whether this rupture is the moment to build something that relates differently to customers, differently to scale, and differently to your own agency?

That question will not have the same answer for everyone. Some people will find another role and do well. Some will need transition structures that only institutions or governments can provide. Some will not be in a position to take entrepreneurial risk. That is why the caution earlier in this piece cannot be treated as a ceremonial disclaimer and forgotten. Household runway, debt, caring obligations, and timing all shape what a person can realistically do next. A person may recognise the logic of redesign and still be unable to act on it immediately. That is not failure, it's part of the material reality through which any honest redesign has to pass. Families must not be left as silent shock absorbers for a system redesign they did not choose, and institutions calibrated to an older labour world cannot keep sending people into a changed reality and then treating the fallout as a private problem for households to absorb.

But for some displaced workers, especially in tech and adjacent knowledge fields, the venture path deserves far more serious attention than it usually gets.

Not as a motivational slogan, nor as Silicon Valley optimism. As a sober response to the fact that some categories are shrinking, some ladders have cracked, and AI has changed the minimum scale at which useful work can be organised.

That is why the right response to major change is not always to search harder for the old rung. Sometimes the more serious response is to begin with a real problem, involve the people who actually live with it, make something worthwhile for them with the best judgment you have, and let the path clarify through contact with reality.

And that may turn out to be one of the defining ironies of this period: AI may force you off the old ladder, and in doing so confront you with a challenging but consequential possibility -- that instead of spending your best years pleading for re-entry, this rupture may give you the chance to shape what comes next more deliberately than the old system ever allowed.

© 2026 Greg Twemlow. All Rights Reserved.

All rights are reserved. No license is granted for reuse, adaptation, certification, or commercial application of these terms or frameworks without prior written permission.

About the Author -- Greg Twemlow writes and teaches at the intersection of technology, education, and human judgment. He works with educators and businesses to make AI explainable and assessable in classrooms and boardrooms -- to ensure AI users show their process and own their decisions. His cognition protocol, the Context & Critique Rule™, is built on a three-step process: Evidence → Cognition → Discernment™, a bridge from what's scattered to what's chosen. Context & Critique → Accountable AI™. © 2025 Greg Twemlow. "Context & Critique → Accountable AI™" and "Context & Critique Rule™" are unregistered trademarks (™).

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "build the next rung" mean?

It means that if the old corporate ladder is weakening, some displaced workers may need to stop assuming their only path forward is re-entry into the same kind of role and instead begin designing a new form of work for themselves. The "next rung" is not a metaphor for blind optimism. It is a deliberate attempt to create something viable under changed conditions.

Is this article saying people should stop job searching?

No. The article is not arguing that everyone should abandon job search. It is arguing that job search alone may not be enough when a category is shrinking rather than merely wobbling. For some people, another job will still be the right move. For others, a more serious redesign may be necessary.

Who is this article really for?

It is aimed primarily at displaced tech workers and adjacent knowledge workers who can feel that the old promise of career progression is weakening. It speaks most directly to people who have judgment, domain knowledge, and some ability to shape an offer around a real problem, but who may still be in shock and instinctively looking for the nearest surviving version of their old role.

What does "customer-backed co-design" mean?

It means building with the people you want to serve, not guessing in isolation and hoping demand appears later. Instead of inventing a polished solution first, you begin with a real frustration, unmet need, or inefficiency that people already feel, then shape the offer through direct contact with them. It is a way of grounding authorship in lived demand rather than fantasy.

What is a "live problem-space"?

A live problem-space is an area where pain, friction, delay, waste, confusion, or unmet need is already visible. It is not an abstract idea. It is a problem people are already experiencing and would willingly help solve if a better option existed.

Why does the article focus on displaced tech workers?

Because tech workers are among the first to feel what happens when AI changes the economics of knowledge work. They are often close enough to the tools to understand the shift, but still vulnerable to the same labour compression those tools enable. That makes them both exposed to displacement and unusually well positioned, in some cases, to build something new.

Is this article saying AI has replaced humans?

Not in every meaningful sense. The deeper claim is that the old assumption of human primacy across routine cognitive work can no longer be taken for granted. In speed, scale, recall, and first-pass output, AI has already changed the hierarchy. That does not erase human judgment, authorship, ethics, or accountability, but it does mean the old baseline is gone.

Why does the article say capitalism will not restore the old hierarchy?

Because once a cheaper form of capability becomes available, dominant systems tend to treat human primacy as a cost to be challenged rather than something sacred to preserve. That is why the article argues that waiting for the old order to return is a weak strategy. The more serious task is to design a future under the new conditions.

How can AI help a displaced worker build something new?

Used well, AI can lower the threshold for small-scale creation. It can help with prototyping, administration, research, service design, communications, documentation, scheduling, first-pass analysis, and content production. That means one person, or a very small team, may now be able to operate with a level of capability that once required a much larger structure.

What does the article mean by "the venture path"?

It means a serious attempt to create a small business, service, practice, or firm outside the old corporate structure. In this article, that path is not startup mythology, founder theatre, or Silicon Valley bravado. It is a sober response to the fact that some workers may need to design a livelihood rather than merely seek permission to re-enter an older one.

What if I do not have the money, energy, or household stability to take that risk?

Then the caution in the article applies directly. This is not a universal rescue story. Household runway, debt, caring obligations, health, and timing all shape what a person can realistically do next. Recognising the logic of redesign does not mean you are immediately in a position to act on it. That is not failure. It is part of the material reality any honest response has to face.

Why does the article spend time on mistakes and false starts?

Because people leaving corporate life often assume that uncertainty is proof they are on the wrong path. The article argues the opposite. In a changed market, mistakes are often how a person refines taste, discovers what customers value, and finds the real shape of a business. False starts are not always evidence of failure. Sometimes they are the path itself.

What kind of person is most suited to this path?

Not simply the best technician. The article points toward people who can define problems clearly, interpret context, exercise judgment, hold boundaries, listen well, and turn scattered signals into a coherent offer. In other words, the strongest candidates are usually those who can think in systems rather than only execute a narrow point-solution.

What is the first practical step if this article resonates?

The first step is not to rush into branding, a website, or a product build. It is to identify a real problem-space, talk to people already living with that problem, and see whether a small, useful, repeatable offer can be shaped with them. The first task is not performance. It is contact with reality.

Is the article anti-institution?

No. It is critical of institutions that continue sending people into a changed labour world and then treating the fallout as a private problem for households to absorb. But it does not argue that institutions no longer matter. It argues that many have not adapted honestly enough to the conditions their students, workers, and families now face.

What is the main message of the article in one line?

If the old ladder is weakening, some displaced workers may need to stop pleading for re-entry and start designing what comes next more deliberately than the old system ever allowed. more

Emmanuel Ehimetalor
Career development 1d
so i work at upwork as a social media marketing expert with 5 star ratings and 100 jss but upwork just seems to be dead at the moment.

please any suggestions on where i can get quality jobs

Career development

 21h

The New York Times Promotes Bill Ruthhart to Senior Early Careers Editor to Strengthen Talent Pipeline Strategy


The New York Times has promoted Bill Ruthhart to senior early careers editor, expanding his role in shaping the newsroom's recruitment, mentorship, and training programs for journalists entering the industry.

Ruthhart, who joined the Times in 2022, has played a central role in guiding early-career journalists through fellowship and mentorship programs, working across résumé development, story... coaching, and newsroom training initiatives. In his expanded position, he will help coordinate and formalize the company's early-career strategy as it works to adapt its talent pipeline to evolving newsroom needs.

The promotion reflects a broader effort by major news organizations to invest more systematically in recruiting and developing journalists at the start of their careers, as traditional newsroom entry paths continue to shift and competition for emerging talent intensifies. At the Times, early-career programs have become a key part of its long-term staffing approach, particularly as digital-first reporting and cross-platform storytelling expand newsroom skill requirements.

Ruthhart's responsibilities have already extended beyond coaching fellows to include résumé and application review, journalism training, and coordination with external newsrooms to support job placement for emerging reporters. He has also been involved in educational programming through The School of The New York Times and mentorship initiatives tied to college students and early-career journalists.

Before joining the Times, Ruthhart spent more than a decade at the Chicago Tribune, where he covered Illinois politics, city government, and national elections, including coverage of Rahm Emanuel's tenure as mayor of Chicago and the 2020 presidential race. He began his journalism career at The Indianapolis Star, reporting on state government and multiple legislative sessions.

His background in political reporting and newsroom operations has informed his transition into training and mentorship roles, particularly in guiding early-career journalists through complex reporting environments and editorial standards.

In his new position, Ruthhart will also focus on expanding and structuring the Times' early-career initiatives, including refining curriculum components, coordinating outreach to universities, and aligning training programs with newsroom hiring needs.

The promotion underscores the Times' emphasis on building internal development pathways for journalists, as news organizations increasingly compete not only for experienced reporters but also for emerging talent capable of navigating data-driven and multimedia reporting environments. more

Career development

 21h

Resume Update: Add New Roles


I have a solid résumé template that I am happy with -- layout, fonts, skills, and education all stay exactly as they are. What I need is for you to weave one to two recent positions into the Work Experience section so the document reads as if it was always there. I will supply: * The current résumé in Word and PDF * Bullet points for each new role (titles, dates, key achievements) You will: *... Blend those details seamlessly into the existing format * Keep wording concise and achievement-focused, matching my voice * Preserve spacing, typography, and overall styling Once finished, please return an editable Word file and a print-ready PDF. A brief spell-check and light ATS optimisation would be appreciated, but no redesign is required. Quick turnaround preferred -- let me know if you can deliver within the next couple of days. more

Career development

 22h

Rite Foods Technical Trainee Program 2026: Deadline, Salary & How to Apply


Rite Foods Limited has officially announced the launch of its 2026 Technical Trainee Program, offering young Nigerians a rare opportunity to earn a salary while gaining hands-on industrial experience in the manufacturing sector.

The 12-month intensive training programme is designed to equip participants with practical technical skills, workplace experience, and career development opportunities,... positioning them for long-term employment within the company and the broader manufacturing industry.

With the application deadline set for April 17, 2026, interested candidates are urged to act quickly.

What the Rite Foods Technical Trainee Program Offers

The Rite Foods Technical Trainee Program stands out as a career-launching initiative for individuals interested in technical operations and manufacturing.

Participants will undergo a blend of classroom learning and on-the-job training, working alongside experienced professionals in a structured environment.

The programme focuses on building core competencies in machine operation, safety compliance, and production efficiency, which are essential skills in modern manufacturing.

Key Benefits: Salary, Training, and Career Growth

Successful applicants will enjoy several benefits aimed at supporting both their financial stability and professional development.

These include:

* Monthly salary throughout the training period

* Hands-on technical training in a real production environment

* Exposure to industry-standard manufacturing processes

* Opportunity for career advancement and potential employment

* Mentorship from experienced professionals

This combination of earning while learning makes the programme highly attractive to entry-level candidates.

Eligibility Criteria for Applicants

To qualify for the 2026 Technical Trainee Program, applicants must meet the following requirements:

* Possess an OND or equivalent qualification in Engineering or related disciplines

* Demonstrate a strong passion for manufacturing operations

* Be agile learners, result-driven, and committed to excellence

The programme is specifically tailored for individuals seeking to build a technical career in Nigeria's industrial sector.

READ ALSO

Nestlé CWAR Nesternship 2026: Apply for Paid Internship, Training & Career Boost

WTO Young Professionals Program 2027: Earn CHF 4,000 Monthly, Eligibility, & How to Apply

Key Responsibilities of Trainees

Selected candidates will be actively involved in production processes and will be expected to:

* Operate and monitor machines in line with standard procedures

* Ensure minimal material wastage and efficient production

* Maintain cleanliness and adhere to Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP)

* Follow health and safety regulations strictly

* Report faults and assist in routine maintenance

* Prevent product contamination and ensure hygiene standards

These responsibilities are designed to prepare trainees for real-world manufacturing challenges.

Application Deadline and How to Apply

Applications for the programme are currently open and will close on April 17, 2026.

Step-by-Step Application Process:

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted for the next stage of the recruitment process.

Why This Program Matters for Nigerian Youth

With rising unemployment and limited access to practical training opportunities, the Rite Foods initiative offers a valuable pathway for skill acquisition and employment.

By focusing on technical capacity building, the programme contributes to strengthening Nigeria's manufacturing workforce while empowering young professionals with industry-relevant experience.

For many applicants, this could serve as a stepping stone to long-term career success in engineering and production.

FAQ

What is the Rite Foods Technical Trainee Program 2026?

It is a 12-month training programme designed to equip young Nigerians with technical skills in manufacturing while earning a salary.

Is the Rite Foods trainee program paid?

Yes, selected candidates receive a monthly salary throughout the training period.

Who is eligible for the Rite Foods Technical Trainee Program?

Applicants must have an OND or equivalent in engineering or related fields and show interest in manufacturing operations.

What is the deadline for Rite Foods Technical Trainee Program 2026?

The application deadline is April 17, 2026.

How can I apply for the Rite Foods trainee program?

You can apply by sending your CV to [email protected] with the job title as the subject.

Does Rite Foods offer employment after the program?

While not guaranteed, the programme provides career development opportunities and may lead to employment based on performance.

What skills will I gain from the program?

You will gain skills in machine operation, safety compliance, production efficiency, and maintenance practices.

Is the program open to fresh graduates?

Yes, it is suitable for entry-level candidates, especially those with OND qualifications.

Where is the Rite Foods trainee program located?

The programme takes place in Nigeria at Rite Foods production facilities.

Why should I apply for the Rite Foods program?

It offers a unique chance to earn, learn, and build a career in Nigeria's manufacturing sector. more

SAJJABI BENJAMIN
Career development 6d
i just want to branch after my sernior four this year but it is hard to choose a course to do
1   

  • Taher Mashud

    1
    22h

    Resort to the field you think you have the potential in and a high interest in pursuing, not necessarily following any advice to make a wrong choice

  • kato harlod

    2d

    What do you want to be or become.
    Voccational courses are far much better than proffessional courses these days. take your time.
    Email me and I will... let you know the way forward
    katoharlod@gmail.com      more

Anonymous member


Career development 2d
Im new to my field and I need to gain clients. Any suggesstions on how to do this? everyone Ive approached gives their contact information but doesn't show up for the meetings

  • Taher Mashud

    22h

    Hire experts to do this on your behalf, and engage the media for advertisements

  • Taher Mashud

    22h

    Hire experts to do this on your behalf, and engage the media for advertisements

Dean Lee


Career development 2d
I used to think that when a man has a successful career, his wife would be proud and happy. But the more I work (and earn), the worse things get at home. My wife even said she might leave me if I don’t come home on time and spend more time with her and our child. What should I do? I don’t want to work less because I could lose opportunities.
4   

  • Taher Mashud

    22h

    Honestly speaking, knack her well well without excuses of tiredness, and keep her updated a little more often about your meetings, workshops,... trainings, almost everything related to your work, be it inside or outside your office, she must be in the know.  more

  • Abbas Isa Ruga

    23h

    The entire problem is not about spending time with her and your child, its about spending time with her, and that doesn't mean she wants you around... her all the time, but whenever you are getting intimate just do it well and make sure she got the pleasure she needs. Make your bed lively and healthy and all other problems will vanish. more

Load more...

Career development

 23h

Want to stand out on LinkedIn? Try this career strategist's top 3 tips for strengthening your profile


Every minute, LinkedIn users submit just north of 8,000 job applications, according to company data.

For job seekers, that can feel like a daunting number, especially as headlines about layoffs seem to infiltrate news feeds at a similar rate.

While LinkedIn isn't the only platform for searching job ads, it's the most popular, with a global user base of over one billion. So if you haven't updated... your LinkedIn profile in a while, whether you're actively seeking employment or not, it's time for a refresh.

Also: 'Job seekers have to be detectives': 3 signs that listing is a scam

"People want to see that you have a digital footprint and see that you have more context about who you are," said Sam Wright, head of career strategy at Huntr, a company that specializes in job search tools.

Here are three quick ways -- plus one bonus round -- to clean up your LinkedIn profile.

Think about the information you want a potential employer to know about you first, and make sure they can see it fast.

If you have impressive facts or stats, make sure no one has to dig into your profile to find them. In part, that means using your headline and about section.

The headline, for example, can go beyond your current job title. A post on LinkedIn profiles from the University of Washington advised professionals to use 10 to 15 words to describe both career focus and top skills.

Also: Job hunting? 5 ways you can stand out in 2026 - and beat AI screening tools

Wright recommended compiling your achievements and crafting a few sentences highlighting them for the about section.

"I like to remind people that we all have TikTok brains, eight-second attention spans -- hiring managers and recruiters included," Wright said.

If finding your most important information requires too much scrolling and clicking, odds are, a recruiter or hiring manager might not get there.

On your resume, you probably go into specifics about your past positions, not only describing your title and length of employment, but also your key achievements and responsibilities.

Make sure that information is also on your LinkedIn profile.

A 2025 guide from Rutgers University suggested using strong verbs and bolstering those bullet points with measurable numbers to tell what it calls your "professional story."

Also: Job hunting? Nothing beats human networks - here are 8 places to start

You should answer the question of what you actually did in your job.

Wright said that information helps with visibility, and it's easy to add since you've already got it on your resume.

You've likely seen rants on LinkedIn. Particularly after something like a layoff, you might be tempted to vent your work-related frustrations on the platform.

Remember that if you're on the job hunt, your target audience is recruiters and potential employers. Rants, however justified or deeply felt, are better suited for friends and family.

"You want to promote yourself as a professional that somebody wants to work with," Wright said.

And if you've posted a screed in the past, it's worth going back through old posts and deleting anything that might not represent you well.

While you're at it, you can use our guide to make sure your online presence beyond LinkedIn won't get you disqualified from a job you want, either.

Even if you're not on the job hunt at the moment, it's important to keep your LinkedIn profile polished and up-to-date.

Wright suggested a good time to revisit your profile is around when you do performance reviews at work. That way, you have your most recent stats and accomplishments at hand, and should you suffer a layoff or decide to start looking for a new gig, your profile is ready to go. more

Career development

 1d

Managing Well


Unintentional Outcomes as a Catalyst for Brainstorming

Taly Reich, Alexander Fulmer & Kelly Herd

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming

Abstract:

Companies increasingly engage in ideation exercises both with their employees and the public. One field experiment with Marketing and Sales employees at a candy company and four laboratory studies demonstrate a novel strategy to... promote ideation quantity and quality. They reveal that prompting people to reflect on a history of their own unintentional outcomes in different domains can promote subsequent ideation in brainstorming tasks. This occurs because reflection on one's unintentional outcomes can incite motivation to regain threatened control. We demonstrate this effect in various domains and in several different contexts that have practical implications for both organizational managers and individuals. Further, we identify a theoretically driven moderator of this effect, showing that the promotion of ideation occurs subsequent to control threats in domains perceived as relatively malleable, in which there is an expectation that control can be regained, but does not in domains perceived as relatively non-malleable.

Mind the Gap: AI Adoption in Europe and the U.S.

Alexander Bick et al.

NBER Working Paper, March 2026

Abstract:

This paper combines international evidence from worker and firm surveys conducted in 2025 and 2026 to document large gaps in AI adoption, both between the US and Europe and across European countries. Cross-country differences in worker demographics and firm composition account for an important share of these gaps. AI adoption, within and across countries, is also closely linked to firm personnel management practices and whether firms actively encourage AI use by workers. Micro-level evidence suggests that AI generates meaningful time savings for many workers. At the macro level, in recent years industries with higher AI adoption rates have experienced faster productivity growth. While we do not establish causality, this relationship is statistically significant and similar in magnitude in Europe and the US. We do not find clear evidence that industry-level AI adoption is associated with employment changes. We discuss limitations of existing data and outline priorities for future data collection to better assess the productivity and labor market effects of AI.

Résumé Washing

Janet Gao, Jun Oh & Joseph Pacelli

Harvard Working Paper, March 2026

Abstract:

We examine whether workers strategically revise their descriptions of past job histories on résumés to signal alignment with employer preferences for ESG, a phenomenon we term résumé washing. We find that résumé revision behavior reflects both labor market incentives and workers' intrinsic identities. Workers in management roles are more likely to revise their résumés to signal alignment. Democrat-leaning workers are more likely to include ESG language than Republican-leaning workers. Résumé revisions also exhibit strong political cycles. Additions surge after the 2020 Biden election and deletions rise after the 2024 Trump election. Exploiting variation in the timing of ESG commitments by major prospective employers, we show that workers begin adding ESG language to their résumés when potential employers initiate ESG commitments. Finally, we show that strategic résumé revisions are associated with greater job mobility and higher promotion rates both internally and externally.

Internal Versus Market Pay References in Knowledge-Intensive Firms

Claudine Gartenberg & Elaine Pak

Organization Science, forthcoming

Abstract:

How do firms balance market competitiveness with internal cohesion when setting employee pay? We examine this question using confidential compensation data on 19 million U.S. employees across 479 firms varying in knowledge intensity. We construct precise pay reference groups: internal benchmarks based on skill-equivalent peers across functions and market benchmarks based on same occupation, skill level, and region at other firms. We find that in low knowledge-intensity firms, pay is equally sensitive to both internal and market benchmarks, whereas in high knowledge-intensity firms, pay becomes decoupled from market forces and aligns with internal benchmarks. Internal pay alignment also increases following chief executive officer transitions that prioritize innovation. These patterns are driven by high-skilled employees in roles requiring complex problem-solving and collaboration. Moreover, firms with greater internal pay alignment generate more patents, including breakthrough innovations. Altogether, our findings reveal that although some firms maintain close market alignment, knowledge-intensive firms appear to decouple pay from market forces. This is particularly the case for their skilled workers, consistent with firms prioritizing internal social dynamics in contexts where complex problem-solving and collaboration are important for value creation.

Beyond Demo Day: Sorting and Value Added in Startup Accelerators

Youn Baek & Deepak Hegde

NBER Working Paper, April 2026

Abstract:

We study who joins startup accelerators, how founders sort across programs, and which accelerators improve startup outcomes. Using a comprehensive sample of about 750,000 U.S. startups linked to 329 accelerators, we adapt the teacher value-added framework from education economics to estimate accelerator value added (AVA) while accounting for sorting. Selection is systematic: observably better ventures are more likely to enter accelerators and to sort into higher-AVA programs. Yet accelerator performance is highly dispersed. Most accelerators have negative value added relative to a no-accelerator benchmark, while a small right tail generates large gains. High-AVA accelerators predict better long-term outcomes, including acquisition, employment, revenue, and valuation, and are also more likely to accelerate the shutdown of weaker ventures. We validate AVA using internal applicant data from a large U.S. non-equity accelerator.

Managers Allocate Additional Tasks to Intrinsically Motivated Employees: Exploring Mechanisms, Consequences, and Solutions

Sangah Bae & Kaitlin Woolley

Organization Science, forthcoming

Abstract:

Intrinsic motivation is highly valued in the workplace with employees encouraged to express the meaning and enjoyment they derive from their work. However, the current research identifies a cost of intrinsic motivation: managers allocate additional tasks to employees they perceive as more (versus less) intrinsically motivated. We establish this effect across task allocation paradigms using managers' actual employees, profiles of real workers randomly assigned to managers, and a laboratory experiment with a salient financial downside for the chosen employee (Studies 1a, 1b, and 2). Managers' preference to allocate additional tasks to intrinsically motivated employees is serially mediated by the naïve belief that these employees will enjoy the additional task (i.e., motive oversimplification), which, in turn, reduces perceived risk of burnout from the additional work (Study 2, Supplemental Studies 2 and 3). Notably, this preference persists in a six-day longitudinal study with repeated allocation decisions (Study 3) and can negatively affect organizations (Study 3 posttest). Two theory-driven interventions attenuate this preference by intervening on managers' decision environment (Study 4) and beliefs (Study 5). This research advances theory on motivation, person perception, and task allocation decisions and offers insights and solutions for the paradoxical burnout experienced by individuals who derive joy from their work.

Entrepreneurial deviance as bright and dark character virtues: The Harry Potter study

Martin Obschonka et al.

Small Business Economics, March 2026, Pages 949-975

Abstract:

Despite its centrality to entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial deviance remains poorly understood and hard to capture empirically. This study offers a fresh, character-oriented perspective, proposing that deviance may stem from deeper, but fundamentally different, personality structures. Drawing on a fiction-based personality typology from the Harry Potter saga, we use machine-learning methods to transform this typology into measurable constructs. We analyze large-scale data from the TIME Magazine Harry Potter Quiz at the regional level (N = 795,829) and a two-wave individual-level replication and extension study (N = 820). We consistently find that Gryffindor and Slytherin character types, capturing bright and dark forms of deviance, jointly predict entrepreneurial outcomes. These effects persist even when accounting for established entrepreneurial personality profiles. Our findings underscore the conceptual and empirical value of viewing entrepreneurial deviance through the lens of character diversity and equifinality. Both heroic and self-serving forms of deviance may play constructive roles in entrepreneurship, inviting renewed reflection on the moral complexity of entrepreneurial personality and behavior.

Collaborative Work Management Technologies and Managerial Intensity in U.S. Corporations: An Examination

Piyush Gulati, Arianna Marchetti & Phanish Puranam

Management Science, forthcoming

Abstract:

Do digital technologies reinforce managerial hierarchies or, instead, make them less relevant? We propose that the answer to this question depends on the nature of the technology: specifically, its relative impact on managers' capacity to supervise and on subordinates' need for supervision. Applying this framework to collaborative work management (CWM) technologies that facilitate real-time collaboration, communication, and task coordination, we predict that the adoption of such technologies should reduce managerial intensity and increase decentralization in organizations. To test this prediction, we use a difference-in-differences design on a novel data set built from over 26 million job listings (Lightcast) and over 20 million social profiles (Revelio) matched to 3,017 U.S. public firms in Compustat, which we track over the period from 2010 to 2019. We find that over the observation window, CWM technology adopters show a 3% reduction in managerial intensity and a 5%-7% increase in nonmanagerial skills linked to decentralization in their job postings in the years following adoption. The pattern of results is robust to a battery of validations, alternative measures, and specifications, and it strongly supports the idea that these technologies enable collaboration and make organizations less hierarchical along the dimensions that we studied. more

Anonymous member


Career development 3d
I had a job interview yesterday and most of the questions weren’t about my experience or skills, but about my personal life. They asked about my boyfriend, our plans and even our intimate relationship. I’m shocked. Is it normal to ask things like that?
I feel really uncomfortable and gross after they basically dug into my private life

3   

  • Patrick Igbana

    3d

    What could be the position you were being interviewed for? Maybe the interviewer needed a partner. Other wise, those questions were not for regular... interviews more

  • Dorothy Awuor

    3d

    This is not normal, probably the interview panel had no idea about the job requirements

Load more...

Career development

 1d

CONSULTING MAGAZINE OPENS SUBMISSIONS FOR 2026 BEST FIRMS TO WORK FOR


Annual employee-driven ranking accepts nominations through June 4; winners to be honored at awards dinners in Chicago

DALLAS, April 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Consulting Magazine, part of the Arc network, has officially opened survey submissions for its 2026 Best Firms to Work For program, the annual ranking that identifies the consulting profession's top employers based entirely on feedback from... their own professionals. The submission period runs through June 4, 2026.

Unlike peer-nominated or third-party industry awards, the distinction is self-directed and data-backed -- meaning the evaluation is driven solely by the consultants who work at each firm. Each year, thousands of consulting professionals submit comprehensive surveys about their day-to-day workplace experience. Those responses are then assessed using objective, measurable criteria to determine which organizations set the standard for firm culture, employee satisfaction and career development.

"What makes this distinction so powerful is that it strips away the marketing and gets right to the truth of the employee experience," said Michael Webb, Director of Consulting Magazine. "In a highly competitive talent market, a firm's culture is its ultimate differentiator, and there is no better measure of that culture than the honest feedback of its own professionals."

For more than two decades, Consulting Magazine has recognized the most outstanding workplaces in the consulting profession. Being named one of the year's Best Firms to Work For is a distinction few achieve and many covet. Honorees consistently differentiate themselves through a relentless commitment to investing in their people -- a commitment that translates directly into exceptional client service.

To ensure fair and accurate peer comparisons, the 2026 honorees will be recognized across four size-based categories:

* Boutique firms: 20-50 billable personnel

* Small firms: 51-249 billable personnel

* Midsize firms: 250-999 billable personnel

* Large firms: 1,000 or more billable personnel

The evaluation covers six areas of employee satisfaction: culture, compensation and benefits, career development, client engagement, work/life balance and firm leadership. Scores are measured against all other qualifying firms.

To qualify, firms must employ a minimum of 20 full-time, billable consultants and have at least 10% of those consultants complete the survey. Specific minimums apply by firm size: boutique firms of 20 to 50 consultants require at least 10 completed surveys; small firms of 51 to 249 require at least 20; midsize firms of 250 to 999 require at least 30; and large firms of 1,000 or more require at least 100.

Every qualifying, participating firm receives a basic benchmarking report detailing its raw scores and placement across the six measured categories. Firms seeking deeper operational insights may purchase expanded bespoke reports that include category scores for all survey questions, unfiltered employee feedback and comparative scoring measured against the top three firms in aggregate.

"Earning a spot on this list is the ultimate testament to a leadership team that truly champions its greatest asset: its people," Webb added.

Honorees will be celebrated at an exclusive awards dinner Thursday, Sept. 17, 2026, at The Midland Chicago in Chicago, Ill.

Consulting firms interested in participating may begin the survey process at surveymonkey.com/r/F3KGDKM. The nomination deadline is June 4, 2026.

About Consulting Magazine

Consulting Magazine is the leading publication covering the business of management consulting. Published by Arc Network, it produces annual rankings, awards programs and editorial coverage recognizing top firms and professionals in the consulting industry. For more information, visit consultingmag.com.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/consulting-magazine-opens-submissions-for-2026-best-firms-to-work-for-302742043.html more

Career development

 1d

Direct Legal Job Boards That Actually Work


Legal job hunting often feels like a maze. You scroll through listings, only to question if they're real or outdated. However, direct-from-employer legal job boards are changing that experience.

These platforms connect candidates straight to law firms, corporations, and government employers. As a result, they remove middle layers and reduce guesswork. For legal professionals and recruiters, that... shift matters.

Learn more from this guide: Direct-from-Employer Legal Job Boards: The Complete Resource

Meanwhile, competition in the legal job market keeps rising. Therefore, using smarter tools is no longer optional. It's essential.

Direct-from-employer legal job boards feature listings posted by hiring organizations themselves. You can also browse attorney job listings on specialized platforms that focus only on law firm roles. Unlike aggregators, these platforms prioritize verified openings.

For example, many traditional job boards scrape listings from multiple sources. However, that approach can lead to duplicates or expired roles. Direct boards avoid this issue.

Additionally, candidates gain more confidence in the application process. You're not guessing whether a job still exists.

Legal professionals value precision. Therefore, they often prefer tools that deliver accurate and relevant results.

Direct-from-employer legal job boards meet that need. They streamline the search process while improving job quality.

First, these boards reduce outdated listings. As a result, candidates spend less time chasing dead ends.

Moreover, employers post roles with clear expectations. This clarity helps applicants tailor resumes more effectively.

Applying directly saves time. Instead of navigating multiple redirects, candidates interact with the employer's system.

Consequently, the hiring process feels more transparent and efficient.

These platforms often focus on legal-specific roles. For instance, you'll find positions for associates, partners, and in-house counsel.

Additionally, niche practice areas receive better representation. That makes searches more relevant.

Recruiters also gain significant advantages. Direct posting gives them more control over candidate flow.

Employers attract candidates who are serious and informed. Because listings are specific, applicants tend to match requirements more closely.

As a result, recruiters spend less time filtering unqualified resumes.

Direct job boards allow firms to present their identity clearly. For example, they can highlight culture, values, and practice strengths.

Meanwhile, this branding helps firms stand out in a crowded legal hiring market.

Posting directly reduces reliance on third-party systems. Understanding direct hire vs contract legal roles can also help both employers and candidates make better decisions. Therefore, recruiters can manage applications more smoothly.

Additionally, they can update listings in real time without delays.

The legal hiring landscape continues to evolve. Consequently, direct-from-employer job boards are adapting quickly.

Many platforms now integrate with applicant tracking systems. This connection improves workflow efficiency for employers.

Furthermore, candidates benefit from smoother application tracking.

Some boards use analytics to suggest roles. For example, they may recommend positions based on skills or experience.

As a result, candidates discover opportunities they might otherwise miss.

Niche platforms are gaining traction. These boards focus on specific practice areas or career levels.

Therefore, they offer more tailored opportunities for both employers and job seekers.

Using these platforms effectively can improve your job search results.

Start by narrowing your search. For instance, filter by practice area, location, or experience level.

This approach saves time and increases your chances of success.

Even with direct listings, personalization matters. Tailor your resume and cover letter to each role.

Additionally, highlight skills that align with the employer's needs.

Check listings regularly. Because jobs update quickly, timing plays a key role.

Meanwhile, set alerts when possible to stay ahead of new opportunities.

Don't rely on a single source. Additionally, using proven legal job search strategies can help you stand out in a competitive market.

This strategy broadens your reach and improves outcomes.

Direct-from-employer legal job boards are reshaping how legal professionals find work. They offer accuracy, speed, and better alignment with career goals.

For law students, lawyers, and recruiters, the benefits are clear. You gain access to verified listings and a more efficient hiring process.

As the legal industry evolves, these platforms will continue to grow. Therefore, adapting to this approach can give you a meaningful edge in a competitive market. more

Career development

 1d

Surveilled and Sold: Privacy and Sanctuary in Portland


When I first see Nemorio, he is sitting by himself at the Voz Worker Center in Southeast Portland, Oregon. The 56-year-old is bundled up in neon-colored winter clothes and watching a soccer game on his phone.

Job hunting looks a lot different than it used to. When he joined the Worker Center 14 years ago, he left behind standing on a cold street corner for a safer, warmer place to find work.... Nemorio is a professional landscaper, but he takes all sorts of jobs: a request to help someone move, paint their house, clean their business's exterior, or other construction or landscaping-related needs. A Portlander of 22 years, he has worked for some of the same clients for over a decade.

Nemorio is one of dozens of immigrant day laborers searching for work at the Worker Center. Along with central heating, coffee, pastries, and conversations to pass the time, the Center also provides a degree of security for its workers, some of whom are undocumented. A poster that says in big block letters, "NOT OPEN TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC," is pasted over the front door, next to a Ring camera. Volunteers regularly sign up for shifts to sit on a folding chair and guard the front door. Often bundled up in rain jackets with hot tea in hand, they observe the Worker Center's surroundings -- watching who approaches the building. With increased ICE presence in Portland over the past year, their job is to alert workers if they spot masked agents.

When I initially approach Nemorio, he politely declines to participate in an interview. But he stays in the same room as I speak to another member: a house cleaner from Oregon City, fresh off a two-hour bus ride into town. Not long after we begin talking, one word piques Nemorio's attention -- enough to join in on the conversation.

"Camera."

The house cleaner and I are discussing high-tech cameras that are installed all over the city of Portland. They're hard to miss, with big solar panels and a recording of a male voice repeating the same message: "This property is being monitored by video surveillance 24/7." When I show Nemorio a photo I took of a camera in a Lowe's parking lot, he recognizes it immediately. He's seen the cameras everywhere, he says. He begins listing grocery stores like WinCo and Fred Meyer. He remembers one in particular at La Tapatia, a Latino grocery store in Gresham -- a city bordering Portland. "ICE was looking for somebody there," he says.

He's seen the cameras out in nearby towns like Beaverton, too. "There are more undocumented immigrants and more troubles there."

Any one of those cameras in the parking lots he named could be capturing his truck's license plate every time he drives past, silently recording his routine movements.

And any of them could've been the one that led to an encounter last October, when an ICE vehicle followed Nemorio's truck, landscaping equipment in tow, after he left a work site. He says he was lucky, because the agents eventually split off to follow a different car instead.

"It's better now," he says. "I'm lucky to have no problems. Maybe Jesus protects me."

This happened to him despite living in a sanctuary city within a sanctuary county and state. In 2026, Nemorio and other immigrant Portlanders face daily threats and fears of being targeted or profiled while driving. Surveillance technologies are helping federal immigration agents bypass state and local sanctuary protections to reveal immigrants' personal information and track their movements -- in many cases, leading to their arrests without a warrant or reasonable suspicion.

Over the past year, immigrants in Portland and across the country have had growing suspicions of being watched and followed. It's not unwarranted: ICE arrests quadrupled last year, and street arrests increased by 1100% nationwide. The number of ICE detainees went up 75% in just one year.

This has all been disrupting immigrants' daily lives. A 2025 survey by KFF and the New York Times shows that 41% of immigrants are worried that they or a family member could be detained or deported. About 14% avoided seeking medical care. Around 13% were not showing up to work. While their fears are valid, what they don't know is how they're being surveilled.

These concerns have prompted Portland community organizers to take action. Elizabeth Aguilera is the Director of Communications of an immigrants' rights advocacy group called Adelante Mujeres. Last year, they started organizing volunteers to drive children to school and pick up groceries for families who are afraid to leave their homes.

Allies in Portland's city government are also responding in their own ways. As Portland's only immigrant City Councilor, Angelita Morillo co-sponsored an emergency ordinance last fall to codify Portland's sanctuary city declaration into law. "The community wanted us to indicate that we were working on these issues and taking a critical look at them," says Morillo.

While Nemorio doesn't know the mechanisms behind the cameras, he has a hunch about why they're here.

"Somebody is looking in the cameras," he says.

Tools of Control

The cameras are automated license plate readers (ALPRs). They are typically installed on road signs or bridges. They can also be mounted on police cars or left on mobile trailers for extended periods of time in the parking lots of grocery stores, shopping centers, banks, and gas stations.

You've most likely seen them around your neighborhood. ALPRs are used in all 50 states by over 4,000 local law enforcement agencies. In the Portland metro area, there are approximately 130 ALPRs installed. Nationwide, these ALPRs have captured millions of people's movements -- likely including yours.

ALPRs record every vehicle they see, capturing and logging its license plate number and characteristics, along with the date and time. These cameras all feed into one network, which can reveal a person's daily routines -- recording what streets one takes to go to work, school, places of worship, medical appointments, and so on. Those details are then stored in an easily searchable database.

It's a system that runs with little to no oversight.

Police don't need a warrant to look up a license plate. Curiosity alone is often enough reason to search for a track record of a car's movements. Officers can construct a list of targeted plates and receive an immediate alert once an ALPR detects one, detailing exactly when and where it was found. Police can also access data from cameras owned by private businesses such as Home Depot and Lowe's, which are popular gathering sites for day laborers.

Two companies, Flock Safety and Vigilant Solutions, corner the market on selling these tools to law enforcement agencies and private corporations. These companies claim their missions are in service of public safety and crime solving. But both have been known to collaborate with the Department of Homeland Security on immigration enforcement efforts.

ICE routinely taps into vehicle location data collected by local and state police departments for deportation operations. A lack of federal data privacy protections allows ICE agents to buy access to private databases through data brokers. The agents can use these databases to match license plate numbers and ALPR data to DMV records as a loophole circumventing sanctuary laws. It's a quick and easy way to reveal someone's image, address, and daily movements.

During President Donald Trump's second term, license plate reader data -- combined with subscriptions to private data brokers -- are increasingly being exploited to find and seize immigrants. ICE does this without warrants across the country, including in sanctuary cities and states like Portland, Oregon.

"About a third of the detentions are happening out in community, and usually [while someone] is in a vehicle going between one place to the other," Aguilera says. "Part of that is because of these surveillance techniques, including tracking license plates."

Local sanctuary protections only function on the local level, determining what city and state resources and personnel can and can't be used for. They are not enough to stop federal agencies from buying access to data brokers and using surveillance technology to monitor Portlanders. And these sanctuary protections have not stopped the Portland Police Bureau from sharing its residents' information with a database ICE can access.

Tracked and Hunted

According to Aguilera, most detentions in Oregon last year occurred along the highway through Washington County, where one-sixth of all Latino Oregonians live. Smaller towns within the Portland metro area (like Beaverton, where Nemorio was followed) are where day laborers often find work. 90% of these vehicle stops, Aguilera says, usually happen between six and nine a.m., when people are heading to work or school.

On an early morning last October, a farmworker in Woodburn, Oregon was on her way to a job. Just like Nemorio, that same month -- in a town 30 minutes away -- she was being followed while in transit.

But unlike Nemorio, her car was pulled over by DHS officers. The agents who stopped her did not ask her name or show any papers. They broke the glass of her car window and detained everyone in the car. Immigration enforcement swept her up along with 30 others that day. Their arrests were part of an ongoing surveillance and deportation campaign in Oregon called Operation Black Rose.

"They sit and surveil and run license plates," says Aguilera. "And then they're doing sweeping arrests without [reasonable] suspicion."

In February, a federal judge issued an emergency order to halt warrantless arrests in Oregon. By that point, over 800 ICE arrests had occurred in Oregon between January and October of 2025, with over 500 immigration arrests in Portland alone.

"What does that say about us as a sanctuary city?" Marina Ortiz asked the city council at a hearing in September. Ortiz is co-chair of Latinx PDX, a resource group for city employees. "Sanctuary must be more than a word. No one should have to fear that a lunch break or commute home could change their life forever. Yet for many city employees and community members, that fear is real. We need more than your symbolic words."

Incomplete Promises of Sanctuary

A month after Ortiz's plea, Portland City Council passed an emergency ordinance to codify the city's sanctuary status. The ordinance legally prohibits all Portland city employees and resources from assisting any federal agency with immigration enforcement.

"I'm really not a fan of resolutions that say we care about X group of people but we're not gonna do anything materially for them," Councilor Morillo says. In 2017, during President Donald Trump's first term, the city council passed a resolution declaring Portland a sanctuary city. "City Council encourages all Portlanders to unite and work together to promote kindness and understanding in our shared community," the city council wrote in the conclusion of the 2017 resolution.

But resolutions are not legally binding. They merely express the formal opinion of the city council. Without specific policies that define what sanctuary status means in practice at the city or state level, these declarations remain mere political statements.

This criticism was echoed by city residents who urged city council to codify sanctuary protections at the public hearing in September.

"Prior to this year, sanctuary policies sort of felt like the equivalent of a company changing their logo to a rainbow during June," said Portland resident Jack Dickinson at the hearing. "We no longer live in a world where that can be justified as sufficient."

But even with the new emergency ordinance, local sanctuary laws cannot override federal policies. That means sanctuary laws cannot protect immigrants from deportation or criminal prosecution by the federal government.

By the time the city's sanctuary status became law last October, immigration arrests in Oregon had shot up almost 80 times more than the year before.

Portland resident Nick Kai remembers that two of those arrests involved immigrant fathers in their neighborhood in the same week. Kai is a trained legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild. One of Kai's neighbors was taken by ICE on his way to work. At the same hearing, Kai shared that they now drive their friend's daughter to school because her mother is afraid to leave her home.

"True sanctuary means safety in every part of your daily life, not just when you enter a city building," says Kai. "It's sanctuary in schools, churches, hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, community centers -- every essential thing that we need. No one should live in fear of being torn from their family simply by leaving home. That is sanctuary."

Contracts Reveal Police Share Portlanders' Data

Both the Portland Police Bureau and the Sheriff's Office in Multnomah County, which encompasses the city of Portland, have denied any active contracts with Flock Safety. Yet in January 2026, the police bureau confirmed a recent contract with Motorola Solutions, the owner of Vigilant Solutions.

This relationship suggests Portlanders' private information may be being shared without their knowledge, regardless of citizenship status.

"That information is being funneled systematically all over the country to private data brokers," says Laura Rivera, a senior attorney with Just Futures Law, an organization that provides legal support to immigrants' rights organizers. "[They] sell it to law enforcement agencies and private parties that could exploit it."

Since 2017, Vigilant Solutions has sold license plate data to DHS and its agencies via Thomson Reuters, a data broker company. The data is searchable through a Thomson Reuters investigative database called CLEAR.

Through its new contract with Motorola Solutions, any plates read by ALPRs owned by Portland Police Bureau will feed into CLEAR -- right into the hands of ICE -- in direct violation of the city's ordinance and the state's Sanctuary Promise Act.

That's not the only way ICE can access Portlanders' data. A public records request Feet in 2 Worlds submitted to the Portland Police Bureau showed its active subscription to LexisNexis Accurint, a different investigative database with access to millions of people's names, social security numbers, addresses, vehicle registrations, utility bills, and ALPR data, among many others.

In an email to Feet in 2 Worlds, Sergeant Kevin Allen -- the Public Information Officer at the police bureau -- said that the bureau uses the database to "assist in identifying and locating subjects involved in investigations."

The police bureau's subscription includes access to another investigative database originally developed for the federal government after 9/11. The Accurint Virtual Crime Center (AVCC) was created to conduct mass personal data searches of Muslims to generate suspect lists following the 9/11 attacks.

As a condition of access to AVCC, the police bureau and other local law enforcement agencies must share their data with the Public Safety Data Exchange database (PSDEX). PSDEX compiles data from thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide.

ICE has access to both AVCC and PSDEX.

The Portland Police Bureau is handing over its data to the same investigative database ICE uses to find immigrants. That means even if Portland law enforcement is not directly cooperating with ICE, Portlanders' data can still be accessed by ICE.

Importantly, ICE can also access jail release data through AVCC. ICE often asks local police to hold someone in their custody for an extra 48 hours through a form called a detainer request. Once ICE knows the exact date and time of a detainee's release, agents can arrive at the jail and directly transfer them into federal custody. The police bureau's FAQ says that "officers shall not honor or comply with federal agency immigration detainer requests," in compliance with sanctuary city laws. Their data-sharing with PSDEX -- formalized in a contract -- undermines that claim.

When Feet in 2 Worlds reached out to the Portland Police Bureau, Sergeant Kevin Allen denied any participation in PSDEX via an email statement. "We do not see this anywhere in the current contract with LexisNexis," he wrote. He also denied that the police bureau is contractually required to share license plate data and jail release data to LexisNexis's databases, including the post 9/11 tool AVCC.

Yet the addendum Feet in 2 Worlds received via a public records request states that the police bureau "agrees to submit to LexisNexis Customer Data Contributions."

"ICE is looking to exploit data brokers increasingly to power its deportation machine," says Rivera, the attorney with Just Futures Law. "We're seeing right now under this government how data brokers and other surveillance tools are being weaponized to criminalize our community members and expose them to arrest and deportation on a new scale."

Without strong federal data privacy laws preventing the sale of people's personal information, sanctuary protections will remain toothless against these loopholes. Meanwhile, the federal government is building and bolstering a vast surveillance infrastructure to harvest our data -- targeting immigrant communities first.

Feet in 2 Worlds is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Ford Foundation, the Fernandez Pave the Way Foundation, the Elizabeth Bond Davis Foundation, an anonymous donor, and contributors to our annual NewsMatch campaign. more