No More Volunteers: College Sports Meets Collective Bargaining
Posted on November 12, 2026 Leave a Comment
The University of Tennessee’s flirtation with collective bargaining blows the lid off the NCAA’s favorite parlor trick-operating a multibillion-dollar entertainment conglomerate while pretending the workforce is strictly there for the library privileges-and hands HR and recruiting leaders a masterclass in what happens when you dodge basic people operations for a century.
Way down yonder, in a little old town in the Smoky Mountain foothills known as Knoxville, Tennessee, a cohort of college basketball players recently committed what may stand as the single most subversive act in the history of the NCAA (or at least, one that doesn’t involve throwing tortillas).
Three Volunteers who’d rather not be were seated across a conference table from management, negotiating their compensation and working conditions like actual, tax-paying adults. Nobody had to incorporate a shell company in Delaware, launder money through a booster nursing a suspiciously bloated “marketing budget,” or claim a six-figure wire transfer represented fair-market value for a fifteen-second Instagram Reel promoting a local Chevy dealership.
Rather, they simply convened to discuss payroll, benefits, binding contracts, and workplace rules-basic Human Resources, in other words, which college athletics has spent the better part of a century treating like a capital offense, with literal “death penalties” being meted out for the most flagrant violators of the NCAA rulebook.
Read MoreLost in Translation: Why Veteran Hiring Keeps Missing the Mission
Posted on November 11, 2026 Leave a Comment
This Veterans’ Day, employers have the opportunity to do so much more than running some asinine content marketing or specious social media campaign thanking veterans for their service (or some variation of the same spurious sentiment). They can finally learn how to recognize the skills veterans really have, and what that service means when it’s applied to the civilian workforce.
Every November 11, while the rest of the world recognizes “Remembrance Day,” “ANZAC Day,” or “Death and Duty Day,” (or, at least, those countries for whom the Armistice to end World War One is worth remembering), America officially celebrates Veterans’ Day, which is sort of ironic, given the fact that the US is one of the very few countries to make celebrating veterans a part of its daily civic and institutional culture.
While other countries honor their current armed forces, past service members, and, most prominently, those killed or injured on the battlefield through solemn national holidays and muted recognition such as wearing poppies, laying wreaths and moments of silence, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that America takes a slightly different approach to honoring our troops.
While we have a national moment of silence, and official remembrance ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery, we also honor our veterans with free meals at Applebee’s, 30% off coupons for Kohl’s, and complimentary admission to such fine American institutions as the Harley-Davidson Museum, Six Flags and Sea World, proving, for a day at least, that freedom is indeed free, unless, you know, you’re an orca whale or bottlenose dolphin.
Read MoreDayforce’s Big Recruiting Bet: Agentic AI, Frontline Hiring & The Future of Talent Acquisition Technology
Posted on November 4, 2026 1 Comment
I don’t go to many user conferences, and I write about even fewer. Spend a few days inside a single vendor’s universe (particularly if analyst briefings are involved) and you tend to learn a little too much about how the sausage gets made, or how the clickable demo doesn’t.
The format doesn’t help, either: companies with already staggering margins charge their own customers to sit through product propaganda so on the nose that Leni Riefenstahl might suggest dialing it back a notch, with most of the stage time reserved for the biggest logos and the loudest evangelists.
Last week, though, I found myself in Las Vegas at Dayforce Discover, which, for someone with almost no history with the company, turned out to be a fitting name. Dayforce rarely comes up in talent acquisition conversations, so I walked in with no relationships with the executive team and no real preconceptions about the product, which is a rare position for someone who spends most of his days listening to customers vent about their vendors.
I walked out cautiously optimistic, which is rarer still. Dayforce is making an overdue but credible bet that recruiting belongs at the center of its platform, and it has a couple of structural advantages that most vendors making the same bet don’t.
Whether it can turn a roadmap into results before its new private equity overlords get restless, as we’ve seen, is another question entirely. As yet, it’s quite literally a (multi) billion dollar question.
Read MoreEverybody Bought the Future. Who Made It Work?
Posted on October 21, 2026 1 Comment
Nobody has ever watched an HR tech demo go badly, which is sort of the point of a demo. The data is clean, the workflow is tidy and the hiring manager in the sample scenario responds to feedback requests within the hour (a detail that, on its own, should get the whole thing reclassified as speculative fiction).
Then the contract gets signed, and the product goes from the People function to the people who actually need the product to function. And that’s where the real mess usually begins.
That gap, between what looked enticing before the contract was actually signed and which feature actually exists when that contract is up for renewal, is the subject of my session at UNLEASH World in Paris this week, “Beyond the Demo: Spotting the HR Innovation Worth Betting On.”
Thousands of HR leaders will spend the next couple of days walking the expo floor at Porte de Versailles, and just about every one of them will be told, repeatedly and with tremendous conviction, that they’re looking at the future of work (which, let’s face it, probably involves a combination of prompt engineering and skilled trades).
A few of them actually will be something innovative (at least by the modest standards of our industry); the hard part is figuring out which ones are telling the truth, and which ones are selling a roadmap to nowhere.
Read MoreThe Work Between the Work: The Rise of Vibe Recruiting
Posted on October 20, 2026 1 Comment
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about modern recruiting, one that most talent acquisition leaders already know even if few would put it in a QBR deck: a recruiter can put in a full eight-hour day, touch dozens of tasks and log off exactly as far from filling an open role as when they logged on.
Look at where that time actually goes. An interview gets negotiated back and forth across three time zones before anyone finds a slot that works. A hiring manager gets a gentle reminder about feedback, then a slightly less gentle one, then a third that’s written in all caps demaning a response, followed by one final, desperate and defeated cry for help.
Given how fast candidates go cold, that’s not hyperbole. It’s reality..
In a recent candidate survey, 62 percent of professionals said they lose interest in a job if they don’t hear back within two weeks of an initial interview, and that figure climbed to 77 percent at three weeks.
Meanwhile, every system dutifully logs all of this activity. The applicant tracking system looks delightfully productive and the activity report is spotless; the req, of course, is still open. It’s the recruiting equivalent of piling up 400 yards of offense and losing 10-3.
And it’s that gap between motion and progress is precisely where the concept of vibe recruiting comes in.
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