A Lumina Foundation and Gallup survey of 2,500 U.S. employers who make hiring decisions was conducted August 5 to 18. Most say degrees still matter, and nearly half expect AI to raise their value.
Forty-eight percent expect AI to make college degrees more important over the next five years, compared with 26 percent who expect them to become less important.
Eighty percent would prefer a candidate with a degree even when the role doesn’t require one, including 31 percent who strongly prefer one.
Preference for degree holders is 62 percent at employers with fewer than 10 employees and 84 percent or higher at those with 100 or more.
Six in 10 employers have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, compared with 38 percent of U.S. adults in June.
Employers are hiring for the things that AI can’t do. They’re putting a premium on judgment, critical thinking, communication and adaptability.”
Read more via Inside Higher Ed, Gallup
Jack Weis graduated in 2024 with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and is living in his parents’ basement in Salt Lake City. The Wall Street Journal uses his search to illustrate a low-hire, low-fire job market that is hitting college-educated workers hard.
Weis moved from corporate science jobs and national laboratory fellowships to software engineering and eventually food-preparation roles, and was often ghosted.
He earned $70 an hour training AI models through the startup Mercor until his contract was cut in mid-March.
The share of unemployed people out of work for 27 weeks or more was higher this summer than at any point in more than a decade, apart from Covid and its aftermath.
Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds laid-off workers whose skills AI heavily absorbs are far less likely to find jobs than they were several years ago.
More than 60 percent of job seekers surveyed by Greenhouse said they had been interviewed by AI technology in the past year.
Read more via The Wall Street Journal
A recruiting executive at Carrington West writes about CV-Library’s Candidate Behaviour Barometer 2026, a UK survey of more than 1,000 candidates and 233 recruiters and employers. Both sides describe the same problem.
Seventy percent of candidates say widespread AI use makes it harder to stand out, and 69 percent of recruiters say AI-generated applications make the strongest candidates harder to identify.
Fifty-two percent of candidates would now accept a job offer and keep looking, up from 24 percent a year ago.
Seventeen percent have chosen not to apply for a role because they believed AI would screen them.
Fifty-eight percent would feel more comfortable knowing a person was guaranteed to review their application.
Six in 10 candidates expect to go from application to offer within two weeks, but only a third of hiring processes manage it.
Applications have never been more polished, and polish has never told us less about the person behind it.”
Read more via Carrington West
A survey from European HR firm SD Worx finds many older workers are open to staying on, as governments raise retirement ages to ease labor shortages. The European Commission expects the region’s labor force to shrink about 12 percent between 2022 and 2070.
Thirty-two percent of employees 55 and older are willing to keep working past the statutory retirement age, compared with slightly more than one in four of those under 35.
Half of workers 55 and older would prefer to retire early, compared with 61 percent of those under 35.
The top reasons for wanting to retire early are more time for family or personal matters (57 percent) and health (53 percent), and money rarely plays a role.
Sixty-one percent of workers 55 and older feel confident in their jobs even as automation changes their tasks, compared with 53 percent of those under 35.
Only 17 percent of workers 55 and older say they get enough support to prepare for an AI-driven future, compared with 29 percent of those under 35.
Read more via SD Worx
Dan Rust, vice president of global leadership development at Infopro Learning, argues that the disengagement blamed on Gen Z reflects the workplace culture leaders have built. He says a “light” style of leadership works for younger workers and everyone else.
Rust says Gen Z is wary of workplace culture after watching earlier generations be poorly treated, including through sudden layoffs.
When younger workers ask why a report is due or what a task is for, that is useful information for leaders.
Employers pulling back from remote work often do so out of a need for control, not necessity.
Light leadership means ongoing feedback instead of annual reviews, and conversations that cover workers’ lives as well as their projects.
Rust describes a franchisee with 17 fast food restaurants who expects his general managers to know the story behind every employee, including the one working the midnight shift.
I think that Gen Z is not more disengaged than the rest of us. I think they’re just worse at hiding it.”
Read more via HR Dive
Videos of overflowing quarters and cash counters have made laundromats a popular side hustle pitch in an anxious economy. Owners and the industry’s trade group say the work is far from passive.
Atusa Parsa bought a laundromat in Fullerton, California, three years ago after social media convinced her it was a good investment, and later had to remove drug dealers from the bathroom with police help.
The Coin Laundry Association says the U.S. has about 30,000 laundromats, a number that has stayed flat.
A small location costs around $300,000, while larger, high-performing operations can sell for up to $3 million.
The association puts the average profit margin at 24 percent.
Francis Dayamba added a claw machine and an electric-vehicle charger to his Chicago laundromat because staffing it from 7 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. requires more than quarters.
People are getting trapped into looking at all these videos that glamorize the industry and they forgo any other due diligence.”
Large law firms are borrowing from consumer brands to stand out as competition grows among a shrinking pool of larger firms, according to The Wall Street Journal.
White & Case unveiled a new cobalt-blue identity this month, its first rebrand in 13 years.
Firms now regularly pay first-year associates $250,000, up from $190,000 in 2018.
Firms are also spending heavily to lure and keep top partners as star lawyers get more comfortable switching firms.
Freshfields shortened its name and dropped its logo, and Sheppard Mullin rebranded as Sheppard earlier this year.
White & Case hired a chief marketing officer from General Electric and Goldman Sachs, and used consumer branding agencies for the redesign.
H-1B changes are reshaping biopharma hiring:
Biopharma hiring teams have turned their focus to candidates already authorized to work in the U.S., according to two experts who spoke to BioSpace. The $100,000 H-1B fee has been blocked by two federal judges, but its effects on hiring are already visible.
Dave Bowers of EPM Scientific says the fee “effectively shut the door on hiring talent from overseas.”
H-1B registrations fell 38.5 percent, from 343,981 in fiscal year 2026 to 211,600 in fiscal year 2027, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Starting this fiscal year, applicants at the highest of four wage levels get four entries in the selection lottery, while those at the lowest get one.
The Department of Homeland Security proposed a $103,265 fee for all cap-subject petitions in August, and revised cap exemptions that could strip the status from some biopharma research organizations.
Bowers says hiring is hardest for computational biology, AI in drug discovery, cell and gene therapy, process development and biostatistics.
Read more via BioSpace
