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Talent Management

Jesse Klein

cfobrew.com

Corporate all-hands meetings will probably have a slide about employer health insurance this year, because health insurance costs are going to be a hot topic. Get ready, because employers—and employees—will have to figure out how to cover a cost spike.

Employer coverage is expected to increase an average of 9.2% to 9.5% in 2026, the biggest increase in 15 years, according to the 

 on employers. The rising costs are attributable to lingering inflation, as hospitals ask for higher prices; the 

; and the need for more healthcare services, as rates of cancer, cardiovascular problems, and musculo-skeletal issues climb among working age people, according to the Journal.

Aging workers are also staying in jobs longer and accessing more telemedicine, which is all adding to ballooning medical care costs, the 

. And of course we can’t forget tariffs, which are affecting prices of medical devices, supplies, and drugs.

“This is the worst I’ve seen,” Pam Kehaly, CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, told The Wall Street Journal about the rising healthcare costs.

Employers are looking at alternatives to cut costs and avoid pushing rate hikes onto employees. A WTW survey provided to the Wall Street Journal found that 60% of large employers were considering switching health insurers, and a third were thinking of finagling new plans with limited access to providers to cut down costs.

But some will still choose to push the costs onto employees “through larger payroll deductions for premiums or higher out-of-pocket charges such as deductibles,” per the WSJ. 

Those all-hands are going to be a lot of fun, for sure.

Health insurance costs face largest rate hike in 15 years

After three years of health insurance costs increasing, this year…they will also increase.

Natasha Piñon

No one likes it when a teacher pulls out a red pen. Revisions are rarely 

 to jobs numbers, we have a feeling the Bureau of Labor Statistics isn’t a fan of the red pen either.

 than initially reported in 2024 and early 2025, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday, fueling concerns that the once seemingly sturdy job market has harbored deeper cracks than we previously realized.

Annual revisions to payroll data demonstrated a 911,000 drop from previous estimates. That’s a decrease of over 50% from the 1.79 million total jobs the BLS previously reported.

The leisure and hospitality sector was especially hard-hit by the revisions, subtracting 176,000 jobs from initial estimates. Professional and business services, as well as retail, were also revised down significantly. Ultimately, most sectors, with the exception of transportation, warehousing, and utilities, were downwardly revised.

The corrections arrive as part of the BLS’s annual benchmark review of jobs numbers. The BLS historically updates the figures using more comprehensive data from state unemployment tax filings, which take longer than the business surveys it initially uses for jobs numbers.

A full revision, which economists expect to be less negative, will arrive in February, per the 

. But if the corrections hold, they would mark the largest annual revision to jobs data to date, 

Job growth in the US through March was lower than previously reported 

The revised data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics fuels concerns about a weakening labor market.  

Courtney Vien

How prepared are new accountants to enter the workforce? Depends on who you ask.

Early-career accountants tend to think their skills are pretty solid, according to a 

 by the Illinois CPA Society (ICPAS). Their managers, you may be surprised to hear, don’t exactly agree.

ICPAS surveyed 185 staff with five years’ experience or less in accounting and finance, and 285 managers who supervised early-career accounting and finance staff. Across a set of 37 skills, early-career accountants rated themselves an average of 7.39, on a 10-point scale. But the managers gave the new accountants an average of just 4.95 across the board. On every single skill, new accountants rated themselves higher than managers did.

Managers felt that newer hires were weakest in areas related to critical thinking and initiative. They gave them particularly low marks on topics such as making decisions independently under pressure (3.96 rating) or without explicit instructions (4.08), finding answers (4.6) and knowing when to ask for help versus researching on their own (4.13), and drawing conclusions from data (4.37).

But are early-career staff getting the support they need to increase their skills? Here, ICPAS uncovered another perception gap: Managers were far more likely than early-career staff to say they gave feedback on every topic ICPAS asked about. For instance, 59% of managers said they discussed “taking initiative or problem solving” with employees. Only 21% of early-career staff said they’d gotten feedback in that area. Four in ten said they gave feedback on “professionalism or workplace etiquette.” Just 8% of staff agreed.

Accountants might be suffering from a failure to communicate. But managers do seem to understand what entry-level staff are going through. In interviews with ICPAS, they said that new hires face higher expectations than they themselves did, and that new staff are given less of a grace period for getting up to speed. Soft skills, the managers said, are now being prioritized alongside technical skills such as Excel proficiency.

Accounting managers see more of a skills gap than new hires do 

But managers may not be giving them the feedback they need.

Gee, what a strange, random coincidence: When industries go all-in on AI adoption, people might lose their jobs because of it.

The US “may be witnessing the early stages of AI-driven job displacement,” according to 

 published at the end of August by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Fed researchers were interested in the sharp slowdown of the labor market in July’s jobs report, and, more broadly, they wondered to what degree “widespread deployment of large language models” was contributing to rising unemployment.

Perhaps you remember that particular jobs report: That’s the one that inspired President Trump to take the 

 of firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s commissioner hours after the July results were released. July wasn’t a blip, though: August’s jobs report was 

So, where does AI factor in? To determine which industries had the highest AI prevalence, Fed researchers analyzed more than 19,000 tasks from the Department of Labor’s O*NET database, which lists occupational characteristics and worker requirements, and determined “whether LLMs could reduce task completion time by at least 50%,” ultimately aggregating results “at the occupational level to create comprehensive AI exposure scores.”

They also looked at “real-world uptake patterns” from the Real-Time Population Survey “in which workers reported the intensity of their actual generative AI usage and time savings.”

Either way you slice it—theoretical or actual AI usage—researchers found “both measures reveal a striking correlation between AI’s prevalence and unemployment increases since 2022.”

Take it all with a grain of salt: The report’s authors were careful to stress that their findings “represent correlation, not causation,” considering that many factors, from 

 to monetary policy, could be driving “rising unemployment in AI-exposed occupations.”

Between 2022 and 2025, occupations with higher AI exposure saw a higher unemployment rate.

“Computer and mathematical occupations—predictably among the most AI-exposed, with a score around 80%—saw some of the steepest unemployment rises,” the report noted. “Meanwhile, blue-collar jobs and personal service roles, which have limited AI applicability, experienced relatively smaller increases.”

Industries with high AI adoption similarly “showed the largest unemployment gains” in that time period. “Again, computer and mathematical occupations, which adopted these technologies most heavily, experienced substantial unemployment increases,” the report’s authors said.

“These patterns are particularly striking in technology sectors, where workers might expect AI to augment rather than to replace their roles,” they continued. “Unlike previous technological revolutions that primarily affected manufacturing or routine clerical work, generative AI can target cognitive tasks performed by knowledge workers—traditionally among the most secure employment categories.”

All the while, the researchers noted that because AI is such a new technology, potential longer-term benefits that could offset job displacement, like creating new jobs and industries, are currently unknown.

“If current trends continue, new approaches to workforce development, social safety nets and economic support for displaced workers may merit greater consideration,” the researchers said. “As we navigate this technological revolution, understanding potential early warning signs could prove crucial for protecting US workers and maintaining economic stability.”

Industries with most AI prevalence could be showing early signs of job displacement, according to St. Louis Fed

Fed researchers sought out to what degree “widespread deployment of large language models” was contributing to rising unemployment.   

Alex Zank

The US added just 22,000 jobs in August, continuing its stubborn trend of “little change since April,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in its first monthly jobs release since President Donald Trump 

Last month’s job gains were well below economists’ expectations of 75,000, 

 reported. The August jobs report “likely keep[s] the Federal Reserve on track for a widely anticipated interest rate cut later this month,” the outlet noted.

The BLS also significantly revised its June jobs numbers from a gain of 14,000 to a loss of 13,000. It revised its July numbers upward from an increase of 73,000 to 79,000. On the whole, that makes June and July employment numbers “21,000 lower than previously reported,” the bureau noted.

Unemployment remained at 4.3%, also little changed from the previous month. The health care sector added jobs, but the federal government and the mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction sector shed jobs.

Friday’s jobs report is the latest batch of data the folks at BLS released this week. The other numbers didn’t tell a much better story for the US economy, though a boost in worker productivity offered a bright spot.

The BLS earlier reported that job openings fell to just under 7.2 million in July from the roughly 7.4 million openings recorded in June. Layoffs increased by 12,000 from June, totaling just over 1.8 million. Job openings hit their lowest level since September 2024, and layoffs reached a 10-month peak, CFO Dive 

On Thursday, hte bureau also revised Q2 worker productivity upward to a 3.3% increase from the previous quarter. BLS previously estimated a 2.4% increase.

 As CFO Brew previously reported, Trump’s decision to fire BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer in August set off 

 in some economic circles. Experts told us they worried Trump will turn the BLS, long an apolitical agency, into a partisan sounding board.

And soon, these numbers may not come out as regularly. Trump’s nominee for commissioner, EJ Antoni, 

 the BLS should stop posting the jobs report on a monthly basis “until it is corrected.”

US gained 22,000 jobs in August, sharply missing economists’ estimate

This was the first Friday jobs report since Trump fired the BLS commissioner.

AI might be harming entry-level workers’ job prospects, at least in certain fields, new research suggests.

An as-yet unpublished study by three Stanford researchers found that, between late 2022 and July 2025, employment of people ages 22–25 “in the most AI-exposed occupations,” such as software developers, customer service representatives, and marketing and sales managers, 

 overall. It dropped 13% compared with employment of people from the same age group in jobs with low exposure to AI.

But even in the most AI-exposed occupations, employment 

 by 6%–9% for “older workers” (meaning, roughly, workers over 25) during the 2022–25 time period, the researchers found, suggesting that AI might be displacing certain entry-level jobs.

The researchers drew upon monthly payroll data for “tens of thousands” of companies from payroll provider ADP. To gauge how vulnerable a job might be to AI displacement, they looked at factors such as whether AI could perform tasks that fell under its description in the Labor Department’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database, as well as the number of Anthropic GenAI model Claude queries related to those tasks.

Their findings held true even when the researchers controlled for “firm-level shocks,” such as interest rate increases, that could have accounted for a drop in entry-level hiring. The pattern also held when the researchers excluded tech companies and “computer occupations” from the data, implying that AI, and not fluctuations in tech employment, was likely to blame for the decline in early-career employment.

 positions, rather than laying people off in favor of AI. It’s possible that entry-level hiring may pick back up if AI 

But if employers in certain sectors do find AI an adequate substitute for entry-level workers, the question remains: How will new entrants to those fields learn the skills they need to perform higher-level work?

 in years to come. “I think that we’ll have to 

 people, as opposed to just hoping that they will figure these things out on their own,” Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the Stanford researchers, told the Wall Street Journal.

AI could be the reason some young workers can’t find jobs

Employment of entry-level workers has dropped 6% in the most AI-exposed fields.

Tally another one up in the “2025 is a 

Fewer CHROs plan to increase hiring than did so a year ago, a survey by the Conference Board finds, and more anticipate that their companies will 

Twice a year, the Conference Board surveys US CHROs at organizations like Fortune 500 companies, healthcare employers, and midsized companies. This quarter, 36% of CHROs said they plan on increasing hiring within the next six months, roughly the same percentage as Q4 of 2024 (37%) but down from 41% in Q2 of 2024.

Similarly, 20% of CHROs said they would decrease hiring over the next six months, around the same percentage as Q4 of 2024 (19%), but up from 11% this time last year.

It’s yet another data point suggesting that the jobs picture is weakening. Though unemployment is low, at 4.2%, fewer jobs are being added. The US gained just 19,000 jobs in May, 14,000 in June, and 

. Were it not for the healthcare and social services sectors, Bloomberg pointed out, that jobs growth 

. It now takes job seekers an average of 24 weeks to land a role, a month longer than it did a year ago.

Consumers are also feeling qualms: Around 60% told University of Michigan researchers they 

 in the next 12 months, up from 32% in 2022.