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Human Times helps you stay ahead of the latest news and trends that impact the HR industry. Every weekday, our unique blend of AI and team of expert HR and employment editors and researchers monitor 100,000s of articles, and social posts to create summaries of the most relevant and useful content to help you lead, innovate and grow. The award winning Human Times newsletter has four geographical editions with news tailored to your region.
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Recent Editions
Human Times
North America
The General Services Administration (GSA) wrote to EY, McKinsey, BCG, FTI Consulting, AlixPartners, and A&M on Thursday, asking them to outline and justify their federal contracts. The GSA helps oversee procurement across the government and is coordinating the administration-wide review to determine which tasks can be done internally by federal employees, and which must be done by outside consultants. “Our objective is to critically evaluate which engagements deliver genuine value,” wrote the GSA’s Josh Gruenbaum, who serves as commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service. “In keeping with this Administration’s laser focus on fiscal responsibility, our baseline presumption is that most, if not all, of these contracted services are not core to agency missions.” He asked the consulting firms to respond by July 11 by detailing their existing federal contracts in plain language - “no consultant gobbledygook,” he said in the letter - and explaining the pricing structure of projects.
Full Issue
Human Times
UK
Analysis by jobs search site Adzuna shows that the number of new entry-level jobs has fallen by 31.9% since the launch of the AI tool ChatGPT in November 2022. The report highlights that entry-level posts now account for just a quarter of the overall jobs market, down from 28.9% in 2022. James Neave, head of data science at Adzuna, said: "If you can reduce your hiring at the entry level, that’s just going to increase your efficiency and improve cost savings."
Full Issue
Human Times
Europe
According to the Migration Advisory Council's report, around 331,000 migrants in the Netherlands are unemployed despite their willingness to work, representing a significant "unused labour potential." Monique Kremer, chair of the council, highlighted that “the migrant misses out on connection to society, employers miss out on staff, and the Dutch treasury loses out on tax revenue.” The report reveals that migrants from Turkey and Morocco are the largest groups affected, and over half of Syrian migrants under 45 being unemployed. Women are disproportionately impacted, with 23% unemployed compared to 15% of men. The council recommends enhancing Dutch language education to reduce talent waste because language barriers hinder employment opportunities. Fatih Aktaş, a political scientist, emphasised that language access is a fundamental barrier, observing: “In asylum centres, you get little or no Dutch lessons.”
Full Issue
Human Times
Middle East
A series of experiments involving more than 4,500 participants at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that those who used ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) to research everyday topics demonstrated weaker understanding of those topics afterward and produced less original insights than people who looked up the same topics using Google. Overall, across five experiments, ChatGPT-assisted brainstorming sessions consistently produced narrower sets of ideas, according to the researchers. The findings highlight how overly relying on gen AI “can limit the breadth of perspectives, even when individual ideas seem original,” a media release stated.
Full Issue
Read the latest HR highlights
How HR is Tackling Long Covid?
Fingers remain tightly crossed around the world that the rampant hospitalization and fatality stage of the Covid-19 pandemic has generally peaked. Vaccination programmes are accelerating, and restrictions are gradually being lifted...
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ESG Is Not Just Another Name For CSR
Back in the distant 1980s if you wanted to demonstrate your environmental and ethical credentials it was sufficient to shop at or purchase shares in retailer The Body Shop. The charismatic Anita Roddick, founder of the “hippy” tinged retail chain, heralded a new age of environmental concern, caring capitalism and corporate awareness that evolved into what became known as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR was much talked about and lauded, but in reality often ended up being a lot of a hot air (excuse the pun) and often never progressed much beyond a footnote in the annual report.
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Have Older Workers Paid The Highest COVID-19 Price?
Across the world the pandemic is slowly but surely moving into its next phase. Recovery beckons. As furlough schemes across the U.S. and U.K. are being wound down, restrictions eased or lifted, and workforces moving back up the gears, early signs indicate that older employees are more likely to be casualties of the pandemic aftermath than their younger colleagues. Here at the we have witnessed an increasing number of stories supporting the growing belief that older workers are disproportionately paying the highest Covid-19 price.
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Bosses. What's not to like? Plenty, say employees
“You’ll never have another boss like me, someone who’s basically a chilled-out entertainer”
So said, David Brent, the fictional manager of Slough-based paper merchant Wernham Hogg in the seminal TV comedy The Office. Ricky Gervais’s portrayal of Brent as a flawed, narcissistic, incompetent, and deluded manager was so well observed that many (including me) believed it was a genuine fly-on-the-wall documentary when they alighted accidentally on the first ever episode.
Rolling with the Payroll
To mark National Payroll Week the team at the Human Times has provided some insight into the industry that we hope you’ll find useful.
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