Hiii,

Happy Juneteenth week, everyone!

Fun fact: Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021, making it the first new federal holiday added since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established in 1983. 🤓

Anyway, while we're on the theme of long overdue reckonings, this week's newsletter has a lot of that energy!

Between New York having to literally pass a law to get companies to stop posting fake jobs and new data showing that nearly half of frontline employees are spending more time managing AI than doing their actual work, it's been a lot.

The good news is that we get to hear from people being honest about where things actually stand, which is the only kind of content I have energy for right now.

Let’s discuss!

🗞️ Here's the Tea:Copy anchor linkCopied

👻 New York passes a bill aimed at halting ‘ghost jobs’

The TL;DR: New York just passed a bill that would require companies with 100+ employees to be upfront in job postings about whether a role actually exists, when they plan to fill it, and to take the listing down within two weeks of hiring someone. If they don't comply, fines start at $2,500 per post and double every 30 days after that. It's still waiting on the governor's signature, but New Jersey and Pennsylvania are drafting similar bills.

My POV: We could have a long, detailed discussion about ghost jobs, but I’ll just say that companies posting jobs they have zero intention of filling, whether it’s to impress investors or build a pipeline of talent, just feels incredibly icky to me.

Candidates are spending hours tailoring cover letters and doing interview prep for roles that were never real, and HR is out here wondering why trust in the hiring process is at an all-time low.

I'm fascinated at the fact that legislation had to step in to correct!! Clearly, too many companies refused to just act right on their own! 😬

🎙️Mic Drop Moment:Copy anchor linkCopied

"If the average manager, person, individual, exec, whatever, had to sit in our seat for a day, they'd be like, 'Never mind. You can take it back.'"Copy anchor linkCopied

On the mic this week: Morgan T. Stanley is the Head of People at Lithic, where she leads the company's people strategy and employee experience efforts. With more than a decade of experience across HR, recruiting operations, compliance, onboarding, and scaling remote and hybrid organizations, she's known for turning complex ideas into practical execution. Throughout her career, Morgan has focused on building scalable, equitable processes that help teams grow without losing sight of the humans behind the work.

Pin this:

• The strongest leadership partnerships often come from complementary strengths, rather than similar personalities.
• Context is often the difference between making the right decision and the wrong one. It’s that simple.
• Taking over an existing leadership role requires balancing stability with the need to make the role your own.
• Small, incremental improvements can create more lasting impact than constantly rebuilding processes from scratch.
• HR leaders operate in a unique space where they must simultaneously advocate for employees, managers, and the business.

My H*ly Sh*t Moment:  The best HR leaders don't succeed because they have all the answers, but they do know how to gather the context and relationships necessary to make the best decision possible!

▶️ Press Play

📊 Data Is My Love Language:Copy anchor linkCopied

Stat: 47% of front-line users said they spent more time dealing with AI than doing the actual work

My spiral: Remember when we were told AI was supposed to take work off our plates? Ughhh.

Instead, it did the opposite and added a whole new job on top of the old one!

Could it be because we rushed to adopt a tool??

Possibly...

Still holding out hope for change, but either way…nobody signed up to become an AI babysitter!!! And the numbers are showing that it's what frontline workers are doing with their time.

TBH: The tools got deployed before the workflows got redesigned, and frontline employees are paying the price for that gap.

🗣️ UNMUTE YOURSELF

Doing the right thing in our jobs isn’t always as black and white as other people think.

You have to know which battle to pick on any given day, and when things do work out, we are rarely given the credit.

That leads to my question today:

“What's the most political thing you've ever had to do just to get the right thing done?”

🛠️ TRY THIS TOMORROW:

We spend a lot of energy solving the problems people are willing to name out loud, but what about the problems that don’t make it into a formal meeting or Slack message?

So try this in your next team meeting:

"What's one thing slowing us down that no one wants to bring up?"

🛠️ In Your Toolkit Copy anchor linkCopied

Not gonna lie, the data on women's health at work is kinda alarming. 😬

The workforce crisis is already happening inside your org, too, with women navigating healthcare built on research that wasn't even designed for them. Wild, right?!

I teamed up with Aon for a new article to break down some stats from one of their reports that were impossible to ignore, and how to loop in your exec team!

Taking this seriously does wonders for your team + it's honestly just good business at the end of the day.

So read it and let the data guide you! 🤓

👂 OVERHEARD IN SAFE SPACE

Book the vacation before your OOO message becomes your resignation letter. 😭

Read what members had to say here.

See ya on Friday!