🎉 Meet your new AI coworker 🤖

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Today’s edition is brought to you by Morning Brew. The daily email that makes reading the news enjoyable. Stay informed and entertained, for free.

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Good Afternoon Party People! 🎉

Welcome back to The Party. The go-to newsletter for the latest in layoffs, career news, and dad jokes.

PARTY PLAN 🎉

🤝 Meet your new AI coworker

✂️ The latest in layoffs

🏡 RTO mandates & home sellers

And, of course, MEMES!

MEME OF THE DAY

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Morning Brew

Today’s edition is brought to you by Morning Brew. The daily email that makes reading the news enjoyable. Stay informed and entertained, for free.

AI

Meet Your New AI Coworkers 🤝

We’d like to introduce you to Maria & Janet, your AI HR coworkers (always gets a little weird when you give AI human names).

Wyndham Hotels is testing out a new AI tool named Maria that will help potential candidates and new hires in the hiring and onboarding process. The chatbot can help them fill out applications, schedule interviews, and more.

Janet is another chatbot that answers workplace accommodation questions.

“Go talk to HR” just became “Go talk to Janet”

Experts are saying the implementation of new, artificial “coworkers” won’t be received well by employees. While people may be curious and excited about new AI tools, most people are also likely anxious about what it means for their jobs.

Janet was created by the HR company CareValidate and can help remedy tough subjects such as:

• “How can I help a team member with cancer?”

• “Suggest accommodations for depression”

• Suggest accommodations for ADHD”

• “My employee says they cannot drive to work. What do I do?”

Maybe Janet isn’t so bad after all…

LAYOFFS

The Latest in Layoffs…

Another week, another round of layoffs.

The good news?

This job cuts tracker shows layoffs significantly slowing down heading into the second half of this month. Below are the companies with recent layoffs:

• Stellantis offers buyouts to 6,500 corporate employees (50% of workforce) to cut costs as rising EV costs harm margins.

• Once popular video chatting site ‘Omegle’ has shut down and will lay off its last 28 employees.

• Amazon cuts more than 180 jobs in gaming division, per CNBC.

• Dish Network confirms layoffs - CEO steps down, company laying off 15% in some divisions this week. May affect up to 1,500 jobs.

• Last week, Walmart announced layoffs of 363 employees.

• Sleep Number Corporate lays off 500 employees.

• CNBC announces that 10% of its digital team has been laid off.

• Neighborhood watch app, Nextdoor, laid off 25% of its entire workforce last week. Approximately 200 positions, according to the filing…

• TikTok's parent company Bytedance laid off 1,000 employees last week.

• Jack Dorsey’s Block to lay off 1,300 employees.

• UPS reduces pilot headcount by nearly 200 with severance deals.

• OpenSea laid off approximately 432 employees, approximately half its entire workforce.

RTO

Return-to-Office Mandates Are Forcing People to Sell Their Homes

RTO mandates have been a point of contention ever since the end of the pandemic. Now, they’ve become even more controversial as they’re forcing thousands of people to choose between losing their jobs or selling their homes at a loss.

Earlier this year, Redfin and Qualtrics surveyed US residents planning to sell their homes. Return-to-office policies were found to be the motivating factor for selling a home for one in every ten (10.1%) home sellers.

Below is a list of major companies requiring employees to return to office (per Business Insider):

• Amazon

• Apple

• BlackRock

• Chipotle

• Citigroup

• Disney

• Goldman Sachs

• Google

• IBM

• JP Morgan

• Meta

• Redfin (🤨)

• Salesforce

• Snap

• Starbucks

• Tesla

• Twitter (X)

• Uber

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