AI Mistakes Are Costing Companies, Confidence Is Falling, & Small Businesses Aren’t Hiring

Additional Resources

• Resume.org Survey on AI Slop Crisis
• Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index
• NFIB Small Businesses Jobs Report

Transcript

Pete Newsome: 0:00

Welcome back to Cornering the Job Market for Friday, February 6th. Happy Friday, everyone, and happy Super Bowl weekend. I am hoping for a close game on Sunday and better commercials than last year. They weren’t very good. It’s kind of been on the decline the past couple of years. I don’t know why that is, but should be fun either way. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to talk about the latest workforce news and headlines, of course. And we have some interesting stories today. Glassdoor just put out their latest employee confidence index. And then NFIB just launched some data that tells us what small businesses are thinking.

0:33

We’ll get to those in a minute, but first, a new survey reveals what is going on with AI in the workplace, and it’s not very good in many respects. It comes from resume.org and they call it the AI slop crisis with some data to back that up. They did a survey in January of a little more than 1,100 managers in the US, and 70% said they’ve witnessed their direct reports making AI-related errors in the past year. And I suspect those are people copying and pasting straight out of Chat GPT and passing that off as their own work, their own words. And you know what? It’s not a good idea. Even the company says you can’t, you shouldn’t trust their, you know, what spits out of Chat GPT. So that is what seems to be happening with great regularity right now in the in the workplace. Uh they’re not one-off incidents. 43% of the managers said they’ve seen it several times, and another 12% said many times over the past year. Um so look, more than half of all the managers in the survey that are dealing with that on a regular basis. That’s not good. That’s that’s not good at all. So as employees, that’s gonna make you look awful, right? Because it’s just showing you’re cutting corners. Never a good idea. The number one mistake that was reported were factual inaccuracies at 58%. So that, you know, come on. I mean, you you have to check it. Don’t just assume that it’s right. Assume it’s wrong, and then you know, do your research before you share that information. More than half also said AI missed critical context or nuance. We know that happens too. 41% reported low quality content, and 29% flagged confidentiality, privacy, or compliance concerns. That 29% should catch your attention.

2:18

So factual errors are bad, but compliance violations can be catastrophic. So, big concern there for any employer that should be something you pay attention to and make sure you have the right AI policies in place. It all starts with that, and then lock down whatever you need to to make sure you’re not putting your company at risk or allowing your company to be put at risk is probably the better way to phrase it. Also, nearly 40% said this bad information is reaching clients. So that also is a huge problem. I mean, this isn’t, these aren’t small numbers, right? If that’s happening four out of 10 times, you’ve got to change what you’re doing. And so, you know, it’s interesting to me. See, the survey came out, this is what people are claiming. Well, what are you doing about it? Hopefully you’re taking action. Hopefully you’ve already taken action, but the numbers certainly don’t indicate that that’s happened. Also, 59% of the managers in the survey said they had to personally spend extra time to fix the work. I mean, that’s its own problem. This thing just gets worse the more I read through it. Um, so look, it AI is supposed to increase efficiency, not just grind everything to a halt. So it’s making you look bad in front of your clients, it’s putting your company at risk with compliance issues, and now managers are having to redo work. And one in five managers in the survey said AI mistakes have cost their business more than 10,000, and 5% said over 50,000.

3:46

Like I said, I just it just keeps getting worse the more I read through it. There seems to be a generational angle to it as well. 34% of managers identified Gen Z. Come on, Gen Z, what are you doing? They’re the most error-prone group, and then millennials at 26%. So it looks like Gen Xers are handling this better. Uh, Kara Dennison, who’s head of career advising at resume.org, explained it by saying younger workers aren’t necessarily more careless, but they’re often using AI more frequently and earlier in their workflows. So that makes sense. I mean, you’re if you’re using it more, you’re gonna be prone to making more mistakes if you’re not paying attention. So I guess that’s the message from this. Should be the takeaway. Pay attention. Do not let AI get you in trouble in any of these ways that we’ve talked about. So that’s what’s going on there.

4:34

The next story tells us how employees are feeling about the labor market. The Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index just came out and it shows that employee confidence has dipped heading into 2026. But what makes this interesting is that the group losing confidence the fastest isn’t entry-level workers, it’s senior leadership. And that matters a lot because that’s who’s making the decisions. So everyone should be concerned to see that too. I wanted to, it’s Friday. I wanted better news today, not gloom and doom. But the Glassdoor Index, the numbers slipped from where they were about for in December, a little bit, but they’re about where they were last year. So you know, we we’ve kind of come full full circle. The numbers went down a lot in June, right? So June, June was a disaster. That’s when the shutdown was happening. Uh all the numbers were really low then. And so we’ve come back up from there, but we really just haven’t made any progress. And that’s how the last couple of years have felt. Uh, and and the data has really uh supported that as well. We’ve just been stuck in neutral. Now, consumer-facing industries seem to be okay. They were holding up, they uh they actually improved a little bit, but government and public administration was down uh 4.6% year over year. So they are not feeling good at all. And that was actually, when you look at the dates this was collected, that was before the shutdown. And so I’m sure the numbers are even worse now than they were then. Um layoffs were mentioned in employee reviews a lot more than they had been previously, 14% year over year increase there. So that is not good to see. We know there’s been so much layoff news uh already this year, so I’m guessing we’re gonna see those numbers tick up too.

6:20

So we see a lot of fear right now in the market for good reason, unfortunately. Sometimes we the sentiment doesn’t really match what the data shows, but this is a case where I believe that absolutely does. And there was one more number that really jumped out, and and and and I I always scratch my head a little bit when I see this particular survey because it talks about workers accepting jobs, right? The percentage. And it’s always a or n or declining jobs rather, and it’s always a high percentage. So a year ago, 26% of kids who received a job offer turned it down. And now it’s 20%. Now, I think those numbers are astronomically high. One in five people turning down a job, or one in four is what it was a year ago. Um that I have a lot of questions when I see that. I’d love to be uh have some firsthand ability to dig into this data and ask all these candidates why they’re going through the job process and who’s interviewing them and what the hiring process is where you end up with such a high decline rate. But I can’t do that. What I can do is see what this trend means.

7:24

And what this trend means is that employees realize or job seekers realize right now that this is an employer’s market. So they don’t have the luxury of tearing down jobs as often as they did in the not too distant past. So workers are reading the room. That’s good. I mean, it’s a bad room to read, but at least the the people who are on the job market are realizing the situation that we have right now and that it is super tight. And that leads me to a big contradiction in the NFIB report, which is the next story. What it shows is small business hiring has hit its lowest point since May 2020. And that was, of course, at the worst of COVID, right? COVID started ramping up just a couple months prior, layoffs were happening everywhere. So by May 2020, things were awful, and we just hit those numbers. I mean, that that’s not good at all. Uh, very different reasons for sure. One of the things that um I really didn’t like seeing from this report is that only 50% of small business owners reported hiring or trying to hire right now. So that is down, that has been trending down for a while. But what this report always shows is that a significant number of small businesses are having difficulty hiring. And in this particular month, it said 88% said they found few or no qualified applicants. And every time I see this report, I respond the same way to for someone from this organization or who took this survey to reach out to me and let me know why you’re having trouble finding qualified applicants. 31% of the owners in the survey said they have job openings they can’t fill. And yeah, like what are you doing? You’re you’re doing something wrong.

9:14

Is is it is you, it is not the labor market, it is not the candidate pool. Um, but I don’t I never hear back from anyone on this survey. I really wish I did. 30% of construction businesses called labor quality their top problem. And that’s a number that makes a lot of sense to me. We know that there’s a shortage of trades workers. That is only going to get worse. We know that too. Um, so construction is having a hard time at a point where there is a lot of construction. We’re seeing a boom in that area. That’s one of the few positive things that are happening in the market right now. So if you’re early in your career or you know someone who is trying to figure out which route to go, well, it looks like construction is going to be an area that has a need to hire for a long, long time. And we know that all the data shows us we’re going to run out of qualified tradespeople, and it is going to be an entirely different kind of problem for all of us in the not too distant future. So definitely worth paying attention to there.

10:17

There was some positivity from the report. Net 32 raised compensation. Um, but it looks like those numbers are starting to soften too. So that is that’s the NFIB report for today. Small businesses aren’t hiring with frequency, they’re struggling to find candidates, which makes no sense to me, other than the construction industry. That one clearly does. But I’ll make the same offer again. Reach out to me, let me know why you’re having trouble hiring. I promise you, either my company can solve it for you or I’ll point you to someone who can. So that is it for today. Please like and subscribe and share with anyone you think might be interested if you want the latest job market news and headlines, because I’ll keep sharing them. So thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you soon.