Your Senior People Feel Fine. The Ones You Haven’t Hired Yet Don’t.
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Employee confidence hit a new record low in July. Only 43.5% of workers told Glassdoor they expect their employer’s business to improve over the next 6 months, down from 44.4% in June and below the previous low set back in May, according to the Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index released today by chief economist Daniel Zhao. Glassdoor points to two drags: energy prices rebounded in July and job security remains the top worry on workers’ minds.
The headline is the record low. The number I keep coming back to is the split by seniority.
Senior-level confidence rose 3.1 percentage points in July and is up 1.8 points over the year. Entry-level confidence went the other way, down 2.9 points over the year, with younger workers convinced that entry-level roles are getting harder to find. Mid-level confidence slipped too, down 1.2 points on the month. Confidence is moving in opposite directions depending on how far along you are in your career.
When senior workers feel better and entry-level workers feel worse by nearly 3 points in a year, I read it as a market protecting experienced people and freezing out the ones trying to break in. Companies are holding onto their senior talent and going slow on early-career hiring.
There’s a real cost to going slow at the bottom. Starve entry-level hiring for two or three years and you pay for it later, when you go looking for mid-level people and they aren’t there. The two-track job market we’ve tracked all year is now showing up in how workers feel, not only in the postings data.
The industry numbers are where it gets interesting. Telecommunications posted the steepest drop of any industry over the past year, plummeting 13.9 points to 31.1%. Fewer than a third of telecom workers feel good about where their employer is headed. Hotels and travel fell 12.3 points over the year, even with the World Cup travel surge that has now ended. Insurance dropped 7 points as leaders push workers to cut costs and automate claims with AI.
One bright spot sits close to home. Human resources and staffing posted the highest confidence of any industry at 54.8%, up 1.0 point over the year and one of the few sectors to gain ground. The people closest to hiring still see plenty of work ahead. When companies get cautious about permanent headcount, they add contract and temporary workers instead, and contract staffing is the market we work in every day.
Falling Jobless Claims Are Hiding a Harder Truth for the Unemployed
Every Thursday the Labor Department publishes two unemployment numbers: new claims and continuing claims. Both have looked good lately. Fewer people are filing for the first time, and the number collecting week after week has come down since last summer. Read quickly, it sounds like a healthier job market.
A July Economic Brief from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond says look closer. Economist Claudia Macaluso finds that continuing claims fell almost entirely because fewer people are arriving in unemployment, not because unemployed people are finding jobs faster.
The exit rate, meaning how fast people leave the unemployment rolls, has barely moved. It has been stuck near 11.7% a week since early 2025, down from 15.2% in 2022. A typical stretch on benefits now runs 8.2 weeks, up from 6.5 weeks in 2022. Continuing claims fell 149,000 from August 2025 through June 2026, and Macaluso’s model pins almost all of that drop on fewer arrivals rather than faster exits.
More people are also leaving for the worst possible reason. The share who exit because they ran out of benefits more than doubled, from 3.3% of all exits in 2022 to 7.3% in the year through June 2026. Over the same stretch, leaving for an actual job fell from 9.1% of claimants a week to 6.8%.
There’s a blind spot on top of that. Continuing claims can’t count anyone unemployed longer than their state allows benefits. Benefits cap below 26 weeks in 16 states, and five states stop at 12. When people hit that cap, they drop out of the count even though nothing about their situation improved. So the true scale of long-term unemployment runs worse than the headline shows, and Macaluso says to read the 8.2-week figure as a floor, not an estimate.
Her summary of mid-2026 is the clearest I’ve seen: it has become less likely to lose your job, but more costly if you do.
For job seekers, don’t read the falling claims number as a green light. A falling count with a flat exit rate means fewer people are entering a pool that is just as hard to leave. Landing an offer is harder than it has been in years, and the doubling in people who exhaust benefits before they find work proves it.
For recruiters and hiring managers, the read flips. If you have open roles, the talent is available and it is staying available. The urgency that defined 2022 hiring is gone, which gives you room to be selective in a way you didn’t have three years ago. The hiring rate has been sitting near COVID-era lows, and this is the other side of that same coin. Low firing plus low hiring adds up to a pool of experienced people who stay available longer than they used to.
Watch the exit rate, not the level. A number can fall for a good reason, fewer layoffs, or a bad one, people aging off benefits without ever finding work. Right now it is mostly the arrivals side moving, while getting out stays stubbornly hard.
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LinkedIn Put a Button on the AI Writing Everyone Can Already Spot
LinkedIn is going after the AI junk in its feed. On July 30, the Microsoft-owned platform rolled out a “seems like AI slop” button so users can report posts that read like low-quality AI writing, according to Bloomberg.
Chief product officer Hari Srinivasan drew a careful line: “AI and slop are not the same thing. Many people refine thoughts with AI.” Alongside the button, LinkedIn is rolling back its “enhance your post” feature, which made it easy to draft a whole post with AI, and replacing it with a narrower proofreading tool that fixes grammar without rewriting in a generic voice.
The move follows months of user complaints about AI-generated content flooding the feed. Some users started calling out the telltale signs of AI writing by name, including excessive em dashes and the “it’s not X, it’s Y” construction.
The signal for anyone building a professional brand is where this goes next. Once “this looks like AI” becomes a one-click report, the cost of posting generic AI content climbs. Readers already spot it, and now they have a button. One commenter predicted that “human written” will one day read the way “organic” does in the produce aisle, something people seek out, and I think they have it right.
Srinivasan drew the right line. AI for proofreading and sharpening your thinking is fine. AI writing the whole post in its own voice is the problem. My read for recruiters and job seekers: use AI to sharpen and edit, then put it in your own words before you hit post. The people who still sound like themselves are the ones who get read, which is the same reason the trust gap in AI job searches keeps widening.
Put the three together, and the market comes into focus. Confidence is sinking fastest for the workers trying to get in, the unemployed are staying unemployed longer, and the noise in professional channels keeps rising. For employers, the opening is real: experienced talent is available and staying available, and you have room to be selective. The teams that win this stretch move fast on the exact people they need.
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