Job Seekers Are Paying Recruiters & AI Anxiety Is Spiking

Additional Resources

• Job Hunters Are So Desperate That They’re Paying to Get Recruited
• Q1 2026 Employee Mindset Survey
• AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It

Transcript

Pete Newsome: 0:00

Welcome back to Cornering the Job Market for Monday, February 9th. I’m Pete Newsome, and today’s workforce news and headlines include Q1 employee mindset survey results that reveal workers are satisfied in their jobs but deeply anxious about what lies ahead. And the workers who are using AI the most, well, they’re the most afraid of it. Plus, new research from Harvard Business Review challenges the idea that AI is making work easier. They say it may be doing the opposite. But first is a story that was in the Wall Street Journal today. Job seekers are getting so desperate that they’re doing something I really can’t believe. I mean, I believe it. I just really don’t like seeing it. They’re paying recruiters to find them jobs. So that is the top story today. And something that really should not be happening. The way this the staffing and recruiting industry works, and I’ve been in it a long time now. I’ve owned a staffing company for more than two decades, and I worked in it prior to that, is the employers pay the recruiters, either up front or after they’ve placed a candidate for the service. And what’s happening right now is what’s called reverse recruiting, where these companies are offering a recruiting service to candidates for a fee. They’re asking to be paid by the job seekers. It is absolutely unnecessary. No job seeker should be doing this, not only because you don’t need to, but because this is the last time you should be paying for a service. And I apply this same thought and strong advice. I don’t always give advice this strongly on things. I mean, I’ll make recommendations based on my experience and knowledge, but there’s no reason to pay for a service like this. Just like there’s no reason to pay for a resume writer, there’s no reason to pay for a job search coach. All of the information you could possibly want and need to be successful in your job search is available on websites of companies like mine. We put this content out there for free. We do it to increase our branding, our awareness.

2:06

We want companies and individuals to know who we are. So we try to put out good content so we can be found and recognized for it. Or just get on AI and ask it to help build your resume. Ask it to write emails for you if you want, you know, if you don’t have enough time to do it, or you should have enough time if you’re on the job market. But if you just need help, it is all available for free. I promise you that. What these companies are doing is it seems like in large part they’re using AI to send mass messages on your behalf as a job seeker, which is also a bad idea because it’s going to sound like AI. It’ll sound canned, it’s not going to be your voice. And listen, when you’re in the job search, there’s a common mistake that’s made. And these companies seem to be pretty good at marketing and promoting their reverse recruiting services. But it’s not a volume play. You should not be approaching your job search that way. Yes, you may have to apply to a lot of jobs over time, but don’t send out mass messaging.

3:09

Target individual positions and target the ones that you believe you’re genuinely qualified for, and then state your case and try to get a hold of someone at the organization who’s hiring. So, yeah, you cannot do that for every job, but I highly recommend taking a very focused effort and approach toward the ones that you really want to pursue, that you think you’re qualified for, and have a realistic chance of getting an interview for. So I that this is this seems like it’s companies uh just capitalizing on desperation. I think I used that word right when I introduced this story. Um, and I believe the Wall Street Journal used that as well. If you are someone, you see this video, you think, I don’t know where to turn, I don’t know what to do in my job search, send me a message, just reply in a comment, I’ll send you some resources. Again, start with my company. We have exhaustive information on this, um, extensive information on what you need to do to facilitate a very effective and thorough job search. So I could talk for hours about this, but the employer pays the recruiting firm. That’s the way it should work. Anything else, you should it just sounds like oof, it sounds like something a job seeker shouldn’t be doing and absolutely does not have to to have results. So that’s all I’ll say on that for now. It’s in the Wall Street Journal if you want to read the full articles published today. But in the next story, let’s turn to something very different. It is the employee mindset survey for Q1 that was put out by my company by 4 Corner Resources. We just released this data that was a survey of around 750 workers that are earning $50,000 or more. So everyone who took our survey is employed. It’s something that we put out quarterly where we can gauge how this evolves over time. And what it tells us right now, the key the score came in at 67.8 out of 100. And it’s what we’re calling a steady sentimental. It combines three sub-indexes: job satisfaction, employee confidence, and AI threat perception. And so here are the key findings.

5:25

And one is that workers who use AI the most are most afraid of it. How about that? What does that tell you? It tells you that they realize how powerful it is, how effective that these AI tools have really become. So heavy AI users scored a 42.9% on our AI threat index, where non-users scored just a 25%. So almost twice as fearful of what AI represents. Actually, 72% more concerned, specifically about AI displacing their jobs. The 35% of people who claim to be power users are extremely concerned about AI threatening their work within three years specifically, compared to just 11% of non-users. So in this case, three times more concerned. So this isn’t a fear of the unknown. This is a fear of the known. So I just found this very, very telling and consistent with what I see in the job market is the better AI gets, well, the more reason there is for all of us to be concerned. I’m concerned for my own industry. It’s not just this is a applies to others and not me, far from it. I think any white-collar role should be concerned about AI’s impact and focused on where it’s heading. The second finding that jumped out at us was that satisfaction is high, but employees’ financial runways are thin. 88% of workers say they’re satisfied with their current employer. That’s great. That’s a really nice number to see. And I love seeing positives where I can find them. That’s definitely one.

6:59

But the other side of it is that 46% have less than three months of emergency savings, and 21% have none, zero. No savings at all. If they lose their job today, one out of five people are in big trouble. Also, there was a gender difference that jumped out. When women are 60% more likely to have nothing saved. 27% of women report no emergency funds compared to 17% of men. So interesting results there for sure. You could be happy at your job, but as we all know with layoffs coming, you’re one phone call away from being in real trouble. Third finding is that Gen Z is the most anxious of all the generations. They had the lowest overall employee mindset score of any generation. Um, and it and it seems to get a little better with age. So the older you are, the less you’re concerned about the future, right? That that’s how I see it, because you’re not gonna have to work as long. So I think this is a healthy fear. It’s not good to have fear, but at least it is well founded because it’s it’s what I think. I’m I’m worried about Gen Z. You know, I have four Gen Z children. I’m worried about their futures as a whole, but specifically as it relates to how AI is impacting the job market. The next finding was that entry-level workers face what we’re calling a triple crisis: low confidence, low savings, and low AI exposure. And that low AI exposure is concerning because they’re gonna fall behind. And you know, the it if you’re not using, look, you ultimately can’t stop the train on where it’s going, but you have to be in the game, you have to be using AI. So 45% of entry-level workers use AI at work versus 87% of executives. Okay, so what is that telling you? I mean, just 4% of young people atjury level are heavy AI users compared to 46% of executives. And this is self-declared heavy user. So that’s an 11 to 1 difference. So the workers who are most vulnerable to AI displacement, which are the entry-level jobs, they have the thinnest financial cushion and the least exposure to the very tools that might help them adapt.

9:21

So if you’re a young worker, by all means, and I gotta say, I uh we all assume, or at least I do, I until this, until AI, we always assume that the younger you are, the more technic uh technologically proficient you are, the more you’re using it, right? Old people, you know, what’s the joke? You know, the old people don’t know how to send emails and don’t know how to turn the computer on. And yeah, there’s a certain age, people who are retired who never who weren’t in the workforce when uh technology became as commonplace as it is now, sure. They’re they’re struggling. But what I have found surprising, and this is a realization that’s really jumped out at me over the last year, is how many young people just haven’t embraced AI. I’m talking about friends of my kids that I interact with and family just aren’t using it as much as I would expect them to, and as much as they should be. So if you’re a young person or you have a young person in your life, young professional, make sure they’re using this. Get, I can’t say the same thing over and over, right? Get in the game. You absolutely need to do that. And the next finding was that executives appear to know something others don’t. Executives have the highest satisfaction score of any job level at 73.2 and the highest confidence at 70.4. But they also have the highest AI threat perception. So the more senior you are in your role, just like the more of a heavy user you are, the more you’re concerned about where AI is heading.

10:50

So it begs the question: what do they know that others don’t, right? 87% of executives use AI at work, 46% claim to be heavy users, and they’re the most satisfied, the most confident, and the most concerned about AI. So it’s a bit of um, it sounds like a bit of a contradiction, but that combination, you know, seems that these people have the clearest view of where business is heading. They’re the ones also who are making the strategic decisions. So there’s a lot of articles that we see written about AI’s not really effective yet. Well, perception is what matters here, as the saying goes, right? Perception is reality. So if executives see AI as effective, they see AI as strategic, they’re gonna make decisions on whether it’s actually working or not, and that’s what matters.

11:40

And the last one was that AI concern accelerates over time, as it should. I would have been both shocked and worried. I’m worried already, but I would have been worried more if uh the survey um showed that people were dismissive about AI’s future impact, but that’s not what we saw. So we really see that concern increase from short-term to long term. So it it some of the some of the survey data told me that workers are absolutely looking at the right thing, they’re concerned about the right things, but then when I see other data showing that young workers in particular aren’t using AI as much, that that’s probably my bigger, biggest concern from this as a whole is um not enough entry-level workers are adopting AI um as they should, and and they’re that’s not gonna end well for them, is my concern. So when you put all these six findings together, the American workforce is living in two realities almost, right? They’re satisfied today as long as they have their job. And again, that number was overwhelming at 88%, but anxious about tomorrow. So yeah, I think that um I think that the results effectively sum up how I would describe the current marketplace prior to the survey. As I mentioned on one of the shows last week, I’m sometimes lately scratching my head over the way these results come in, but this one really told the story that I would have expected, although still enlightening along the way. So check it out on our website, fourcornerresources.com. I think we have a um a link to it right in the top menu bar. You can’t miss it. It’s our Q1 employee mindset survey. And then the final story today is that researchers from UC Berkeley’s High School of Business spent eight months studying how generative AI changed work habits at a US-based technology company with about 200 employees.

13:44

And what they found is that AI tools didn’t reduce work, it consistently intensified it. So that’s what this article is about. AI is intensifying work. They found that workers moved at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without anyone telling them to. So that’s I found really, really interesting that employers forever have uh try to get their teams to do more, their employees to do more, and employees are often uh hard to um lead down that path and without forcing them. And nobody wants to force that. And no one, no one’s happy when that happens. But it seems like AI is making that happen somewhat naturally. And the article positions it as a bad thing. I think it’s, I don’t necessarily think it’s bad. I think there should be some benefit derived from this, right? It shouldn’t be just work for the sake of work. Um, and maybe that’s a bit of an unknown, uh, but there’s really three things that they identified that is happening because of AI. One was that task expansion is happening. So product managers and designers start writing code, researchers take on engineering tasks, and basically people attempt work that they otherwise would have been responsible for, or they would have outsourced, or altogether avoided altogether in the past.

15:12

And that speaks to me because I just built a web page that AI helped me design, do the coding for, uh, it did the analysis uh for the um uh from a massive spreadsheet of content prior to building the page. So I get all of that. I mean, task expansion I think is only going to increase. And it is really something that those who have already embraced AI are seeing and they’re seeing the benefits of, right? I mean, and this is where the job loss is going to come from. And this isn’t really, that’s not really the point of this article. But if you think about it, if you don’t need designers to write code or developers, if you don’t need engineers to do things that you would have been fully dependent on them prior to AI existing, well then they’re not gonna be used. I mean, it’s just that simple. And the argument is always yes, we still need people to check, check it. You can’t trust it. Yeah, you can’t check it, trust it now. And yes, it has to be checked, but what happens when one AI is checking the other AI? And what happens when five AIs are checking the one AI and there’s redundancy built in, and they’re catching things that humans wouldn’t. So way too often there’s the trap of thinking, well, this is just how things are today, therefore, this is how things are. No, it’s it’s only going to get better, and you always have to remind yourself of that when thinking of AI. But I get off, I’m off topic a little bit there. The second thing they found is that work-life boundaries blurred. Workers started prompting AI during lunch and meetings right before leaving their desks. This resonates with me too. I mean, I have a very difficult time finding where to stop. As a very heavy AI user, I use four different LLMs regularly, and I’m constantly pushing the limits and using it for more things.

17:11

And I think that’s a snowball effect that’s just very natural because you see how powerful it is, right? So I guess the argument or the this article really was saying this is all bad. I’m saying this is just the way it is, whether you know you shouldn’t use you know Doom Scroll on your phone either, right? But how often, how much time is spent doing that? So, you know, this it is what it is, right? And so people are losing their downtime because they’re just doing things that they otherwise wouldn’t have done. They’re bringing work home, so to speak, because the AI is always with them. I mean, not only are we always connected, but now you have the app and you’re gonna have ideas and think about them and and and run with them no matter where you are and what you’re doing. So I find this fascinating. I personally don’t think blending um work and personal time is a bad thing. I think, however, you know, good because look, if you’re what’s better, being more productive in your job that’s gonna be, or doing things that are going to help benefit you in your job that will have a financial benefit, a professional benefit while you’re home at night, like that’s portrayed as bad versus doom scrolling and looking all at all the bad things happening in the world. I I’m supposed to make a case that your free time, I mean, unless you spend it really wisely, but let’s be real, that’s that’s not always the case. You know, you’re watching garbage television, and I’m guilty of all this too, making no mistake. But if you’re asking me, hey, what how’s my time better spent when I’m not working? Doing things that are gonna benefit me and my family and my my employees and my customers, or spending garbage time, well, that’s a pretty easy answer for me, right? So that is their second thing they found. And then third, is it multitasking escalated?

19:04

Uh people can work on multiple AI threads at once, they can write code while generating um you know a blog, while running agents, and yeah, welcome to life from this moment forward, right? This is where this is where we are, and and it’s only going to increase. And yes, we’re all gonna have to manage that individually. But what they’re proposing is to implement uh what they’re calling an AI practice where you know you build norms, uh intentional norms around when to use AI, when to stop, and how work should and shouldn’t expand. Okay, I mean those who are motivated and ambitious are going to use it more, those who aren’t are going to use it less. But people are going to use AI for they’re not gonna stop. That that’s that’s just where the trajectory of all of this is. So um there’s lots of warnings I could recommend that you put in place. And I companies do need AI policies to make sure it’s not being used to violate compliance or or privacy, yes, all of that. But and I I I I’ll say measure productivity, right? That’s that’s the one thing from this that that I uh was thinking about, and I can absolutely see, and they implied too that if if it’s limiting your productivity, like intensifying work, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Like you should be intense at work, right? I mean, while you’re doing it, but if it becomes unproductive and you’re using AI just to do things that don’t need to be done, well that’s that’s different. So I I don’t think that makes it um I don’t think that’s unique to AI. I don’t think that uh makes it different than any other technology.

21:01

So good article gives you some things to consider, some things to think about, but this genie’s not going back in the bottle. We know it, so let’s all figure out how to use it to our advantage. And that concludes our headlines for today. But before we go, here’s a fun fact: the Monday blues. Are you having Monday blues today? Hope not. Uh, the Monday blues is a real psychological phenomenon where your heart attack risk is 20% higher on Monday. Okay, I didn’t realize that’s where this was going. So the Monday heart attack risk is 20% higher on Monday. I I have never heard that before. I don’t generate these fun facts. Someone on my team gives them to me, so I don’t read them until the end of uh the end of the episode here. So I’m seeing this as you’re hearing it, but yeah, wow, heart attack risk. So I’m gonna err on the side of making sure we have lighter um lighter mood. On Monday from now on, as we’re doing this. So don’t have Monday blues. And by the way, it’s my birthday. So hey, everyone should be happy about that, right? No, no one, just me. Not even me. I’m at an age where you don’t get happy about that anymore. But I’m happy to be alive. So there we go. I’ll take it. Thanks for listening. Goodbye for now. Please like, subscribe, share with anyone who you think might be interested, and I will look forward to talking to you tomorrow.