HR Brew // Morning Brew // Update

June 23, 2026

Welcome back! UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his impending resignation on Monday, making him the country’s sixth prime minister to exit in seven years—a turnover rate that’s among the highest in the history of the role. If you think your organization’s employee retention situation is a mess, just be glad you’re not at 10 Downing Street.

In today’s edition:

Impact = intent

Emotional waterworks

A founder’s fix

—Adam DeRose, Mikaela Cohen, Jamila Huxtable

TECH

Better than maxxing

image of AI assiting workers with business growth

Getty Images

AI systems are infiltrating workflows all across the world of business, likely compelling companies and their HR teams to drive employee AI adoption and usage thoughtfully, without blowing through entire AI budgets. Measuring what constitutes success is becoming a growing question for business leaders and people pros.

“Everything is being redefined through AI, but in particular, how every company runs in terms of [an] operating model,” Laura Gonzalez Florez, AI-powered video platform Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, said. “For me, it’s not a systems-only problem, it’s a systems, it’s a people, and it’s a workflow problem.”

Pricing for the new technology is evolving into a pay-per-use service, with AI tokens serving as units that vendors use to represent the work being processed by large language models (LLMs). In recent months, some companies—and unsanctioned employees—designed leaderboards and trackers that monitor token use, encouraging some to maximize their token use, known as tokenmaxxing.

For Synthesia, tokenmaxxing didn’t stick. Like, at all.

For more on why Synthesia values AI impact more than usage, keep reading here.—AD

Sponsored By Software Advice

Tough tool decisions?

Choosing an ATS system is like choosing a mattress—the decision has quite a long-term ripple effect.

With such a high-stakes decision, it’s easy to fall into analysis paralysis. That’s why Software Advice pulled together the Expert Guide on 5 Top-Rated Applicant Tracking Systems for Small Businesses.

The report compares ATS tools and their capabilities for you, laying out everything from job posting distribution to resume parsing to candidate tracking. It gives you a clear view of what each platform offers so you can decide which one will work best for you.

Meet the ATS that can centralize your recruiting workflow, automate manual tasks, and help your team hire faster.

Grab your copy of the guide.

HR STRATEGY

A good cry

Getty Images

Nearly half (49%) of US workers have cried or almost cried at work in the past six months, and most (87%) have hid their tears from colleagues, according to a recent report from career and résumé platform Resume.io, seen by HR Brew.

“I don’t think it’s surprising to see the data, given how much is going on right now,” Amanda Augustine, a career expert at Resume.io, told HR Brew. “As we’re seeing many people return to work after having those lines blurred for so many years working from home, we are seeing more people show that emotion.”

HR pros can help by normalizing conversations about emotional distress and acknowledging that crying is a symptom of other issues in employees’ work and personal lives, Augustine said.

“While openly crying in the office isn’t fantastic, it’s not necessarily the problem, it’s the effect,” she said. “This emotional distress is a signal. We really got to focus on what is the root cause behind this.”

For more on how to support crying employees, keep reading here.—MC

RECRUITMENT & RETENTION

Vying for visa solutions

Aizada Marat

Aizada Marat paid immigration lawyers thousands of dollars to help her navigate the US visa system.

Instead, a basic mistake left the Harvard Law graduate unable to work, travel, and stuck in legal limbo while living in the US and supporting her family back home in Kyrgyzstan. She called it an “immigration nightmare” that lasted more than a year.

Then she built Alma to fix it.

Founder Brew spoke to Marat about her experiences with the US immigration system, and why she wanted to rethink how professionals and companies navigate it.

Sponsored By Culture Amp

Adapt or stall. The plant floor is modernizing fast, but manufacturing’s workforce strategies are falling behind. Culture Amp’s Adapt or Stall: The Critical State of HR in Modern Manufacturing explores how workforce stability dictates production capacity and strategies to manage communication silos and oncoming demographic shifts. Read the report.

WORK PERKS

A desktop computer plugged into a green couch.

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Electric vehicle maker Lucid is laying off 18% of its workforce and eliminating its chief operating officer role in an effort to cut costs. (CNBC)

Quote: “It’s almost like you have to read between the lines to catch that somebody’s doing that, and we can do that now…The AI can read between the lines.”—Donald McElligott, VP of compliance supervision at workplace surveillance software firm Global Relay, on AI’s ability to detect more subtle kinds of workplace bullying—including from bosses (Bloomberg)

Read: Serious chemical accidents are becoming more frequent and more dangerous in the US, largely due to aging infrastructure in chemical plants. (the Wall Street Journal)

Simplify your search: The right ATS can make all the difference to growing teams. That’s why Software Advice pulled together a guide that compares the top-rated tools on the market. Grab your copy.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

JOBS

More focus, less fluff. CollabWORK filters out the noise and delivers jobs that actually match what HR Brew readers are looking for. Click here to see the full board of curated roles.

PEOPLE PERSON PODCAST

Using PTO to boost your employees' performance

On this episode of People Person, host and Morning Brew Inc.'s SVP Head of People Operations Kate Noel, speaks with Jenna Young, Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry about the importance of PTO: taking it, not taking advantage of it, and how companies should actually be thinking about it for optimal employee performance. Plus, Jenna shares her idea for trading AI training with Summer Fridays.

Listen to the episode

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Written by Adam DeRose, Mikaela Cohen, Jamila Huxtable, and Paige McGlauflin

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☕ Maxed out on tokenmaxxing