It's hiring season over here.

We've spent the past few weeks interviewing some lovely, smart people and getting ready to welcome new faces to team B+E. Exciting!

For the many orgs picking up hiring in fall (interns! new grads! growth!), summer is a great time to roll up your sleeves and refine your onboarding. It’s also when it tends to get shaky. Can someone get started if their manager is away at the cottage? Would they know where to find answers without relying on the one person who seems to know everything? With an intentionally designed process, things can feel organized and welcoming no matter who’s OOO.

I love building onboarding, personally- it’s a chance to design a cool experience, show off your culture, and give someone a clean, happy start. Beyond paperwork, the best processes give people a lens into how the organization really works. Some of my favourite examples: having every new hire do a month in customer support, rotating them to different teams completely outside their job, or giving them fun faux-projects to practice on- ours is a fictional ice cream startup called MerryGoRound. Great programs also give a sense of being welcomed into a community. Make sure to give them a chance to share a bit about who they really are, fill them in on inside jokes and lore, and recruit a few warm colleagues to take them under their wing. Whatever you do, please don’t just hand them a Macbook and expect them to figure it out.

An oldie but a goodie, The Bright + Early Guide to Onboarding is full of practical tips for creating a good onboarding experience that reflects what makes your team unique- from designing a meaningful first day to building the rituals and relationships that help people thrive. It also has a template you can borrow from to start.

Twenty-six current and former Meta employees are suing, claiming its AI systems selected them for a layoff because of/despite the fact that they were on medical or parental leave. According to the claim, the system was ranking them lower on performance scores due to inactivity and less positive input points (praise, manager 1:1 notes, project wins) while they were…on leave.

According to a new report, a drop in employee retention may be coming. Millennials especially are frustrated, citing slower upward mobility and fewer pay increases than in previous roles. This may be a sticking point; in a rough economy, people have been "job hugging” and staying longer than they used to. But that same rough economy is why raises and promotions have been moving slower than they’re used to. The frustration is real, but the question is whether better roles are actually out there for everyone feeling it.

We’re still in the “cheap-Uber” era of AI use. How long until tokens become more expensive than the staff they replaced? (Companies Are Throttling Employees' AI Use Because It's Too Expensive, AI Token Economy: Workers Are Being Given Budgets for AI Use.)

Steph and Trisha, our Directors of Workplace Design, gave a really thoughtful talk with TechSoup on whether ethical AI at work is possible- you can watch it here. They get into what’s extractive vs supportive, sustainability concerns, dealing with different levels of AI comfort on your team, vetting vendors, and some tangible examples of “AI for good”.

How Tech Workers Are Feeling in 2026: A Workforce Splitting in Two. Burnout is up 11 points, people’s career optimism directly correlates with their AI optimism, people feel like they are expected to ship way more (but are iffy on the quality of it), and managers are still the biggest lever for happiness - their perceived quality was the strongest driver of burnout on teams, and had one of the strongest impacts on everything else measured.

The 250-Year-Old Company That Survived by Refusing to Lay People Off. I love this feel-good business story. Droughts happen, but the ones who stay true to their values (and their people) are the ones still standing when the rain comes.

Stanford research on 3 million job applications found that when companies use the same AI screening vendors, the same people keep getting rejected, with clear racial disparities. Over 25% of applications by Black candidates went to positions that adversely impacted them by US employment discrimination standards (thanks to the folks at Feminuity for the share).

How Workplaces Can Support Working Parents Amid Summertime Care Challenges. This is a real issue- in fact, this issue is being written while a local sitter plays MarioKart with my 7 year old ten feet away from me. I’m lucky to have some help and general control over my work schedule, but it’s still a struggle. Helping parents navigate the summer months with ease and flexibility is something we’re eternally grateful (and more productive) for.

A new LSE study found that 86% of business managers privately support post-growth practices -business models that prioritize wellbeing, sustainability, and equitable distribution over endless financial expansion. However, only about half think that their peers agree with them.

Nature This Week. A cool app that combines iNaturalist observation data with Wikipedia species info to show you what's happening in your area right now. Here in Ontario, coyotes are currently guarding their pups and showshoe hares are competing for mates (they’re just like us)!

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Every issue, we’ll share a curated list of exciting jobs at Bright + Early partner orgs, as well as ones we think are cool. Note that we’re not involved in hiring– please apply directly. As part of our advocacy for pay transparency, we only share jobs that include it.

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