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The University of California Irvine’s new healthcare campus has a long list of innovative features, from its combined inpatient-outpatient surgical suite to its outdoor chemotherapy infusion terrace to an entire floor dedicated to staff only. The one thing it doesn’t have is a gas line. The multi-building healthcare campus with 144 hospital beds officially opened in December as one of a very few major hospitals around the world that runs entirely on electricity. CO Architects, which designed the all-electric hospital alongside design-build partner Hensel Phelps, claims it’s the only hospital larger than 500,000 square feet to pull this off. [Photo: Tom Bonner] “Healthcare is just about as big of an energy hog as you can get,” says Fabian Kremkus, a design principal at CO Architects. Room-sized MRI machines, medicine refrigerators, and commercial kitchens cranking out hospital food represent just a snapshot of the energy needs of a healthcare facility. At UCI Health, as the campus is known, feeding this energy demand with only electricity required nimble design. The project has been in the works since 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was putting unusual scrutiny on the ways hospitals functioned. UCI Health’s design was inevitably influenced by the pandemic, leading to an emphasis on flexibility and the ability to handle an influx of highly contagious patients should another pandemic occur. At the same time, the University of California system was plowing ahead with its own goal of achieving carbon neutrality in its buildings by 2025, which made electrification another priority. [Photo: Tom Bonner] But when the building’s design was being finalized, there wasn’t enough commercially available equipment to do the entire project without fossil fuels. By the time the project went up for its construction permit, the plan still included things like a gas-powered central heating and cooling plant and a gas line feeding the hospital’s kitchens. As the project got deeper into construction, new equipment started coming onto the market, including all-electric air-source heat pumps and air chillers, as well as all-electric cooking equipment. “Since the start of the project versus couple of years ago, there are a lot more options,” says Jill Cheng, an associate principal at CO Architects. [Photo: Tom Bonner] As more and more electric options came to the table, the design-build team and the university decided to go all in on the carbon-neutral goal, aiming to create an all-electric hospital. “It required a midstream redesign of our central plant when the decision was made,” says Kremkus. “So it was very challenging, with a really aggressive construction schedule.” [Photo: Tom Bonner] Now, the entire campus uses a unique central heating and cooling plant that eliminates the need for gas-based boilers, as well as the staff resources to monitor such high-pressure infrastructure around the clock. On-site photovoltaic panels help offset the hospital’s high energy needs, and the entire complex is primarily fed by California’s majority renewable electricity grid. [Photo: Tom Bonner] That’s just one of many savings on this project, according to Kremkus. CO Architects analyzed the costs and benefits of taking an all-electric approach and found that even when electric equipment had higher upfront costs, they would be more than offset by energy savings over time. The annual energy cost of using natural gas, for example, would be about $650,000 cheaper than the all-electric alternative, but its annual maintenance costs would be $1.4 million more, making the choice fairly clear. The payback period for investing in the all-electric system is less than three-and-a-half years. “We’re building a 50-year facility, so there’s no question that this is economically the right thing to do,” Kremkus says. This all-electric hospital design is a replicable approach. “All of our future projects that we have in the pipeline will be all electric, and it’s largely championed by this project,” says Kremkus. “We were able to test it here, and now we can roll it out in an even better way because there’s a lot of lessons learned.”
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E-Commerce
The best recruiter I know is going to spend the next three months hiring without posting to a single job board website, like Indeed or LinkedIn. LinkedIn? She laughed. You mean Facebook for thought leaders? No, I wont be using any of those sites. Rosa is head of HR for a large tech startup, and someone I trust to tell me whats really going on in the world of professional recruiting and jobs the unflinching truth. The last time we talked, she had finally taken back control of her companys recruiting process, rescuing it from over-automation, misguided AI, and what she called results-last hiring. Ive hired hundreds of people to work with me over my long career. And Ive partnered with some great recruiters and some not-so-great recruiters along the way. I can tell you she has a point about LinkedIn, but its not just LinkedIn. Rosa wants to sidestep the whole damn hiring system, even down to how her company views hiring and talent. We were treating people like fuel when theyre actually critical machine parts, she said. Once you understand that, you realize the whole damn hiring system is broken, and the path becomes clear. Not easy, but at least clear. Her latest experiment, over the next three months, with her executive team behind her: Hire without LinkedIn and the rest of the job boards. The Digital Job Funnel Is Not Going to Be Fixed Anytime Soon On the other side of the country, a CTO friend of mine spent his holiday break clearing a backlog of support tickets. Why? Because a bunch of folks quit, and when he tried to replace them, the modern automated hiring systems his company was using kept throwing up roadblocks. Wasnt that what all of this automation was supposed to do? he asked me. Find me people quickly? He lost three support people the week before Christmas and figured he could get by with two. After getting vague answers from his HR team, the last day before everything shut down for the holidays, he went full White Goodman and took the bull by the horns. I got into the system myself, thought Id be a hero, and I spent hours going through stacks of applications just trying to filter out the bots, or the résumés that werent even close to what I needed. I wondered if I should just write some code to filter [the applications] myself, but I was running out of time and [support] tickets were piling up. I gave up and said Id just handle the tickets on my own over the holidays. After a holly jolly Jira holiday, he had an epiphany. This never should have happened, he said. Were going to take a hard look at why we have all this hiring technology. Its Always the Quiet Ones In my last column, I speculated that were reaching a bottom in the job market, especially in tech, where a sense of capitulation has leaders in the recruiting industry advising tech employees to become baristas, bartenders, and builders. Yeah, thats the right amount of capitulation. I mentioned in that column that, out of the dozen or so SMB tech startup leaders Ive talked to while going down this particular hiring rabbit hole, not one of them is using a major hiring channel to fill their talent needs. In their view, the LinkedIns, the Indeeds, basically all the job boards, have devolved into an automated slippery slope that, in their eyes, produces no signal, just noise. A lot of noise. Were Hiring, Just Without the Purple Sash So these companies are opting out. Theyre posting jobs on their own websites, or sometimes not, and using their current employees and investors networks of networks to find channels. Theyre going through traditional but smaller recruiters, trade associations, user groups, colleges for entry-level positions, even niche online communities like Reddit and Hacker News. Theyre going through me, not to hire me, but asking if I know anyone who knows anyone who would be perfect for the role, like they used to before LinkedIn ate all of hiring which is right before LinkedIn decided there was more money in letting ambitious professionals post AI-written opinions on everything. Oh, sorry, before you ask me who these companies are, Id love to tell you, and I am telling people whom I think they might find a perfect fit, but if I splash their names here it defeats the purpose of what theyre trying to do. Theyre tightening the aperture, as one put it, which sounds uncomfortable, but is really just a way of saying they want 100 targeted résumés for an open position and not 10,000 résumés that are mostly people who didnt read the job requirements plus bots. Crazy, right? But oddly enough, with the sheer volume of talent already on the sidelines, theyre filling these roles much more quickly than they did using LinkedIn, Indeed, and such. So, no, I cant out them, but I can tell you this. Based on how Rosa and her low-tech colleagues are hiring, heres my best advice for joining this worldwide loose hiring network. Turn Your Friends Into Recruiters Good old-fashioned networking is back in vogue. And this isnt just about blasting an email asking everyone you know if they know anyone who knows anyone who is hiring. You want to build an army, a group of folks who will work for you. Be specific about what you can do and what you want, Rosa told me. A personal, concise message is best. Your friends are already willing to help you, they just need to know how they specifically can do that. Itll be different for everyone. Take Time to Do Deeper Company Research Smart companies are, like Rosa said, looking for critical machine parts, not fuel. They need talent, not labor. They want results, not butts in seats. Your best shot is going to be finding a company that can use you, right away, to get the results they need. Use AI to find these companies that are sidestepping tese channels, instead of using AI to turn your résumé into one more needle in an ever growing haystack. Then, instead of sending an application to 50 companies if you might be a fit for five, find 50 companies where you would be valuable and hope that five of them are hiring, whether they have a job posted for you or not. Look for Positive Proof That the Job They Have Is for You When you do find a job that looks right, dig a little. Is it real? Is it what it says it is? Are you going to be dumped into an applicant pool with thousands of other candidates? Then dig a little deeper. Read the job description with some skepticism. Is it generic? Is it a carbon copy of all the others youve seen? Are they hiring just because they have fresh money? Is it more about joining a club than getting results? On that last one: Companies will do that when they have a lot of problems but they dont know what they need, said Rosa. Instead of a finely tuned job description, theyll spend a lot of time on values and goals and what they believe. Theyre hiring fans, not talent. And finally, focus on companies that move quickly. The truth is there is still a huge supply of available talent out there, thus theres no need for a hiring company to wait for the right fit. If theres no urgency, the company might be just testing the waters or, again, not really sure of what they need. Neither of those aspects works in your favor. Dont Fall For False Progress These are desperate times in the job market. I know there will be counterarguments to these strategies, probably led by Well, thats nice advice, but I need a job now. Heres the thing. Job now is more about luck than reach. Scanning or spamming job board websites might feel like progress, but weve gone so far down the digital black hole of hiring that a lot of the companies that are hiring now, quickly, and for the right reasons, are bypassing those job boards entirely. Im not talking about Easy Apply and Im not suggesting these strategies will speed the process. Im talking about adding a growing channel that isnt getting attention because it doesnt want the attention. Theyre not going to find you. Youll need to find them. I can also speculate that these companies wont stay in the shadows for long. The success of this loose network will get noticed, and it will get centralized, maybe not with AI, but it wont be long before Rosa and all the recruiters like her are up to their eyeballs in tens of thousands of applications again. So now is a good time to go job hunting instead of job scrolling. Now is also a good time to join my email list, a growing rebel alliance of professionals who want a different perspective on tech and business. Joe Procopio This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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The era of the empowered worker is behind us, at least for now. The last year has seen a stark reversal of the dynamics that were at play in the aftermath of the pandemic, when employers were scrambling to hold onto their workers. Companies couldn’t seem to cut jobs fast enough in 2025, as over a million layoffs swept across tech giants and other major employers. Hiring came to a standstill as the corporate world grappled with political headwinds and economic anxieties. Employers have gone all in on artificial intelligence, in the hopes that it will make their workers infinitely more productive. We are entering a new phase that is much more employer-centric in terms of who holds the keys, says Lars Schmidt, the founder of HR consultancy Amplify and the vice president of talent acquisition and innovation at superfruit startup Fruitist. With all the volatility of the job market, the displacement of jobs from AI and automation, and the economic uncertainty causing some companies to dial backI think that the power is very much in the employer’s hands again, and kind of at the detriment of employees. In this climate, the role of human resources has grown ever more complicatedand crucial, as they seek to keep employees motivated and manage burnout alongside mounting demands from their employers. Heres what HR leaders are focused on and expect to see in the year to come. AI: Were making it up as we go As workplaces invest in generative AI, many HR leaders are being tasked with not only using those tools to streamline their own operations, but also to help companies figure out how to deploy the technology effectively across their organization. Schmidt argues its an opportunity for people in HR to step up and help shape how their company approaches AI. Like any emerging technology with the promise of automation and less headcount and more profit, there’s going to be pressure to use that, he says. It’s just as important to have a clear point of view of where not to use AI than where to use AI, and you can’t be a strategic adviser to your C suite peers if you are not informed yourself. Melanie Naranjo, the head of people at HR compliance training startup Ethena, believes companies are now reevaluating their AI investments, after throwing money at expensive AI tools or unsuccessfully attempting to automate jobs. Many HR teams are also thinking about how to encourage employees to get adequately trained on AI without making it an onerous burden: How do you keep a workforce trained on the latest and greatest in AI adoption, when AI is constantly changing? she says. How do you structure that? What does that fall under? How do you hold people accountable? Is there space to do it in a strategic way that doesn’t burn everyone out? Another challenge for some HR leaders is how to determine compensation and pay packages for valuable AI talent, or potential hires who are well versed in AIsomething that many of them are figuring out in real time, amid economic uncertainty. It’s really worth as much as you’re willing to pay for it at this point, Naranjo says. I imagine over time this will even out, because the long-term expectation will likely be that everyone has some level of AI expertise within their field. But right now we’re all just asking each other and making it up as we go, candidly. Focus on retention over hiring Amid a hiring slowdown and a tricky job market that favors employers, many workers are staying putotherwise known as job hugging, in recent parlancerather than looking for new opportunities. For companies, this presents its own challenge. A lot of employees are hesitant to make a move right now, given all the volatility and uncertainty, Schmidt says. So they are kind of growing roots, which creates some tension. The natural attrition of an organizationthrough both voluntary and involuntary turnovercreates a bit of a steady flow of talent in and out of the organization. Workers also face new pressures as their employers expect them to both embrace AI and use it to boost their productivity. Companies, in turn, may see a dip in morale and find that employees are checked outwhich means HR leaders need to figure out how to incentivize them. Even in the midst of this being an employer market, I think smart employers are going to start thinking a little bit more about retention, says Naranjo. The reality is your top performers are always going to be able to find work, regardless of the market. And then everyone else? Even though they’re not leaving in droves because of the market, productivity and morale is going to start to shift. In the past, the answer might have been to give employees a generous raise. Now, Naranjo says, many HR leaders are trying to figure out how to reward them in a low-cost, low-lift way. Beyond looking at compensation, one way companies could address this is by expanding benefits. While benefits are not nearly as much of a focus as they were during the Great Resignationwhen companies were clamoring to retain employeesthey remain a competitive advantage for many organizations, particularly around fertility and caregiving. Mita Mallick, a workplace strategist and former DEI executive, argues that companies have an opportunity to differentiate themselvesand retain top performersby investing in unique benefits. Mallick points to platforms like Multiply Mortgage, which helps employees get a mortgage and discounted rate. With some of these benefits, you might be like, well, it’s niche utilization, Mallick says. Cost utilization is low, but then those individuals become your company advocates. Housing-related benefits are also an example of employers essentially providing social services that would not otherwise be covered. Mallick cites paid leave, which has repeatedly faced pushback as a federal policy. When government fails, and there [are] gaps in the infrastructure, companies are stepping up, she adds. Investing in DEI . . . quietly Back in 2020, the racial reckoning in the aftermath of George Floyds murder led many companies to make bold promises about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Some of them pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to bolster these commitmentsbut in the years since, the appetite for DEI has radiclly changed. After the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action in 2023, corporate America slowly backed away from DEI work, particularly as right wing agitators like Robby Starbuck ramped up public pressure on companies. And over the last year in particular, the Trump administration has set its sights on DEI programs across both the federal government and private sector, even threatening to investigate corporate employers who engage in illegal DEI work. All this has seemingly set the stage for a public retreat from DEI, as many employers fear legal action and being targeted by the Trump administration. Across the federal workforce, DEI offices were shut down, and many DEI professionals in the corporate world lost their jobs as the work fell out of fashion. Companies eliminated representation goals and pulled out of external rankings that measure workplace inclusion. But while employers have, in fact, slashed DEI programs, a number of them are merely rebranding it as belongingor doing the work behind closed doors. For certain companies, this shift is more about revising the language of DEI, which has been weaponized by conservatives: When you look at the fundamentals of why DEI is important, that didn’t change, Schmidt says. What [has] changed is how people are twisting the definition for political purposes. As DEI teams have shrunkor have been dismantled altogethersome of this work has fallen to employee resource groups or is now within the purview of HR. But on the whole, many of the companies that have publicly pulled back on their investments in DEI were never particularly committed. There are people quietly doing the work, Mallick says. And there are people who never wanted to do the work. It was performative. It checked the boxand now they have permission to say they don’t need to do it. Navigating a new political climate A few years ago, many HR leaders felt compelled to speak out about politics and current events. But the tides have turned, as many CEOs and other executives have largely avoided weighing in on political issues since Trump assumed office again. There was a lot of pressure on HR leaders to take a stance on every event that took place, Schmidt says. Now we’re obviously in a very different environment You’re seeing very few companies speaking out in this current environment for fear of retribution. For some folks in HR, this has been a bit of a welcome correction; for others, its an adjustment after years of being more vocal. At the moment, against the backdrop of an immigration crackdown that has claimed the lives of two civilians in Minnesota, some HR leaders have felt like they need to acknowledge whats happening around them. What I’m sensing in one-off conversations with HR professionals is: I kind of want to say something, but I don’t know how it will be received, and I don’t know if it’s the right time, Naranjo says. While a handful of tech workers and leaders have finally commented on the violence in Minnesota, most of them have remained relatively silent. An open letter from the CEOs of Minnesota-based companies like Target and Best Buy called for an immediate deescalation of tensions but stopped short of any pointed condemnations. You’re seeing very few business leaders stepping into the moment and making a statement, Schmidt says. CEOs understandably don’t want to put a target on their company. This reticence leaves HR leaders in a tough spot, if they feel a responsibility to speak out or their employees are demanding it. But Naranjo says companies should recognize there can be a cost to not acknowledging the political moment. From an HR perspective, that’s not actually a distraction, she says. Your employees are already distracted. So if you’re being really strategic about this, and your employees are struggling, you can actually help them focus and be more productive by addressing it correctly.
Category:
E-Commerce
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