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Those in steady employment in 2026 might feel like they won the lottery, as the number of job openings dwindles at the same time as layoffs continue to hit. This has caused some recruiters to shift their focus from employers to the unemployed: Instead of companies hiring recruiters to find and place talent, job seekers are now the ones enlisting recruiter services to help get a foot in the door, coughing up hefty fees (either a flat rate or a cut of the candidates first-year salary once they land a job). The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the trend which has come to be known as reverse recruitment. One boutique agency the Journal spoke with, The Reverse Recruiting Agency, charges $1,500 per month, plus 10% of first-year salary upon job acceptance, at which time they will refund the first months fee. Their services include customized résumés (with zero AI-written slop), hiring manager outreach, LinkedIn profile and résumé optimization, and networking support. Their promise? Nine interviews in the first three months, or your money back. Refer is another reverse recruitment agency that connects talent directly with hiring managers using an AI agent, Lia. Lia is currently making 20-plus introductions daily between candidates and hiring managers who have already expressed interest in their profiles. The cost of landing a job with Refer will set new hires back 20% of their first months paycheck. As sites like LinkedIn are flooded with applications and employers rely on AI résumé screeners, applicants are increasingly seeking alternative ways to get their profiles in front of the right people. Theres also those offering these services for less on gig platforms, like Fiverr. But for those with the means, or those desperate enough, spending a few thousand dollars to not have to suffer the indignities of the job hunt may seem like a fair deal. Looking for a job is a time-consuming and often ego-bruising taskespecially considering one in four unemployed people, or 1.8 million Americans, are still job hunting six months later. A low-hire, low-fire environment means that, while the current unemployment rate isnt all that bad, for those out of work it’s incredibly difficult to land a job. Roughly one million more people are seeking work than there were available jobs as of December, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by Indeed. Many job seekers employing the services of reverse recruiters may have been unemployed for monthsat which point theyve exhausted their 26 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits, which replace less than 40% of a persons previous income on average. Here, pay-to-play hiring is a worrying trend and a sign of a bleak job market. When job seekers are made to shoulder the financial burden of their own recruitment, without guaranteed results, it shifts the risk from employers to the unemployed, many of whom will already be under immense strain and stress. Lets call this what it is: predatory marketing wrapped in career coaching language, a résumé writer and former recruiter, Sarah Johnston, posted on LinkedIn. This is a dark space, don’t do it, founding partner of executive search firm Cowen Partners, Shawn Cole also posted. ”Reverse-recruiter models” are not real or reputable recruiting firms. They are résumé spammers. He added: Your résumé and livelihood shouldnt be treated like spam.
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E-Commerce
It’s hard to tell AI news from AI hype at the best of times, but the most recent surge around agents, triggered by many developers embracing Claude Code a couple of months ago, feels like something different. With the viral freakout over Moltbook, the agent social network, and the Super Bowl ad slap fight between OpenAI and Anthropic, AI has escalated to a new level of mainstream attention. Everyone’s forgotten about the AI bubble and is instead dancing around the AI “inflection point,” when AI in general and agents in particular begin to take over huge swaths of knowledge work, with massive consequences for the economy and the workforce. The recent sell-off of SaaS stocks is an indication of how seriously the industry takes this. For journalists, all this mainstream AI noise, coupled with the steady drumbeat of layoffs in the media industry, quickly turns into a familiar feeling: pressure to do more. As newsrooms shrink and AI tools get framed as productivity machines, its easy to assume the right response is higher output. But AI isnt just changing how stories get made. Its changing how stories get found. So the temptation to use AI to do “more with less,” which in many cases will be to tell the same kinds of stories, just more quickly and more often, is misguided. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/media-copilot.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/fe289316-bc4f-44ef-96bf-148b3d8578c1_1440x1440.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to The Media Copilot\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Emediacopilot.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453847,"imageMobileId":91453848,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} This is because of the contradiction in how AI systems surface information: While they look for sameness to reinforce the patterns they’re seeing, they don’t reward it. That’s the difference between being cited in an AI summary vs. being in the background. AI only needs one competent version of the commodity story; it goes looking for the one that looks authoritative and adds something new. More isnt more In practice, yes, you could use AI to accelerate news production, letting you cover more stories than you could before, and a few newsrooms are doing that. And on an individual level, that might even signal your value to your employer in the short term. But if it’s effectively the same story reported elsewhere, an AI engine has no reason to prioritize yours over another. Instead, the more logical path is to invest in the parts of journalism that only humans can do: finding new and novel information through sourcing, research, interviews, and analysis. In other words, while the instinct to do more isn’t wrong, it should be aimed at going deeper, not wider. AI can still be an accelerant here, speeding up ideation, research, and even things like reaching out to sources. A digital media researcher, Nick Hagar, recently showed what this looks like in practice, using coding agents to recreate a deep analysis from a human-authored journalistic investigation on Virginia police decertifications. The interesting thing about his case study is that, when used with very specific tools (such as Claude Code “skills,” which essentially turn certain research tasks into templates), he could quickly replicate the work, but ultimately his human judgment was required throughout. “Even with skills enforcing a structured workflow, I made dozens of judgment calls…. Skills make the workflow more systematic; they dont eliminate the need for human attention,” he wrote. That points to the better way journalists should think about AI: The goal isn’t to create more stories, but to create stories that are so valuable and definitive that AI search engines can’t ignore them. Authority over output To succeed in this new environment, the No. 1 habit that journalists will need to break is the natural instinct to cover more. Very few reporters think they’ve got a full grip on all the stories on their beat, and as newsrooms shrink, they have less help than ever. It doesn’t mean you ignore all breaking news, but it does mean a mental shift from reaction to discernment. In many cases, that might mean narrowing a beat to a micro-beat (say, from “energy” to “nuclear power”). A lot of what I’m describing is happening naturally as many reporters, either victims of layoffs or entrepreneurially minded, flock to platforms like Substack and Beehiiv to put out a shingle. It’s not just the best-worst optionthe system is pushing incentives in this direction, rewarding people who build authority via content that goes deep in a specific subject area and brings original insights and information to the table. Certainly, you don’t have to strike out on your own to take this approach, though it does require discipline to put aside story FOMO and focus on where you can bring something original to the table. And the rewards go beyond simply having a better chance at surfacing in AI answers: you’ll have a stronger connection to your audience because they’ll be coming to you for information you can’t get anywhere else. The value of shaping narratives instead of chasing them is much greater than any short-term traffic spike. That’s a hopeful idea, and paired with the changing incentives of the media ecosystem, it points to a key insight. AI’s ability to summarize and transform content has caused many to wonder what the “atomc unit” of journalism is. Some think it’s the unique facts, quotes, or insights that are woven into stories, but I think all this implies it’s something more abstract: editorial judgment. As AI systems absorb more of the mechanical labor of journalism, theyre inadvertently clarifying the thing they cant absorb: human judgment about what matters and why. If this is an inflection point, it isnt in the tools. Its in the work we choose to do. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/media-copilot.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/fe289316-bc4f-44ef-96bf-148b3d8578c1_1440x1440.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to The Media Copilot\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Emediacopilot.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453847,"imageMobileId":91453848,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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E-Commerce
The Supreme Court has struck down President Donald Trumps far-reaching global tariffs, handing him a significant loss on an issue crucial to his economic agenda. The decision on Friday centers on tariffs imposed under an emergency powers law, including the sweeping reciprocal tariffs he levied on nearly every other country. Its the first major piece of Trumps broad agenda to come squarely before the nations highest court, which he helped shape with the appointments of three conservative jurists in his first term. The Republican president has been vocal about the case, calling it one of the most important in U.S. history and saying a ruling against him would be an economic body blow to the country. But legal opposition crossed the political spectrum, including libertarian and pro-business groups that are typically aligned with the GOP. Polling has found tariffs arent broadly popular with the public, amid wider voter concern about affordability.
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