I rarely feature my own writing on this newsletter, but making an exception for this issue. What Happened in Recruiting in 2025 is a 4 part series covering 20 things which happened in our sector this year.
Part One covered LinkedIn Hiring Assistant, M&A in TA Tech, DOGE firing 300,000 US Federal Gov Workers, Zuckerberg launching the most expensive recruitment campaign in history to build Superintelligence and the retirement of the great Irina Shamaeva from active sourcing.
Part Two, we talked about Trump Liberation Day Tariffs, the incredible case of corporate espionage between global payment processors Deel and Rippling, the rise of the AI First company culture, Moderna merging HR + IT and the exposure of King of Overworking, Soham Parekh, a software engineering who appeared to have been holding down up to 17 remote software jobs concurrently.
Part Three, we’re talking about the Jobless Boom, $100K for H-1B visas, the Collapse of Careerbuilder and Monster, the meteoric rise of the mysterious Mercor and whether GEO is the new SEO. Finally, on
Part Four, the latest on Mobley vs Workday, Indeed’s innocent sounding yet ominous play for ATS disposition data, the ‘Liporrazi Incident’ featured real life deep fake candidate, caught in the act, AI destroying the early entry career ladder and the advent of My AI vs Your AI, and why Sovereign AI is the only thing we should be supporting. There’s much more than happened in our sector - I’m weaker than I like on the staffing / RPO side of the market, and despite my itinerant approach this year, I still have massive blind spots in mega regions and mega industries where lots of recruiting is happening. That being said, I hope that you still enjoy these essays and get something out of them. I certainly did - writing sharpens my thinking and it helped me understand what is going on our sector. Now I need to do a forecast for 2026…