🗺️ Fall Roadmap, 1,750 HR Prompts, Q&A with Leah Brite - Aug 20, 2025

Hey, HR Champs!👋 As we gear up for fall (and pumpkin spice HR lattés), it’s time to map the road ahead—retention, reboarding & Q4 goals. Time for the HR Fall Roadmap…

On today’s agenda:

🗺️ HR’s roadmap for fall success

💡 1,750 HR Prompts

🎤 Q&A with Gusto’s Leah Brite

👻 Ghostworking

THE HR SPOTLIGHT

🗺️ HR’s Fall Roadmap: Lessons from Early Campus Recruiting

As crisp air replaces summer haze, HR’s Fall Roadmap kicks into gear. Let’s take a page from college recruiting playbooks to sharpen your early campus strategies. Think of it as pumpkin spice for your hiring pipeline—warm, familiar, and totally essential. 

🚨 The situation:

• Campus recruiting often comes too late—like showing up midnight to snag a pumpkin spice muffin. At the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), early career fairs are game-changers: three per year (spring, summer, fall), drawing 150+ companies, 375+ recruiters, 1,600 student visits, and 4,000 interviews, helping grads land an average of 3 job offers by graduation. (CIAChef)

• Meanwhile, San José State University (SJSU), the Silicon Valley talent factory, sees 88% of its undergrads and 92% of grads placed, with SJSU Career Center hosting 13 career fairs in one academic year and attracting 370 employers—all courtesy of year-round early engagement. (Shiksha) 

  The result? Graduates land mean salaries of $68,342 within six months, over $18K above national peers. (Braven)

In short: late-stage recruiting means weak pipelines. Early outreach = stronger talent funnels.

✅ What HR can do:

1. Schedule multiple mini-fairs or pop-ups (even digital ones) across the semester—like CIA’s triannual fairs. Get departments, managers, and recruiters involved early.

2. Offer insider access—résumé clinics, mock interviews, and alumni panels even before seniors go job-hunting. SJSU’s Career Center does just that—13 fairs, coaching, digital tools, all year long (SJSU).

3. Leverage local industry ties—SJSU taps Silicon Valley companies, landing grads at Apple, Google, Cisco, etc. You can do the same in your region—tip the scales in your favor.

4. Track and share wins—“Our grads leave early, but get hired early: mean salary $68K+ within 6 months. How’s your pipeline?” This kind of stat builds internal buy-in.

5. Inject some HR wit—“Don’t ghost on campus just because freshmen are nice. Meet them early, or someone else will.”

Think of this as your team’s summer-return “we’re glad you survived the sunburn” strategy.

☕ Curious how to brew this into your own HR strategy? See HRAddict’s Recruitment Strategies—because your Fall Roadmap deserves more than just a map. It needs GPS (Great Placement Strategy). 

💡Work Smarter in HR: 1,750 HR Prompts That Deliver

Save hours of manual work with this curated set of 1,750 HR-ready ChatGPT prompts. From polishing job descriptions to navigating tough conversations, these prompts cut the guesswork and speed up your day-to-day.

What’s inside:

✅ Tailored prompts for employee reviews

✅ Smarter recruitment & onboarding flows

✅ Boosts for engagement & team morale

✅ Guidance for tricky conversations

✅ Faster, data-driven HR decisions

Promo ends August 22 midnight EST.

🤖 Pretending to Know AI — HR Dive

• What’s unfolding: A new survey finds that 1 in 6 U.S. workers admit they pretend to use AI at work because of unrealistic expectations. While many report productivity boosts, gaps in training and fluency leave others feeling overwhelmed or even undermined by the tech.

• Why it matters: This highlights a growing disconnect—employees feel pressure to fake AI skills rather than ask for support, which could hurt morale and lead to mistakes. HR can intervene by designing tiered training, normalizing skill-building, and setting realistic AI expectations across roles.

• What’s unfolding: HSBC is rolling out a major surveillance overhaul: nearly four times more cameras in its new London HQ, doubling biometric scanners, and deploying badging software on personal devices—all as part of a “global security strategy.”

• Why it matters: Though security is top of mind, HR must balance safety with employee trust. Over-monitoring can erode psychological safety and employer brand. Lead with transparency—clarifying purpose, consent, and data use—and consider softer measures like voluntary opt-ins and clear privacy policies.

• What’s unfolding: Recent data reveals nearly 60％ of employees admit to “ghostworking”—that is, pretending to work through actions like typing randomly or faking phone calls. Underlying the trend is a sharp drop in recognition, with only 23％ feeling meaningfully appreciated at work.

• Why it matters: Ghostworking is more than cheeky—it’s a symptom of disengagement. HR should empower managers with recognition tools, encourage frequent peer-to-peer praise, and integrate weekly acknowledgement rituals that reinforce belonging and purpose.

COMPLIANCE CORNER

• What’s unfolding: The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court's block and reinstated enforcement of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) for Texas state employees.

• HR implications: HR teams must prepare to comply with PWFA again in Texas—ensuring accommodations for pregnancy-related needs—and proactively update policies and training before any potential final appeal.

• What’s unfolding: A delivery driver fired for refusing Sunday shifts due to religious observance secured a $50K settlement following an EEOC discrimination suit.

• HR implications: HR must ensure religious accommodations are respected and clearly communicated; failure to do so risks costly legal and reputational fallout—so review schedules and accommodation protocols now.

• What’s unfolding: Delaware amended its Paid Family and Medical Leave law to prohibit requiring employees to exhaust PTO before using state benefits and opened rolling-timeline approval for private plans ahead of the January 1, 2026 rollout.

• HR implications: HR leaders in Delaware should immediately revise leave policies to reflect the “PTO not mandatory” clause, coordinate PTO top-offs by agreement only, and prepare for new compliance deadlines in 2026.

BREAKROOM

📬 Missed Monday’s issue ‘Championing Resilience’? Read it »