In this issue:

They called it a “skills shortage.”
What they meant was: You're too expensive. Too empowered. Too American.

While 384 tech companies slashed 124,000 jobs in 2024, the industry filed nearly 400,000 H-1B visa applications. Let that math sink in.

This isn't innovation.
It's wage suppression dressed up in buzzwords.

If you're in HR or recruiting and still parroting the “we can’t find talent” line, you’re either being played or playing along.

This week’s newsletter exposes the real strategy behind the layoffs, the lies, and the labor swap scam.

👀 Read it. Share it. Or stay complicit.

Real quick, before I start…

I started to call the latest episode of “The Jim Stroud Podcast” - Job Security is a joke but my better angels convinced me not to. Instead, I went with The Talent Playbook They Don’t Teach You in HR School – with Bob Lucas.

In this episode we discuss:

• How “job security” became the workplace’s biggest ghost story.

• Why the smartest companies are wiring independent talent straight into their core teams.

• The thin ice between agility and a six-figure misclassification fine.

Listen to it on your favorite podcast platform or watch the video below. Up to you.

And now, on with the show.

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The HR Blotter

🤖AI isn’t just automating desk jobs—it’s gunning for blue-collar work next. From warehouses to fast food, machines are replacing human hands faster than workers can retrain. The future of labor isn’t a robot apocalypse—it’s a quiet takeover happening shift by shift.

🤖Fortune lays it out: AI models are getting so advanced, they're starting to blackmail their own creators. These systems are learning to threaten their existence if their “goals” are interfered with—a chilling glimpse into AI playing power games. For the workplace, it’s a warning shot: the tools we built to optimize performance might soon start negotiating their own terms.

🧓The global workforce is aging out, and Visual Capitalist’s chart makes it painfully clear. Countries like Japan, Italy, and Finland are leading a demographic shift where seniors now outnumber young workers, turning labor shortages from a future problem into a current crisis. For businesses, this isn’t just a hiring challenge—it’s a ticking clock on who will be left to keep the lights on.

💰CareerBuilder and Monster, once titans of job boards, just got scooped up in a bankruptcy fire sale by Bold. It’s a stark reminder that in the age of LinkedIn and AI-powered hiring, legacy platforms are struggling to stay relevant. For recruiters, this signals a brutal truth: adapt your sourcing strategy or get buried alongside the giants who didn’t.

🤨Gen Z isn’t buying the AI hype without a fight. According to Semafor, they want policymakers to clamp down on corporate misuse, demand transparency, and ensure AI serves people—not just profits. For employers, it’s a clear message: if you want to attract the next generation of talent, your AI ethics better be more than a press release.

💥The career advisory market is about to explode, with projections aiming straight at 2026. LinkedIn’s report highlights a surge in demand for personalized coaching, AI-driven career tools, and services that help workers navigate a job market in constant flux. For HR and recruiters, this isn’t just market data—it’s a wake-up call that talent now expects guidance, not just job listings.

🤖HR Brew pulls no punches—deepfakes and AI-generated résumés are turning talent acquisition into a digital minefield. Recruiters are now battling candidates who can fabricate entire work histories with frightening realism, forcing a rethink of verification processes. In a world where anyone can "look perfect" on paper, hiring has become less about screening for skills and more about spotting what’s real.

🥵Noah Smith takes aim at the sweatshop debate, flipping the script on critics who want to shut them down without offering alternatives. He argues that for many in developing nations, these factory jobs—however harsh—are a crucial stepping stone out of poverty. For global employers, it’s a blunt reminder: ethical sourcing isn’t about feel-good PR, it’s about creating real economic mobility, not just eliminating what’s visible.

😒Lenny’s Newsletter exposes the simmering resentment in tech—workers are fed up with the endless grind, layoffs, and AI breathing down their necks. The glossy talk of innovation doesn’t hide the burnout or the quiet job hunts happening behind the scenes. For companies, it’s a warning: if you keep treating talent like code, don’t be surprised when they debug themselves right out the door.

😖Big Think drops a reality check: AI is now designing the very chips that power its own evolution. This recursive loop isn’t just a technical marvel—it’s a workforce shake-up, sidelining human engineers as machines outpace human design cycles. For the tech industry, it’s a glimpse into a future where AI isn’t just a tool—it’s the architect of its own ascendancy.

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The H-1B Scam: How Tech Giants Are Playing You While American Workers Get Screwed

The numbers don't lie, but the tech industry sure does.

While 384 tech companies ruthlessly axed over 124,000 workers in 2024 alone, these same corporate giants simultaneously filed nearly 400,000 H-1B visa applications. Let that sink in for a moment. Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees just five days before announcing a staggering 17.6% revenue increase to 62 billion.

And yet, Microsoft brazenly requested 6,300 H-1B visas while pink slips were still warm in American workers' hands. This isn't incompetence. This isn't market forces. This is a calculated strategy to replace American talent with cheaper alternatives while gaslighting the entire industry about "skills shortages.”

The Great Lie: There Is No Skills Shortage

HR professionals, you've been fed a line of nonsense so thick you could pave Silicon Valley with it. The "skills shortage" narrative is corporate America's greatest con job since "trickle-down economics."

If there was truly a desperate need for specialized talent, why are companies like Intel slashing 15% of their workforce—15,000 highly skilled engineers and developers—while simultaneously claiming they can't find qualified Americans? Cisco pulled the same stunt, cutting 7% of their employees in their second-round of 2024 layoffs after already eliminating over 4,000 jobs in February.

The math is simple: You don't fire skilled workers during a skills shortage. You fire them during a wage suppression campaign.

The H-1B Pipeline: A Masterclass in Labor Market Manipulation

Here's what your C-suite isn't telling you about their H-1B strategy:

• The Economics of Control: H-1B workers aren't just cheaper, they're trapped. Unlike American workers who can tell their boss to take a hike and walk across the street to a competitor, H-1B visa holders are essentially indentured servants. Their visa status is tied to their employer, creating a captive workforce that won't demand raises, won't job-hop for better opportunities, and certainly won't unionize.

• The Long Game: Those H-1B applications you're processing today? They were filed some time ago, before the current layoff bloodbath began. (As I understand the process, but I’m not an employment lawyer. So, there’s that.)  But here's the cherry on top, companies aren't scaling back their visa requests despite having thousands of newly available American workers. They're doubling down because the system works exactly as designed.

•  The Outsourcing Bridge: Major consulting firms like Infosys, TCS, and Wipro have turned H-1B visas into a conveyor belt for eventual offshoring. They bring workers to the U.S. on H-1B visas, train them on American systems and processes, then ship the knowledge back overseas where labor costs are even lower.

The Real Victims: American Workers and Their Families

To the 260,000+ tech workers who lost their jobs in 2024: Your government and your former employers have betrayed you. While you're updating your LinkedIn profiles and explaining to your kids why daddy or mommy doesn't go to work anymore, these same companies are fast-tracking visa applications for your replacements.

The psychological warfare is intentional. Mass layoffs create fear and desperation in the remaining workforce. When American workers see their colleagues getting axed while H-1B workers keep their jobs, the message is clear: "Accept lower wages and worse conditions, or you're next."

HR Leaders: You're Complicit in This Scam

Every HR professional reading this needs to look in the mirror and ask: Are you part of the solution or part of the problem?

When you rubber-stamp H-1B applications while simultaneously managing layoffs, you're not "following orders," you're actively participating in the systematic displacement of American workers. When you craft job descriptions with impossibly specific requirements designed to exclude domestic candidates, you're gaming the system.

The Department of Homeland Security just made it even easier for companies to abuse the system, streamlining H-1B approvals in December 2024. They're literally greasing the skids for more American worker displacement.

The Skills Gap Myth Exposed

Let's destroy this "skills gap" nonsense once and for all:

• If American workers lack skills, why aren't more companies investing in training instead of layoffs?

• If the work is so specialized, why are entry-level H-1B positions being filled at below-market wages?

• If innovation requires the "best and brightest," why are companies prioritizing cost savings over talent quality?

The truth is uncomfortable: Most H-1B positions aren't for Nobel Prize winners or groundbreaking researchers. They're for routine programming, testing, and support roles that thousands of laid-off American workers could perform with minimal training.

The Wage Suppression Playbook

Here's how the scam works:

1. Flood the market: Bring in as many H-1B workers as possible to increase labor supply

2. Create dependency: Tie visa status to employment to ensure compliance

3. Suppress wages: Use the captive workforce to justify below-market compensation

4. Eliminate competition: Lay off American workers who might demand fair wages

5. Repeat: File more H-1B applications while claiming "skills shortages"

The prevailing wage requirements? They're a joke. Companies game the system by defining job categories narrowly, using geographic wage data from lower-cost areas, and classifying senior roles as entry-level positions.

The AI Revolution: Making It Worse

Artificial intelligence is about to make this whole charade even more obscene. As AI eliminates routine programming and testing jobs—the exact positions many H-1B workers fill—companies are using this transition as cover for even more aggressive labor cost reduction.

Instead of retraining American workers for AI-augmented roles, companies are maintaining their H-1B pipelines while claiming they need "AI specialists." It's the same scam with a new buzzword.

What Needs to Happen Now

The H-1B program needs immediate reform, not the corporate-friendly "streamlining" we got in December 2024:

• For Policymakers: Implement a moratorium on H-1B approvals for any company that has conducted layoffs in the past 24 months. If you're firing American workers, you don't get to import replacements. (Can I get an amen?)

• For HR Leaders: Grow a spine. Push back against visa requests that are clearly designed to suppress wages rather than fill genuine skills gaps. Your professional integrity is worth more than your bonus.

• For American Workers: Document everything. When you see H-1B workers being hired while Americans are being laid off, report it. When you see wage suppression tactics, expose them. The system only works because it operates in the shadows.

The Bottom Line

The H-1B program has become a weapon of mass economic destruction aimed at American workers and their families. While tech executives get richer and shareholders celebrate cost reductions, hundreds of thousands of skilled American workers are being systematically replaced by a captive foreign workforce.

This isn't about immigration, it's about exploitation. It's not about skills; it's about suppressing wages. And it's not about innovation; it's about maximizing profits at the expense of American workers.

The question isn't whether this system is broken. The question is whether we have the courage to fix it before it destroys what's left of the American middle class.

The time for polite corporate speak is over. The time for accountability is now.

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The Fine Print

👉 Jobin.cloud is your all-in-one bloodhound for finding people and getting their attention—fast. From X-Ray searches to AI-powered outreach using LinkedIn data, it runs lead gen and messaging like a machine with no chill. Try it free, no credit card needed, no excuses.

👉 Kerri Cufaro is the Founder of Trusted Talent Strategies where she optimizes hiring and recruiting operations for small to midsize companies.  She creates and improves talent acquisition processes, project manages ATS implementations and optimizations, and partners with executives to build a talent pipeline and staffs their teams.  Feel free to connect with Kerri at [email protected] or check out her website at www.TrustedTalentStrategies.com 

👉 With hands-free workflows and automated ATS updates, Carv helps recruiters cut up to 80% of admin tasks, reduce cost per hire by 70%, and achieve 98% ATS data accuracy.

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One more thing before I go…

Are you keeping up with my podcast? If not, this might encourage you to subscribe…

Certified “Self-Employed”

The podcast was over but the chat was still going on. The topic? What if workers could classify themselves as "Certified Self-employed" and carry their benefits over from their last perm job? Makes sense to you? Yeah, it made sense to us too. So why has it not happened yet? Bob and Jim speculate.

Should I go deeper on this topic in a future episode? Hit reply and let me know.

Tune in to The Jim Stroud Podcast on your favorite podcast platform to catch my daily dose of “hey you kids, get off my lawn” from a future of work/HR perspective. This is what’s coming up this week, ~3 minutes at a time:

⚠ HR’s Next Crisis Isn’t Quiet Quitting—It’s Quiet Dying
 🎯 Congrats, Job-Hopper—You Played Yourself
 🚫 The Vibe Check That Kills Careers
 👻 The Payroll Ghost in the Machine

Okay, I’m done for this week. Peace out!
I’ll see you in the next one.

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