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Picture this: On your way out of the office, you notice a manager berating an employee. You assume the worker made some sort of mistake, but the managers behavior seems unprofessional. Later, as youre preparing dinner, is the scene still weighing on youor is it out of sight, out of mind? If you think youd still be bothered, youre not alone. It turns out that simply observing mistreatment at work can have a surprisingly strong impact on people, even for those not directly involved. Thats according to new research led by Edwyna Hill, coauthored by Rachel Burgess, Manuela Priesemuth, Jefferson McClain, and me, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Using a method called meta-analysiswhich takes results from many different studies and combines them to produce an overall set of findingswe reviewed the growing body of research on what management professors like me call third-party perceptions of mistreatment. In this context, third parties are people who observe mistreatment between a perpetrator and the victim, who are the first and second parties. We looked at 158 studies published in 105 journal articles involving thousands of participants. Those studies explored a number of different forms of workplace mistreatment ranging from incivility to abusive supervision and sexual harassment. Some of those studies took part in actual workplaces, while others examined mistreatment in tightly controlled laboratory settings. The results were striking: We found that observing a coworker being mistreated on the job has significant effects on the observers emotions. In fact, we found that observers of mistreatment may be as affected by what happened as the people actually involved in the event. These reactions fall along a spectrumsome helpful, others less so. On the encouraging side, we found that observers tend to judge perpetrators and feel empathy for victims. These reactions discourage mistreatment by creating a climate that favors the victim. On the other hand, we found that observers may also enjoy seeing their coworkers sufferan emotion called schadenfreudeor blame the victim. These sorts of reactions damage team dynamics and discourage people from reporting mistreatment. Why it matters These findings matter because mistreatment in the workplace is disturbingly common, and even more frequently observed than experienced. One recent study found that 34% of employees have experienced workplace mistreatment firsthand, but 44% have observed it happening to someone else. In other words, nearly half of workers have likely seen a scenario like the one described at the start of this article. Unfortunately, the human resources playbook on workplace mistreatment rarely takes third parties into account. Some investigation occurs, potentially resulting in some punishment for the perpetrator and some support for the victim. A more effective response to workplace mistreatment would recognize that the harm often extends beyond the victim, and that observers may need support too. What still isnt known Whats needed now is a better understanding of the nuances involved in observing mistreatment. Why do some observers react with empathy, while others derive pleasure from the suffering of others? And why might observers feel empathy for the victim but still respond by judging or blaming them? Answering these questions is a crucial next step for researchers and leaders seeking to design more effective workplace policies. The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Jason Colquitt is a professor of management at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Every year, I tell my students in my business analytics class the same thing: Dont just apply for a job. Audition for it. This advice seems particularly relevant this year. In todays turbulent economy, companies are still hiring, but theyre doing it a bit more carefully. More places are offering candidates short-term work experiences like internships and co-op programs in order to evaluate them before making them full-time offers. This is just one of the findings of the 2025 College Hiring Outlook Report. This annual report tracks trends in the job market and offers valuable insights for both job seekers and employers. It is based on a national survey conducted in September 2024, with responses from 1,322 employers spanning all major industries and company sizes, from small firms to large enterprises. The survey looks at employer perspectives on entry-level hiring trends, skills demand, and talent development strategies. I am a professor of information systems at Drexel Universitys LeBow College of Business in Philadelphia, and I coauthored this report along with a team of colleagues at the Center for Career Readiness. Heres what we found: Employers are rethinking talent pipelines Only 21% of the 1,322 employers we surveyed rated the current college hiring market as excellent or very good, which is a dramatic drop from 61% in 2023. This indicates that companies are becoming increasingly cautious about how they recruit and select new talent. While confidence in full-time hiring has declined, employers are not stepping away from hiring altogether. Instead, theyre shifting to paid and unpaid internships, co-ops, and contract-to-hire roles as a less risky route to identify talent and de-risk full-time hiring. Employers we surveyed described internships as a cost-effective talent pipeline, and 70% told us they plan to maintain or increase their co-op and intern hiring in 2025. At a time when many companies are tightening their belts, hiring someone whos already proved themselves saves on onboarding reduces turnover and minimizes potentially costly mishires. For job seekers, this makes every internship or short-term role more than a foot in the door. Its an extended audition. Even with the general market looking unstable, interest in co-op and internship programs appears steady, especially among recent graduates facing fewer full-time opportunities. These programs arent just about trying out a job. They let employers see if a candidate shows initiative, good judgment, and the ability to work well on a team, which we found are traits employers value even more than technical skills. What employers want We found that employers increasingly prioritize self-management skills like adaptability, ethical reasoning, and communication over technical skills such as digital literacy and cybersecurity. Employers are paying attention to how candidates behave during internships, how they take feedback, and whether they bring the mindset needed to grow with the company. This reflects what I have observed in classrooms and in conversations with hiring managers: Credentials matter, but what truly sets candidates apart is how they present themselves and what they contribute to a company. Based on co-op and internship data weve collected at Drexel, however, many students continue to believe that technical proficiency is the key to getting a job. In my opinion, this disconnect reveals a critical gap in expectations: While students focus on hard skills to differentiate themselves, employers are looking for the human skills that indicate long-term potential, resilience, and professionalism. This is especially true in the face of economic uncertainty and the ambiguous, fast-changing nature of todays workplace. Technology is changing how hiring happens Employers also told us that artificial intelligence is now central to how both applicants and employers navigate the hiring process. Some companies are increasingly using AI-powered platforms to transform their hiring processes. For example, Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia uses platforms like HireVue to conduct asynchronous video interviews. HR-focused firms like Phenom and JJ Staffing Services also leverage technologies such as AI-based resume ranking, automated interview scheduling, and one-way video assessments. Not only do these tools speed up the hiring process, but they also reshape how employers and candidates interact. In our survey, large employers said they are increasingly relying on AI tools like resume screeners and one-way video interviews to manage large numbers of job applicants. As a result, the candidates presence, clarity in communication, and authenticity are being evaluated even before a human recruiter becomes involved. At the same time, job seekers are using generative AI tools to write cover letters, practice interviews, or reformat résumés. These tools can help with preparation, but overreliance on them can backfire. Employers want authenticity, and many employers we surveyed mentioned they notice when applications seem overly robotic. In my experience as a professor, the key is teaching students to use AI to enhance their effort, not to replace it. I encourage them to leverage AI tools but always emphasize that the final output and the impression it makes should reflect their own thinking and professionalism. The bottom line is that hiring is still a human decision, and the personal impression you make matters. This isnt just about new grads While our research focuses on early-career hiring, these findings apply to other audiences as well, such as career changers, returning professionals, and even mid-career workers. These workers are increasingly being evaluated on their adaptability, behavior, and collaborative abilitynot just their experience. Many companies now offer project-based assignments and trial roles that let them evaluate performance before making a permanent hire. At the same time, employers are investing in internal reskilling and upskilling programs. Reskilling refers to training workers for entirely new oles, often in response to job changes or automation, while upskilling means helping employees deepen their current skills to stay effective and advance in their existing roles. Our report indicates that approximately 88% of large companies now offer structured upskilling and reskilling programs. For job seekers and workers alike, staying competitive means taking the initiative and demonstrating a commitment to learning and growth. Show up early, and show up well So what can students, or anyone entering or reentering the workforce, do to prepare? Start early. Dont wait until senior year. First- and second-year internships are growing in importance. Sharpen soft skills. Communication, time management, problem-solving, and ethical behavior are top priorities for employers. Understand where work is happening. More than 50% of entry-level jobs are fully in person. Only 4% are fully remote. Show up ready to engage. Use AI strategically. Its a useful tool for research and practice, not a shortcut to connection or clarity. Stay curious. Most large employers now offer reskilling or upskilling opportunities, and they expect employees to take initiative. One of the clearest takeaways from this years report is that hiring is no longer a onetime decision. Its a performance process that often begins before an interview is even scheduled. Whether youre still in school, transitioning in your career, or returning to the workforce after a break, the same principle applies: Every opportunity is an audition. Treat it like one. Murugan Anandarajan is a professor of decision sciences and management information systems at Drexel University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Christopher Pelkey was shot and killed in a road range incident in 2021. On May 8, 2025, at the sentencing hearing for his killer, an AI video reconstruction of Pelkey delivered a victim impact statement. The trial judge reported being deeply moved by this performance and issued the maximum sentence for manslaughter. As part of the ceremonies to mark Israels 77th year of independence on April 30, 2025, officials had planned to host a concert featuring four iconic Israeli singers. All four had died years earlier. The plan was to conjure them using AI-generated sound and video. The dead performers were supposed to sing alongside Yardena Arazi, a famous and still very much alive artist. In the end Arazi pulled out, citing the political atmosphere, and the event didnt happen. In April, the BBC created a deepfake version of the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie to teach a maestro course on writing. Fake Agatha would instruct aspiring murder mystery authors and inspire their writing journey. The use of artificial intelligence to reanimate the dead for a variety of purposes is quickly gaining traction. Over the past few years, weve been studying the moral implications of AI at the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and we find these AI reanimations to be morally problematic. Before we address the moral challenges the technology raises, its important to distinguish AI reanimations, or deepfakes, from so-called griefbots. Griefbots are chatbots trained on large swaths of data the dead leave behindsocial media posts, texts, emails, videos. These chatbots mimic how the departed used to communicate and are meant to make life easier for surviving relations. The deepfakes we are discussing here have other aims; they are meant to promote legal, political, and educational causes. Moral quandaries The first moral quandary the technology raises has to do with consent: Would the deceased have agreed to do what their likeness is doing? Would the dead Israeli singers have wanted to sing at an Independence ceremony organized by the nations current government? Would Pelkey, the road-rage victim, be comfortable with the script his family wrote for his avatar to recite? What would Christie think about her AI double teaching that class? The answers to these questions can only be deduced circumstantially, from examining the kinds of things the dead did and the views they expressed when alive. And one could ask if the answers even matter. If those in charge of the estates agree to the reanimations, isnt the question settled? After all, such trustees are the legal representatives of the departed. But putting aside the question of consent, a more fundamental question remains. What do these reanimations do to the legacy and reputation of the dead? Doesnt their reputation depend, to some extent, on the scarcity of appearance, on the fact that the dead cant show up anymore? Dying can have a salutary effect on the reputation of prominent people; it was good for John F. Kennedy, and it was good for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The fifth-century BC Athenian leader Pericles understood this well. In his famous Funeral Oration, delivered at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, he asserts that a noble death can elevate ones reputation and wash away their petty misdeeds. That is because the dead are beyond reach and their mystique grows postmortem. Even extreme virtue will scarcely win you a reputation equal to that of the dead, he insists. Do AI reanimations devalue the currency of the dead by forcing them to keep popping up? Do they cheapen and destabilize their reputation by having them comment on events that happened long after their demise? In addition, these AI representations can be a powerful tool to influence audiences for political or legal purposes. Bringing back a popular dead singer to legitimize a political event and reanimating a dead victim to offer testimony are acts intended to sway an audiences judgment. Its one thing to channel a Churchill or a Roosevelt during a political speech by quoting them or even trying to sound like them. Its another thing to have them speak alongside you. The potential of harnessing nostalgia is supercharged by this technology. Imagine, for example, what the Soviets, who literally worshipped Lenins dead body, would have done with a deepfake of their old icon. Good intentions You could argue that because these reanimations are uniquely engaging, they can be used for virtuous purposes. Consider a reanimated Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to our currently polarized and divided nation, urging moderation and unity. Wouldnt that be grand? Or what about a reanimated Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, speaking at the trial of a Holocaust denier like David Irving? But do we know what MLK would have thought about our current political divisions? Do we know what Anielewicz would have thought about restrictions on pernicious speech? Does bravely campaigning for civil rights mean we should call upon the digital ghost of King to comment on the impact of populism? Does fearlessly fighting the Nazis mean we should dredge up the AI shadow of an old hero to comment on free speech in the digital age? Even if the political projects these AI avatars served were consistent with the deceaseds views, the problem of manipulationof using the psychological power of deepfakes to appeal to emotionsremains. But what about enlisting AI Agatha Christie to teach a writing class? Deepfakes may indeed have salutary uses in educational settings. The likeness of Christie could make students more enthusiastic about writing. Fake Aristotle could improve the chances that students engage with his austere Nicomachean Ethics. AI Einstein could help those who ant to study physics get their heads around general relativity. But producing these fakes comes with a great deal of responsibility. After all, given how engaging they can be, its possible that the interactions with these representations will be all that students pay attention to, rather than serving as a gateway to exploring the subject further. Living on in the living In a poem written in memory of W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden tells us that after the poets death Yeats became his admirers. His memory was scattered among a hundred cities, and his work subject to endless interpretation: The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living. The dead live on in the many ways we reinterpret their words and works. Auden did that to Yeats, and were doing it to Auden right here. Thats how people stay in touch with those who are gone. In the end, we believe that using technological prowess to concretely bring them back disrespects them and, perhaps more importantly, is an act of disrespect to ourselvesto our capacity to abstract, think, and imagine. Nir Eisikovits is a professor of philosophy and director of the Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston. Daniel J. Feldman is a senior research fellow at the Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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