May 2024

Hi! How was your May? Earlier this month, I broke out the EditMate t-shirt and spent 4 days in Las Vegas at UNLEASH .

One of my personal highlights was seeing a show at The Sphere which was absolutely bananas. It was like Jordan Furniture's MOM - Motion Odyssey Movie Ride on futuristic steroids (if you know, you know).

Anyways, there was A LOT of talk around AI and Gen Z at UNLEASH so that informed my reading this month... here were my favorites finds:

Brands are Leaving Million Dollars Behind by Ignoring Women Over 40 ( ADWEEK ) Because as Ochuko Akpovbovbo cleverly noted in her Substack newsletter: “Gen Z might be cool but they are also poor”

Speaking of Gen Z: 65% of Gen Z workers (who, it’s important to note will make up 30% of the workforce by 2030 ??) say it’s “very important” for their employers to provide mental wellness benefits ( Securian Financial )

On AI, the film Her and so much more: I Am Once Again Asking Our Tech Overlords to Watch the Whole Movie

“If we’re building toward a certain vision of the future, it’s worth understanding which sci-fi sacred texts are guidebooks and which are cautionary tales. Being friends with AI will be so much easier than forging bonds with human beings. That doesn’t mean it’s better. Sometimes it’s much worse.” - Brian Barrett for WIRED

And on that note… Meta’s New AI Council is Composed Entirely of White Men

May’s Mental Health Month is now over, but here are 10 Activities HR & People teams can organize for employees to promote mental health and well-being all year long

And because June is now upon us: 3 Tips for Businesses Celebrating Pride Month ?????

The New Workplace Power Symbols (Michael Waters for The Atlantic )

This was a great piece from Nicole Coffey on using the B2B marketing funnel to understand the employee lifecycle. And it includes some surprising stats:

• 81% of employees felt overwhelmed during onboarding
• 31% of employees quit their jobs within the first six months

The Psychology of Short-Form Content: Why We Love Bite-Sized Videos from Erica Santiago of HubSpot – As someone who has worked in video my whole career I found this interesting but also sobering that our attention spans are rapidly dwindling:?

“Back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average,” Dr. Mark recalls during the interview. “Throughout the years, it became shorter. So around 2012, we found it to be 75 seconds. And then in the last five, six years, we found it to average about 47 seconds—and others have replicated this result within a few seconds.”

Substack wants to be YouTube, On Substack 's new Creator Studio:

"We’ve seen from our data that writers who add audio or video to their Substacks grow 2.5 times faster than those who don’t. We’re going to keep supporting them by building first-class tools that make it simple for them to publish, distribute, and market their work." - Substack Co-Founder Hamish McKenzie (From Emily Sundberg 's Feed Me)

?? Attention All Women: Now is the time to apply for that 6-figure job ( Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza for Business Insider )

That's all for this month. In June, EditMate will share useful content celebrating Pride Month and helping Employer Brand, People Ops & Talent Acquisition folks define their ?Employer Value Proposition? so keep an eye out for that if that's on your to-do list.

Thanks for reading!