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The friday 🖐️ : Disengagement, transparency, dehumanisation

The friday 🖐️ : Disengagement, transparency, dehumanisation

April 19, 2026

Happy Friday, HR friends! 🙌

Time for the Friday 🖐️ ! Five articles, five takeaways. Five minutes away from the chaos to grab a coffee and get caught up on everything that’s been happening in HR this week!

This week's stories have one thing in common: the gap between how organizations talk about their people and how they actually treat them. We've got salary floors that double as benchmarks, engagement numbers that should be keeping leaders up at night, and a whole country asking whether the words we use to describe workers are doing more damage than we realize.

The good news? Awareness is the first step - and there's no shortage of it this week. The question is what HR leaders decide to do with it.

New: Download The 2026 HRIS Pricing Guide

HRIS pricing is a pain to figure out and eats up way too much time. You shortlist a tool, get excited, then the pricing shows up and it’s not even in your budget.

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Inside, you’ll find pricing comparisons for UKG, Rippling, ADP, Paylocity, Deel, and HiBob, plus tips to negotiate better rates and cut down your research time.

IN TODAY’S EDITION

💸 Meta's AI salary bills will make your eyes water,

😶 Global employee engagement just hit a depressing new low,

🚫 Mexico wants to legally ban the phrase "Human Resources,"

🔔 American workers are being slowly killed by inefficient systems and endless pings,

📋 New York State just made credit checks in hiring a thing of the past

THE FRIDAY 🖐️

One in five employees is engaged. The other four are just waiting for 5pm.

💸 Meta's visa filings accidentally became the most revealing salary benchmark in tech. Base pay up to $650k for an AI VP — and remember, that's the legally disclosed floor, not the ceiling. 🔗 Read more — HR Executive

😶 Only 1 in 5 employees worldwide is actually engaged at work. Gallup's latest report puts global engagement at a five-year low of 20% — and disengaged managers are being fingered as a key culprit. 🔗 Read more — The HR Digest

🚫 "Human Resources" could soon be illegal — at least in Mexico. A senator has proposed formally banning HR, "human capital" and similar terms, arguing they reduce people to profit-generating units. 🔗 Read more — HR Executive

🔔 Workers are haemorrhaging time to systems that simply don't work. Nearly half of US employees lose 5+ hours a week to broken processes — and 21% lose more than 10. They're not quiet quitting; they're just quietly exhausted. 🔗 Read more — HR Dive

📋 New York just banned credit checks in hiring — and employers have until tomorrow to comply. Effective April 18, 2026, most NY employers can no longer factor credit history into hiring, pay, or promotion decisions. 🔗 Read more — Yonkers Times

You don’t want to miss this: The People Ops Huddle by SSR

This event brings together HR practitioners, experts, and technology insiders to share what works in modern hiring - from selecting and implementing people tech, to using data and AI responsibly, to building processes with hiring managers and candidates front of mind.

Across practical sessions and candid conversations, you’ll explore how HR teams are navigating an increasingly complex hiring landscape.

That’s it for today!

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition helped saved you a few hours in scouring the web for the latest news! 🧠

We know you’re super busy and as ever, we really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀

Have a great weekend!

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