Hello HR Pros,

Happy Thanksgiving! 💙

This week is about looking ahead before the year winds down. Agentic AI is transforming how we work, recruiters are becoming AI-powered talent advisors, and mindset—not skill—is the new hiring edge.

And since strategy also needs tools, don’t miss the Thanksgiving and Black Friday HR deals spotlight—curated HR tech picks that’ll help your team start 2026 smarter, faster, and leaner.

📰 Upcoming in This Issue

• 💬 How to Assess Candidate Mindset and Attitude During the Interview

• 🔥 Black Friday Spotlight: HR Tools to Make Your Work Easier

• 🤖 The Emerging Agentic Enterprise: How Leaders Must Navigate a New Age of AI

• 🧠 How AI Redefines Recruiting Excellence

📣 Trending HR News

• Despite workforce churn in 2025, employers may not be replacing roles (Yahoo)

• HP to cut up to 6,000 jobs as it turns to AI (The Guardian)

• US government to shed 317,000 workers this year (Reuters)

💬 How to Assess Candidate Mindset and Attitude During the Interview

You can train skills—but not mindset.

After 1,000 interviews and 200 hires, Sergey Bolshchikov argues that the most predictive part of hiring isn’t a case study or coding challenge—it’s the HR interview. That’s where mindset, ownership, and resilience quietly reveal themselves.

By asking candidates to narrate their story, reason through ambiguity, and respond to micro-conflict, you uncover the hidden rules that drive how they think, learn, and handle friction. The secret isn’t in “gotcha” questions—it’s in curiosity, silence, and pattern-spotting.

Because hiring for mindset isn’t soft—it’s strategic.

Key Takeaways:

• 🧭 Start with curiosity: Let candidates tell their story; mindset lives in how they reflect on mistakes and change, not what they achieved.

• ⚖️ Test through tension: A gentle challenge in the interview reveals adaptability faster than polished success stories.

• 🤝 Listen for empathy: Strong candidates describe difficult colleagues with nuance, not blame—they see systems, not villains.

• 📞 Validate with references: Ask past managers for vivid examples; real A-players leave memorable, specific impressions.

👉 Read the full 2,184-word article by Sergey Bolshchikov

🔥 Black Friday Spotlight: HR Tools That Makes Your Work Easier

Patriot: Payroll That Doesn’t Break the Bank

Patriot makes payroll painless with simple setup, automated tax filings, and an easy interface that saves HR teams hours every month.

🎁 Offer: 30 days free + 50% off for 3 months

Paycor: Modern, Automated Payroll for Growing Teams

Paycor helps HR leaders simplify payroll with automated tax filing, easy employee self-service, and powerful reporting—so you can spend less time on admin and more time on strategy.

🎁 Offer: 50% off for 6 months (for businesses with under 50 employees)

Controlio: Employee Monitoring to Boost Team Performance

Controlio gives HR and managers real-time visibility into how teams spend their time, helping identify productivity gaps, ensure accountability, and support performance coaching.

🎁 Offer: Free 14-day trial

Monday.com: HR Project & Resource Management

Monday.com helps HR stay on top of recruiting pipelines, onboarding workflows, employee tasks, and cross-team initiatives—all with powerful automation and a visual dashboard. 

🎁 Offer: Free forever — no credit card required

🤖 The Emerging Agentic Enterprise: How Leaders Must Navigate a New Age of AI

Agentic AI isn’t just another tech upgrade—it’s a management revolution.

MIT Sloan and BCG’s latest research finds that 76% of executives now view AI agents as coworkers, not tools. These systems don’t just execute—they plan, decide, and learn. The challenge? They blur the boundaries between technology and talent, demanding new models for governance, investment, and workforce design.

The report reveals that companies rushing into AI adoption (35% already have, with another 44% close behind) are outpacing their own strategies. The winners will be those who redesign—not retrofit—their organizations around this new “digital colleague.”

Key Takeaways:

• ⚙️ Dual identity dilemma: Agentic AI behaves like both a tool and a coworker, forcing leaders to manage technology like talent.

• 💡 Redefine work, don’t just automate: 66% of AI-mature firms expect full operating model redesigns, not just process tweaks.

• 📊 Governance gets human: 58% of top adopters anticipate new decision-making structures where AI systems share authority.

• 🧭 Future-ready mindset: Success will depend on “HR for AI”—treating AI agents as employees who learn, evolve, and need oversight.

👉 Read the full 7,400-word report by MIT Solan & BCG

🧠 How AI Redefines Recruiting Excellence

AI isn’t just automating recruiting—it’s reimagining it.

LinkedIn’s 2025 report shows that 37% of companies are already using or testing GenAI tools, up from 27% just last year. Recruiters are saving a full day of work each week and using that time to focus on what machines can’t do—building trust, coaching candidates, and making high-impact hires.

But AI’s biggest promise isn’t efficiency—it’s transformation. From improving “quality of hire” by 9% to making skills-based hiring 12% more effective, the new recruiting edge belongs to those who treat AI as a collaborator, not a shortcut.

Key Takeaways:

• ⚙️ Efficiency meets empathy: AI saves recruiters ~20% of their workweek while letting them focus on human connection.

• 📈 Skills beat degrees: Companies with skills-based searches are +12% more likely to make a quality hire.

• 🧭 Branding drives quality: Employers rated highly for innovation and learning are up to 11% more likely to hire top talent.

• 🤖 Recruiters evolve fast: Demand for “relationship-building” skills jumped 54× year-over-year, proving that the future of recruiting is human-led, AI-enabled.

👉 Read the full 3,800-word report by LinkedIn

The bottomline

This week’s stories share a simple truth: HR leaders who act early win big. They treat AI as a partner, mindset as strategy, and innovation as habit.

As the year wraps up, now’s the time to plan, pilot, and prepare. Because in 2026, the future won’t reward the fastest recruiters—it’ll reward the most intentional ones.