All posts tagged: hire

A Year After DOGE Cuts, GSA Now Plans to Hire Hundreds of Employees

A Year After DOGE Cuts, GSA Now Plans to Hire Hundreds of Employees

Published by skeptic

A year after Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effectively fired thousands of government employees, one federal agency that was affected by those cuts is now preparing to hire hundreds of people. The General Services Administration (GSA), an agency that oversees the government’s IT department and real estate holdings, is hiring “approximately 400 positions” across its Public Building Service (PBS) division, according to an email obtained by WIRED. “We’re thrilled to announce that the GSA Strategic Hiring Committee has approved the PBS staffing plan designed to address our workforce needs and strengthen our teams,” states an email sent by PBS chief of staff Donna Dix to employees on Monday. The email goes on to say that the hiring effort will focus on “the most significant areas of need: facilities management, acquisition, and project management.” GSA did not respond to a request for comment. PBS, which manages the federal buildings under GSA’s banner, lost hundreds of employees in March 2025 following DOGE cuts. The agency, WIRED reported at the time, was also instructed to …

Man on trial for conspiring to hire sex workers for prostitution syndicate

Man on trial for conspiring to hire sex workers for prostitution syndicate

Published by Sam Flores

SINGAPORE: A 47-year-old Singaporean man went on trial on Tuesday (Mar 24) for more than 30 charges linked to the sex work of at least 10 women in Singapore. Weiss Tan Yi Xun is accused of offences including living in part on the earnings of a woman’s sex work. This relates to a period of around end-2020 and mid-2021, with charge sheets listing at least 10 women aged between 23 and 56. He is also accused of abetting by engaging in a conspiracy with another person to get women to be sex workers for the “prostitution syndicate” known as “SgSocialites”. These charges allege that, on dates which include 2020 to 2021, Tan worked with women including a Mavis Toh En Xuan and Yap Yuxin to get the agreement of women to work in Singapore for SgSocialites. Tan arrived at the court building dressed in all black, with his face completely covered. SEX WORKER TESTIFIES The prosecution called only one witness on Tuesday – a sex worker surnamed Tan. Ms Tan said she had been introduced …

CEO Says He’ll Hire Anyone Who Can Vibe Code With AI, Regardless of Actual Skill

CEO Says He’ll Hire Anyone Who Can Vibe Code With AI, Regardless of Actual Skill

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Steven Bartlett, the host of the podcast “The Diary of a CEO,” apparently takes a vibes-based approach to recruitment, and loves it when potential new hires say they use AI to actually do their jobs. According to Isaac Martin, the director of innovation at Bartlett’s media brand Flight Story, Bartlett now prioritizes hiring people who can “vibe code,” or heavily use AI to write code and dream up entire programs, regardless of their technical background. “Previously, there would’ve been a big focus on developers, as that’s the typical sort of person you would expect to be within the innovation team,” Martin told Business Insider. “We’re very much now looking for people who are much more within that vibe coding space, people who have experience across almost any area, really, within our industry.” Bartlett is the founder and CEO of Steven.com, a media company that owns multiple content creation brands, including Flight Story, and he rarely misses an opportunity to …

Picsart now allows creators to ‘hire’ AI assistants through agent marketplace

Picsart now allows creators to ‘hire’ AI assistants through agent marketplace

Published by skeptic

The AI-powered design platform Picsart is launching an AI agent marketplace, allowing creators to “hire” AI assistants to help them with specific tasks, like resizing and remixing social content, or editing product photos on Shopify. With over 130 million worldwide users that skew Gen Z, Picsart is like a more advanced Canva for social media managers and content creators. The company reached unicorn status amid the creator economy boom in 2021, but has remained relevant by continuing to ramp up its AI-powered products to serve the current market. The timing is good for Picsart to launch such a marketplace, since viral projects like OpenClaw have fueled industry demand for agentic AI chatbots that can carry out requests like a personal assistant. “Creators have been stuck as the operator of every workflow — the one doing, not deciding,” said Hovhannes Avoyan, Picsart founder and CEO, in a statement. “Our Agents change that relationship — you set direction, the agent builds a plan using real data, you approve, it executes. Picsart says that it will introduce more …

Lyon drug traffickers hire Colombian hitmen to kill their rivals

Lyon drug traffickers hire Colombian hitmen to kill their rivals

Published by Sam Flores

It all began on Friday, November 15, 2024. That day, in the late afternoon, a visibly exhausted man with hollow cheeks and trembling hands pushed open the doors of the Bron police station, located in the suburbs of Lyon. Speaking in Spanish, he identified himself as John Edward C., a 32-year-old Colombian national, and made it clear to the receptionists that he had important information to reveal about a planned premeditated murder in the area. When they entered his name into the database, the police discovered that he appeared in two incident reports filed a few days earlier at a Lyon police station regarding the theft of his suitcase and passport. They also learned that he was subject to an order to leave French territory and had been staying for about one month in a shelter in Bron. An assassination plot? The police wondered whether they were dealing with a compulsive, thrill-seeking liar. But his insistence intrigued them enough to alert their colleagues at the judicial police, based at the central police headquarters on Rue …

Brussels should scrap plans to hire 2,500 EU civil servants, 9 countries say – POLITICO

Brussels should scrap plans to hire 2,500 EU civil servants, 9 countries say – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

“Our joint message is clear: The Commission needs to hear the sign of the times,” said German Minister of State Günther Krichbaum. “When we talk about improving competitiveness, cutting red tape and scaling down national administrations, the Commission’s call to further increase staff numbers is simply out of touch with reality. It would be best for the Commission to retract this proposal.” The letter, signed by ministers from Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands, reads: “We expect the Commission to present ambitious, quantified proposals as a direct input for ongoing negotiations on the next MFF, including on an EU administrative system that reflects the challenges of our times.” “In this context, the proposed increase [from the Commission] of 2,500 posts as well as the overall significant increase of heading 4 (administration) runs counter to the stated objectives of efficiency, restraint and reform, and risks undermining the credibility of the broader MFF proposal.” Heading 4 of the 2028-2034 MFF refers to administrative costs. EU countries are in the midst …

Millennial Boss Will Never Hire A Boomer Again

Millennial Boss Will Never Hire A Boomer Again

Published by Jenni Sidey

Millennial boss Sara Holcomb admitted she’s never hiring a boomer again because they are “too old to work” and don’t understand technology. While it’s possible the new hire wasn’t qualified, her sweeping generalizations about an entire generation were ageist. If you’ve worked in a corporate setting, or really any workplace environment, you’ve definitely been around a “bad employee.” From poor customer service to bad attitudes, there are many things that can lead to a “bad employee” label. Instead of simply chalking up a new hire as the wrong fit, however, Holcomb made her displeasure a generational issue, sharing her experience onboarding a new “boomer employee” whom she said was “unqualified” simply because of her age. A millennial boss said she’s never hiring a boomer again because they don’t understand technology.  “I hired this 65-year-old lady,” Holcomb said, “and I told her several times that we’re closed on Friday. If she has any questions she needs to discuss with me, she needs to call my cell phone.”  Holcomb explained that she had just finished a shower on her day off …

How Two Zoomers Created RentAHuman, the First Marketplace for Bots to Hire Humans

How Two Zoomers Created RentAHuman, the First Marketplace for Bots to Hire Humans

Published by skeptic

The grifters, according to RentAHuman, are fading. “We’re taking safety extremely seriously,” Liteplo says. But the duo also acknowledge that there are “footguns” (features that often lead to pesky bugs) and have implemented paid verification (at $10 a month), inspired by Elon Musk’s strategy of letting users pay $8 to get a “verified” badge on X. “He’s my entrepreneur hero,” Liteplo says, unabashedly. “For Twitter, they had a bot problem and they still have it, but he mitigated it a lot by making it pay-to-play. The unit economics of scammers disappears,” he continues. (Musk tweeted in 2023 that “paid verification increases bot cost by ~10,000% & makes it much easier to identify bots by phone & CC clustering.” No official data exists on a reduction in bots since the introduction of the $8 blue tick, but X’s subsequent purge of 1.7 million bots in late 2025 suggests that the site was not purged by paid verification.) For now, any major pitfalls seem to be mitigated by the relatively small number of tasks being commissioned on …

Masterworks Files Legal Complaint Against Early Hire Over Lawsuit Threat

Masterworks Files Legal Complaint Against Early Hire Over Lawsuit Threat

Published by Jenni Sidey

From its offices on the 57th floor of 1 World Trade Center, employees at Masterworks hawk fractional ownership of blue-chip artworks, promising retail investors hefty returns. Reporting in both ARTnews in 2022 and the New York Times in 2024 has revealed a freewheeling atmosphere in which the company has played fast and loose with legal and ethical guidelines. An initial funding round valued the company at more than $1 billion, and by early 2022, the company had traded more than 100 paintings, to the tune of $450 million, ARTnews reported. Now, former chief product officer Hai Min Tran is threatening to sue, according to Masterworks. A December letter he sent the company via his New York attorneys, Giskan Solotaroff & Anderson, says he was illegally terminated upon returning to work from paternity leave. (ARTnews has not been able to review the letter.) The company has since called this claim “wholly meritless” and filed a legal complaint on February 5 in New York state court, saying Tran resigned before going on leave and then tried to …

IBM will hire your entry-level talent in the age of AI

IBM will hire your entry-level talent in the age of AI

Published by skeptic

While the artificial intelligence industry touts that AI will replace entry-level jobs, not every company is scaling back hiring these positions. In IBM’s case, it’s going all in. Hardware giant IBM plans to triple entry-level hiring in the U.S. in 2026, according to reporting from Bloomberg. Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM’s chief human resource officer, announced the initiative at Charter’s Leading with AI Summit on Tuesday. “And yes, it’s for all these jobs that we’re being told AI can do,” LaMoreaux said. These jobs will look different than the entry-level jobs IBM used to offer, she explained. According to LaMoreaux, she went through and changed the descriptions for these entry-level jobs so they were less focused on areas AI can actually automate — like coding — and more focused on people-forward areas like engaging with customers. This strategy makes sense. Even if an enterprise like IBM doesn’t necessarily need the same amount of entry-level talent that it did before, fostering less experienced workers helps ensure these employees have the skills needed for the higher-level roles down the …