Hey there.
No personal updates this week, just a lot happening, and I wanted to get this out to you. Today we've got a court case that should worry anyone using AI to screen resumes, Apple trimming staff out of teams that didn't pan out, and a viral app that sends your texts by virtual pigeon because apparently we've decided speed was the problem all along.
Let's get into it.
🌐 News Shortlist
1. Bias, Bots and Boundaries: Practical Tips for Avoiding Liability in AI Recruiting.
Recap: An August 21 explainer from HR Daily Advisor lays out where things stand with Mobley v. Workday, the federal case where applicants allege Workday's AI screening tools discriminated by race, age, and disability. A judge already let major claims move forward and certified a nationwide collective action under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The piece spells out what employers now need to do: inventory every AI tool touching recruitment, vet vendors before rollout, keep humans reviewing decisions, and document outcomes for bias.
I've been saying this since before it was a compliance headline. We have a human interviewing every single candidate we present. It's honestly a little wild that I have to keep mentioning that, like it's a differentiator instead of the baseline, but here we are.
Companies bought AI screening tools because they promised to remove a headache. What they actually did was remove a witness. When there's no human in the loop, nobody can explain why a candidate got filtered out, and now a judge is saying that's exactly the problem. The tools didn't eliminate the employer's responsibility. They just made it harder to see where things went wrong until a lawsuit forces you to look.
I use AI in my own process constantly. Every call gets an independent AI score, and it's a great sanity check. What it doesn't get is the final call. A recruiter still has to sit across from that person, ask follow-up questions, catch what a resume parser never will. Take that out and you're not innovating, you're just outsourcing your legal exposure to a vendor.
Advice: If a tool is making pass or fail decisions on your candidates without a person reviewing them, that's your biggest open risk right now, not your biggest efficiency win. Fix that before your legal team finds out about it from a subpoena.
2. Apple cuts jobs in Siri, Vision Pro immersive video and gaming teams.
Recap: Bloomberg reported on August 21 that Apple cut more than 200 roles across its Siri, Vision Pro immersive video, and gaming software teams, citing underperforming product bets. Apple said it would create new roles as part of the change even as it trims existing ones.
This is one of the biggest, best-resourced companies on the planet, and they still got the bet wrong on where to put headcount. That should tell you something. Money and scale don't fix a hiring decision made on hope instead of judgment.
What gets me is the pattern. A team gets built out fast around a product that's supposed to be the next big thing, and eighteen months later half of it gets cut because the thing didn't land the way anyone expected. I see smaller versions of this constantly with founders who hire five people quickly for a new initiative instead of one really strong person first. You end up paying for the headcount either way, you just pay for it twice, once in salary and once in severance.
Precision beats volume even when you're Apple. We tell clients this constantly: it's better to bring on one excellent person and see if the bet works before you scale the team around it. Nobody gets credit for how fast they hired if the whole team gets unwound a year later.
Advice: Before you staff up a new initiative, hire the smallest team that can prove the idea works. Scale the headcount after the bet pays off, not before.
3. Carrier Pidge messaging app says "waiting is the point."
Recap: Carrier Pidge, built by one developer, Noah Iarrobino, in about three weeks, sends your texts via a simulated carrier pigeon that flies at 110 mph. A message from LA to New York takes roughly 22 hours. There's a small chance, 0.2 percent, that your pigeon just dies en route. The app went viral starting August 12 and picked up mainstream coverage through August 25.
Okay, I need everyone to sit with this for a second. We spent twenty years building infrastructure to get a message from one phone to another in under a second, and the breakout hit of the summer is an app that makes it take a day and sometimes kills the messenger. I love it. I would not have built it, but I love it.
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: this guy isn't really selling a messaging app. He's selling nostalgia for a world where you had to wait for something and that was normal, and he found a way to package that feeling and put it back on your phone. Everyone else in messaging spent a decade racing to zero latency. He looked at that whole industry and sold people the exact opposite of what it optimized for. Three weeks of vibe coding and now I'm talking about a pigeon on a Tuesday. That's the kind of insight that makes me want to buy him a drink and also feel a little bad about myself.
Also, and I say this as someone who has read a few too many term sheets, the monetization is aviaries, plural, so you can send more than one pigeon at once. I don't know what an aviary costs. I don't want to know. I just respect that somebody figured out how to charge you extra for owning more birds you cannot see.
Advice: If your product roadmap this quarter is "make it faster," go read about the pigeon app and ask yourself what the opposite bet looks like. Sometimes the whitespace is just doing the thing everyone agrees is dumb, on purpose, well.
That is it for this week. What ties the first two stories together is judgment, whether it's a court reminding you that a human still has to own the call an algorithm makes, or Apple learning that headcount built on a hunch gets unwound the same way it got built. The pigeon story just reminded me that not every good idea has to be the smart one on paper. Sometimes it just has to be the one nobody else was weird enough to ship.
Until next time,
Joseph Burns
CEO & Founder, Lupa Hire