AI and the Outlook for HR in 2025

Hello, everyone. If we look around, we can attest to the fact that artificial intelligence is everywhere. Human resources is one of the most prominent areas where AI could create both efficiency and better decision making tools. Today, we're going to explore some of the most common uses of AI in the HR world, and discuss the pros and cons of the application of this revolutionary technology.

We will also discuss other trending HR topics in recent developments in employment regulation. On behalf of McGriff, I would like to take this opportunity to thank each of you for joining us today as we discuss AI and the outlook for HR in 2025. My name is Lesonya Wilder, and I will be your host for the call today. There are just a couple of housekeeping points that I would like to share with you before we get started.

This is a live session and you are in listen mode only. If you have any questions at any time during the presentation, feel free to utilize the chat box or Q&A box to type in your questions, and we will address them during the Q&A segment. If time doesn't permit us to answer the questions after the presentation, we will be sure to capture them and provide the responses afterwards. A copy of the presentation slides as well as the recording will be provided afterwards as well.

Now, it brings me great pleasure to introduce to you our speakers for the hour. First, I would like to introduce to you, Janie Warner. For the past 15 years, Janie has served as vice president and human resource advisory team leader in the employee benefits division of McGriff. In this role, she partners with clients to assist their executives and HR management in all areas of the employee life cycle, including compliance, policy development, general HR management, training, and benefits administration.

Janie has more than 30 years of progressive experience in HR, training, and employee benefits. Prior to joining McGriff, Janie served in several executive level positions, including Vice President for a Financial Institution and Chief Administration Officer for a software development company. Janie is also a nationally recognized speaker, presenting to various industry leaders on topics as diverse as leadership, management, volunteer board governance, and of course, human resource and employee relations. Janie earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, and a master of science degree in human resource management from Golden Gate University in San Francisco.

She also earned a certificate in total compensation and rewards from Cornell University. It also brings me great pleasure to introduce to you Marci LaRouech, Chief Executive Officer and Owner of Seay Management Consultants. Marci is an accomplished CEO with a passion for empowering businesses. Mari's extensive experience as an executive leader has fueled success over diverse organizations.

She launched her human resources career in Orlando at CoAdvantage in 2006. Prior to joining Seay Management Consultants, Marci led Makai HR, an award winning HR organization in Honolulu, Hawaii. Marci's expertise lies in fostering exceptional client relationships, driving innovation, developing leaders, and optimizing operations. She is a graduate of North Park University with honors and a passionate advocate for social causes.

Marci recently served on the boards of directors for the YWCA of Hawaii and the Institute for Human Services. Marci is an active member of Young Presidents Organizations, YPO. Residing in Orlando, Florida, Marci enjoys hiking, reading, attending concerts, and exploring the world. So without further ado, I will turn it over to Janie to kick off the session.

Thank you so much, Lesonya, and a big shout out to Lesonya for putting this webinar together today. Without all of her tenacity and work, none of this would happen. So thank you, Lesonya, and thank you for the kind introduction. We're here today to talk a little bit about AI.

We're going to talk--

half of it will be me talking about AI, and then we'll toss it over to Marci to go through some really important outlooks for HR in the year 2025. I am going to turn off my camera. I find it distracting to see myself out of the corner of my eye. I think probably some of you guys can relate as well, so I am going to turn that off and we're going to get started.

Any of you who have ever been in one of my sessions, I always start off from an HR perspective talking about mission. Mission is critical to understanding why we do things in business, and certainly why we do things in human resources. And as AI or artificial intelligence rises to the top of concerns, questions, and excitement for the future of HR, it would not be proper to not talk about mission. Because mission answers that question for our organization of why do we exist?

And most mission statements have something in there about doing whatever it is that your company does with excellence, or integrity, or transparency, or any of those kinds of things. And when we start talking about artificial intelligence, we go, well, where does that fit into our mission? And I think today in the short period of time that we have, I think we can--

we'll be able to see several areas where AI will help us not only do our jobs in HR, but do them better. And when we do them better, and we address risk and all of those other wonderful things that we do in HR, it will help us to achieve our mission. Next slide, please. So what is artificial intelligence?

When I was sat down and I wanted to put this presentation together. I thought, how do I describe it without just copying and pasting from Wikipedia or something like that? So what I did was I used artificial intelligence to come up with the definition of what artificial intelligence is, and you'll notice in the bottom right of your screen that the source for this is Meta AI. And I just went into Meta AI and I said, write a description of artificial intelligence, and this is what it gave me.

And pardon me, I'm going to read it off to you because I think it's important for us to start with this basic proposition of what AI is. Artificial intelligence refers to the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as learning, problem solving, and decision making. AI systems use algorithms and data to make predictions, and this is really important, classify objects, and generate insights. These systems can be categorized into two main types narrow or weak AI, which is designed to perform a specific task, and general or strong AI, which is designed to perform any intellectual task that a human can.

AI has various applications, including natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. It has also enabled the development of virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa. So when we think about just that last statement, Siri and Alexa, it's been around for several years and we've actually come to depend on it. How many times when you're driving down the road, do you ask Siri for directions to your favorite restaurant, or you ask Alexa during the day, what's the weather going to be tomorrow?

It's that artificial intelligence that goes through algorithmic functions in computer intelligence and in computer systems, and it gives us these answers based on the information that it has. Humans have been doing this for millions of years. We have made decisions and made calculations based on the information we have. As we know, human intelligence is it can be very faulty.

We can make decisions based on what we have, and it wind up being a very bad decision. The argument with AI is that it's only going to be as good as the information that it has to work with, but this is true of humans as well. And as AI continues to develop over the years, I think we will see a surge in making the content that AI has to work with better and better and better so that the information that it gives us will be as accurate as possible with the best information available, so let's talk about AI applications for human resources. And of course it has been around for a while.

Any of you who have used in the past scanning for resumes. You take a resume, you scan it through a computer program, and it gives you the data that you need to decide if that application or that resume, if you will, has the criteria you're looking for a particular job, so it's been around for a while. A 2022 survey by Eightfold AI, and I encourage you to go out and look at that. Lots of tons of information on their website, found that--

and this was three years ago, 92% of participating HR professionals were planning to incorporate, or at least increase their use of AI into at least one area of HR practice, whatever that is. And for every company, it may be different based on their needs and what their goals are. Significant investments in AI driven HR technologies have, of course, led to much more sophisticated machine learning algorithms in recent years, and that enabled systems to learn from data, adapt and improve over time, giving rise to predictive analytics and intelligent insights. It's a little bit scary, but it's a lot exciting as well to imagine that the growth of AI, the data that we are able to gather and input into these systems can actually take that data and increase their predictive analysis based on the data it has and then create data of its own.

It's scarily exciting, I guess, is probably the best thing that I can come up with to call it here. There's always concerns, of course, with that, but overall it's going to help us be more efficient in much better at what we do. Next slide, please. OK, applications.

Specific applications for AI. The Future of Work survey that was done by Eightfold AI again found that the top five functions were HR departments are currently using AI. So this is current. This is not in the future, and again, remember that this particular survey was done nearly three years ago.

Number one was employee records management. That's huge. Imagine 30 years ago, 35, almost 40 years ago, when I started in human resources, all we had were paper files. Everything was done on paper.

Everything had to be recorded on paper, and everything was in a big giant file cabinet, or two, or seven, or 10, or 22. However many file cabinets it took for you to store that. Nowadays, employee records management is almost exclusively online in an electronic form, which has made it certainly easier to find and to file. Secondly, payroll processing and benefits administration is used currently with AI.

Recruitment and hiring, again, scanning resumes and applications. Performance management, looking at how employees are performing in certain aspects of their job. Using their job applications to score their performance against what it is that they're supposed to do. And, of course, onboarding, which gives us that ability to bring people into our company and have consistent application of onboarding information for those employees.

Next slide, please. And this is where we get into a few specifics. And I don't have a lot of time to go into detail on these, but there are some of these I really want to touch on very quickly if you will indulge me just a second. First, of course, is recruitment and hiring.

Again, lots of stuff going on, but AI can also be used to help write job descriptions, to help write a LinkedIn post, provide pre-interview briefings to candidates so that we're not having to reinvent the wheel every single time, and there's a whole lot more things that they can do, that AI can do. Onboarding and offboarding, of course, is a great use of AI. Excuse me. And we know from experience and also statistics have told us that employee onboarding or really good employee onboarding can improve retention by 82%.

And AI driven onboarding platforms can support organizations and HR in creating an engaging experience for their employees by ensuring the necessary forms are filled in, handbook policies are shared, et cetera, et cetera. Offboarding, again, is no different. When an employee leaves your company, an AI powered solution can, just as an example, send out an exit survey, documents related to the return of company assets, emails to revoke employees access to various systems, and of course, exit interviews. All of those kinds of things can be done using AI.

Workforce planning, and this is really big for AI, because the analytics platforms that you can obtain with AI can crunch vast amounts of employee data to uncover trends, to predict turnover, and highlight potential skills gaps. And those are all things that we have done manually for years and years, takes a lot of time. It's important stuff, but it is a huge time consumer when you have other things that we want to do. And so succession plans also, AI can be really helpful in that as well.

How about HR chatbots and virtual assistants? Have you been on a website lately where you were taken--

you were given a chat bot, and that chat bot actually has a name? I was on one not too long ago doing a little bit of research and a little chat box came up. There was a picture of this lovely person. She said her name was Jessica, and she was my virtual assistant.

Where do you want to go? What are you looking for? Saved a huge amount of time in me. Rather than searching through someone's website, it took me exactly to where I needed it to be.

In the same way that search engines has helped us for years, those chat bots are just a little bit step above the search engines that we've had to depend on. It can be really important for the employee experience as well, especially in very, very large companies where chat bots can help employees navigate through employee intranets, find the information or a particular policy, or who is it that I need to talk to about a certain things? Those chatbots can be really a big help in that way. And, of course, learning and development.

There are so many applications of AI in learning and development. For example, artificial intelligence can enable a personalized learning experience for each employee. If we take a skills gap assessment and a job opening that we have, and we put those two together and we go, who do we have that meet the criteria but may have some skills gaps? And we get this list of folks, and then we can also use HR to determine what kind of learning and development we can push out to these folks so that they can be ready for promotion and movement opportunities within our company.

And so we can see that all of these things can have a really great application within HR. Next slide, please. So it brings us to the big question of is it a big risk or a big opportunity? I think the answer is probably, yes.

But despite the risk, the inherent risk that comes with automation of anything, there's still a multitude of opportunities that AI and HR offers. Again, improved efficiency and productivity. This is huge. HR departments are notoriously staffed quite thin, and when you have a finite number of people to do an infinite number of tasks, that AI can really step in and improve that efficiency and the productivity for those people involved.

A better structured process, and we talked about onboarding offboarding. That's a really good example, because you need to do it in a certain way, in a certain order. AI helps us to keep on track with that. Reduced cost.

People cost money not only for their salaries, but for their benefits and all the other things that come with humans doing tasks, as well as the risk exposure. So it can reduce cost in a number of ways, not just in labor costs, but in the mitigation of risk as well. Less repetitive and time consuming tasks for people teams. When we talked about paper files back in the--

I call it, my early days of HR, I call that the day of the dinosaur. They still called this personnel, and if you needed to know anything about an employee, you would have to go and search through their paper file to find the information. It was very time consuming. It was very repetitive.

Everyday, same thing over and over. Take things out of the file. Put things back into the file. AI helps us to navigate that much more cleanly and efficiently and, of course, more data driven decision making.

We've talked about data driving the decisions for human resources for years and years. And all of the data that we have gathered and continue to gather, and we analyze on our own using the human brain, AI can help us with an additional level of analytics by putting the information into an analytical, artificially intelligent program and say, what am I looking at? What are some of the things that I should extrapolate from this information? Next slide.

So we need to drive the--

driving the use of AI is going to be a challenge because people tend to like doing the things that they've done in a certain way. They like doing them in the same way, even if it is quite onerous and time consuming and all of those things. But as the rise of AI in HR creates opportunities, it really does create a need for the HR staff, the humans, to really step up their game and to use the technology responsibly, and this includes the number of things that we have here on the slide. Number one, knowing where the data comes from.

Ensuring that the data comes from a reliable source, and sometimes that's a little bit hard to tell with the internet. If you remember a commercial from a long time ago, the woman and the man who were on a date. And he was a very tall, a little bit of an odd looking person. And she said the internet told me you were a male model, and it was like, the internet can tell you a lot of things.

It's up to us to discern whether or not that information is coming from a reliable source. Getting a task team together to develop guardrails and guidelines. You don't want to completely turn all of your decision making and data gathering and analysis over to artificial intelligence. You still need that human input, and understanding where those guardrails are, where the guidelines need to be, where we stop depending totally on AI and we have to have that human interaction is very important.

And then experiment with its use, but doing it incrementally is important as well. I would never recommend that you just you wake up one morning and say, OK, all of that--

this particular task is going to AI, and we're not going to worry about it. You really need to look at it incrementally. Where can we do it so that we can build trust in the systems that we're using? And that goes to building trust and transparency in the technology, but being aware of its limitations.

Again, artificial intelligence is the same as human intelligence that for each individual, we all have our limitations. AI is exactly the same. I maybe can envision a point where AI would be all and end all to knowledge. I doubt it though, because technology has to come from the human mind, and the human mind is constantly growing and expanding and learning things.

So it's important that you build that trust, but also be very transparent in that technology. And then of course, contributing towards the bigger discussion on the AI future. The more knowledgeable you are as an individual within the HR world, the better you can contribute to that discussion. Next slide.

So effects on HR staffing. This is one of the things that we hear a lot is that well, is AI going to replace me? There's fears out there, but I think we will always need the human in the human resource practice. While efficiencies are gained, in some areas, there will be other opportunities in the HR related fields, and we have to be ready to take those on.

For all human resource professionals that I'm speaking to this specifically for people like me who have been in the HR business for years and years and years, and we think we've seen it and done it all. This opens up a new horizon of learning for us, for people like me. And definitely for the folks that are just getting out of college and starting their HR careers, this just it expands that available field of knowledge tremendously. It will be important to understand that automation may step in to create efficiencies, but--

and for less complex, repetitive, administrative tasks, they're going to lend themselves to greater efficiency through the use of AI, so it will be really important to enhance skill sets. Whereas we may have had HR jobs that were strictly administrative, those jobs are going to need to upskill and learn new things that will be vital, excuse me, as AI takes over the administrative things. We're getting to the end here, I promise. I'm not going to go through all of this.

But if you get a chance, go out to the AI, HR site that I have at the end of my presentation here under sources. And there is a gentleman by the name of Dr. Dieter Veldsman, and he looked at risk exposures for each of the roles that are typically found in HR. Really kind of good information to look at.

The ones that are at highest risk for being replaced, if you will, by HR. And then those low risk things. What do those look like? In the low risk is where we really need to be pushing our HR professionals, start looking at these types of roles, learning these types of roles, preparing yourself by that.

Our key takeaways here. This is my last slide before I toss it back. Number one, artificial intelligence, of course, is here to stay. It will shape the future of nearly every aspect of the workplace for years and years to come.

And HR professionals will be instrumental in building a bridge, if you will, or bridging the gap between the theoretical and the practical applications of AI in the workplace. You need to prepare yourself and your department, if you work in HR, in order to continue to show your value to your organization in achieving that thing that we talked about first, which is the mission of our organization. How can we improve ourselves, our staffs, and how can we use artificial intelligence in order to create better adherence to our mission in doing things very well and very efficiently? And then by learning as much as you can about AI and all of the applications that it can touch, you will definitely enter in, excuse me, increase your value as a key contributor to organizational success.

My last slide is references. Please feel free to look at all of those once you get a copy of this presentation. And my last slide asked for questions. Remember that questions need to be entered into the chat box, and we will get to those if time permits.

Now, I want to toss it over to my colleague Marci and take over from here. Thank you Janie. That was wonderful and very thought provoking. And I think all of us who are in HR or are around HR and our function are seeing the changes happening on a day to day basis.

But it's really important to note that we can use it to improve our skills, to make us, more efficient things like that, but we still need, I think, a human element. I agree in the conversation in creating culture and being a part of an organization, so thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. I'm excited to share here our 2025 outlook from an HR perspective. Again, my name is Marci LaRouech and I am the CEO of Saey Management Consultants, so we can go on to the agenda slide here.

Great. So today we're going to be going through just a little bit of a 2024 recap, just to make sure that at the federal level that we're all on the same page about some of the last minute changes that happened at the end of last year. We're going to talk a little bit about a 2025 outlook, specifically around potential HR regulations and employee engagement trends, and at the end, we're going to talk a little bit about the McGriff HR hotline support for you as clients there. All right.

So let's start with our federal updates. We can go to the next slide. So a recent court decision has blocked the increased federal minimum salary level for exempt employees that was scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2025. Additionally, the court also invalidated the July 1, 2024 minimum salary requirement.

Included in the ruling is the automatic escalation provision for 2027 and three years after also have gone away. So what this means for you now is that the federal threshold for salary exempt employees is 684 per week, and that was the previous threshold that was set in 2019. During Thanksgiving of last year, the DOL filed a notice of appeal seeking to overturn that decision, but we do not expect the Trump administration to pursue that appeal based on last time he was in office and the last few weeks, I guess, month now that he's been in office here. So we do want to make sure that as a reminder here, although the salary threshold increase has been struck down, US employers still have an obligation to ensure that exempt employees are properly classified.

So that's the first thing we need exempt. Not exempt. We need to be properly classified, and then we also need to ensure that we're paying them at a state amount. If there is a different state or local wage and hour law that applies, you need to go along with that.

So let's make sure we're doing both those things to comply with labor laws and avoid legal and financial consequences there. OK, next we have the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. So the PWFA came under the radar this regulation back in 2023. But the reason why I want to bring it up here is that you kind of had a grace period and then we started to see EEOC doing targeted enforcement in 2024, particularly in the State of Florida, but we did see some cases go through throughout the country.

What is PWFA if you're not familiar? So the law mandates that covered employers of 15 or more employees provide, quote unquote, "reasonable accommodations to qualified employees and job applicants with known limitations due to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless doing so would cause the employer undue hardship." Again, we've got some things in quotation that's intentional there. They could be a little bit vague, but we are seeing the EEOC in the court cases that have gone through really lean heavily towards the employee in these instances with the PWFA.

Now, what the PWFA does is it ensures that pregnant workers are not forced to take leave if other reasonable accommodations can be provided. Additionally, the PWFA focuses solely on accommodations. So we still have other laws that are enforced by the EEOC that prohibit the firing or discrimination against employees or applicants based on pregnancy or related conditions. We've had those for decades.

This is an addition to that. And then just also remember, the PWFA does not override any federal, state, or local laws that offer greater protections for workers impacted by pregnancy or childbirth. Currently, over 30 states and cities have laws requiring accommodations for pregnant workers. So again, if we've got remote workforces, we've got people all over the place, this PWFA, the federal level, is the bare minimum that everybody has to follow.

We've got 30 other states and cities that have additional requirements for accommodations for pregnant workers. OK, next slide. OK, moving on. The Chevron Decision.

So the Chevron Decision is a result of the Supreme Court overturning the long standing Chevron defense doctrine in June of 2024. That doctrine required courts to defer to an agency's interpretation of a statute if the statute was ambiguous and the agency's interpretation was reasonable. The overturning of Chevron could significantly impact employment law by reducing the reliance that the courts give to an agency interpretation of an employment statute. What does that actually mean for you as HR professionals, as the owners, as employers?

What this is going to mean is we're already starting to see hundreds of cases flood into the legal system, more legal challenges to agency regulations and guidance with agencies like the Department of Labor, the DOL, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, EEOC, as well as many other federal agencies. So we don't fully know what the impact of the decision is going to be in 2025. However, because it happened in 2024, and we've already started to see court cases come through that are being challenging in a number of different components, we expect this to be, a lot of confusion, a lot of back and forth with regards to HR changes and impacts.

So we want you to keep an eye on the Chevron decision and how it's going to impact agencies like the DOL and the EEOC and their interpretations of laws or statutes that were ambiguous. And we just want to say buckle up, because we think it's going to be a wild ride when it comes to how the Chevron decision is going to impact HR employment law. All right. So let's take a look at where we believe HR is going now here in 2025.

Now, I do want to make a disclaimer here. I'm not a psychic. I don't actually know. I can't tell the future.

That would be a great superpower to have. That is not my superpower, but what we're going to do here is we're going to take historical context into this new year and make some educated guesses about where we think employers should be ready. What you should be paying attention to when it comes to both employment law as well as strategy. OK, so given that the court has already nullified the Biden era overtime rule, there's no need for the Trump administration to take further action to strike it down.

So we do not project that the current administration will increase the federal minimum wage. It was widely touted during the previous--

Trump's previous term, as well as during the campaign period. He expressed concerns that a significant increase could negatively impact small businesses and lead to job losses, so we do not expect that there's going to be any change to the federal minimum wage. Now, this decision, will continue to be addressed at the state and municipal level. So we do already have a number of states that have automatic increases going in on an annual or every other year basis, and we're seeing more and more of that legislation get pushed through both at the state and municipal level.

So again, make sure you're paying attention to that and not just what's going on at the federal level. But it is interesting. So we do want to still keeping an eye on the recent Trump appointment for the Department of Labor, who has a track record of being a little bit more labor friendly than we would have expected, and has broadly expanded workers' rights in the state of Oregon, where she comes from there. So it could be interesting there what that could come through, but overall a pretty employer friendly administration in right now, so we don't expect anything happening with the minimum wage.

What we do expect is for there to be a big focus on work authorization compliance. So we are predicting that I-9 compliance is going to be a focus for 2025. So for this year, employers, you should expect increased scrutiny and enforcement of form I-9 compliance due to the new administration's stricter immigration policies and enforcement. This is going to mean more frequent I-9 audits and inspections, requiring employers to ensure their records are accurate and up to date.

Failure to comply can result in substantial penalties, operational interruptions, and legal liabilities. And they just posted a last month that all of those fines and fees have all gone up as well, so what do we need to do? We want to help you prepare. We want you to be able to respond and be ready for notices of inspection or analyse if we have that.

So what can we do as employers? We want to make sure that you're onboarding team is using the newest version of form I-9 for new hires. And it includes several updates, and it's a little bit more of a streamlined process. The way you're going to know you're using the right form is it says it has an expiration date of 5/31/2027.

So that's step one, is for any new hires, we want to make sure we're using the correct form. The next thing we suggest that you do is perform an internal I-9 audit. So this is going to make sure that all of your employees that were hired after November 6, 1986, so almost 40 years ago, that they have a properly completed form I-9 on file. So we need to have all of our I-9s on file.

Then we need to go through them and make sure that all portions of the I-9 are accurately completed, that the documents were reviewed within three days of hire, and that the form is appropriately signed by the employee and the employer representative. We want to correct any discrepancies in a compliant manner. That's a big one that I want to put an asterisk next to. So we don't want to go through and have people fill out I-9s.

We can't do that. But if we go through our internal I-9 audit and we identify that a particular component hasn't been filled out, they haven't signed it, whatever it is. We want to make a note of that. And if we need to make a correction on it that we know, make a note on it, the date of the correction.

All right, so we want to be very careful about that. Again, we don't want to start over from scratch and have everybody do not I-9s. We can't do that, and we'll talk about our HR hotline and where you can call in and ask some questions about this later too. The other thing we want to do is probably the number one thing that I see when we are called in to actually complete an I-9 audit, or after the fact that somebody has had an NOI and they want some help with this, is that hiring managers oftentimes do not know how to fill out an I-9 or for the employee to check it correctly that the employee has filled it out.

So we want to train our HR. If you're an HR folk, we want to train our hiring managers. Anybody who's actually doing this process if it's not you on the I-9 process. Identify issues with employment documents.

Taking appropriate action if you suspect that an employee may lack proper worth or authorization work authorization. So we want to make sure that we are empowering our team members that are doing this step with the employees, that they're doing it correctly. I-9 seems pretty easy, but for whatever reason, a lot of people get it very wrong, so we want to make sure we're training our folks that are actually doing this with our employees. And then particularly if you're in a geographical area or an industry that you think is going to have increased scrutiny, even more so with regards to I-9 and work authorization compliance, we want to have you develop a response plan.

So we want to have a trained raid team to handle any potential ice visits. We want you to contact your immigration employment counsel if that happens. We recommend that you keep a legal record of all actions taken by ICE agents. And also as a reminder, e-verify.

If you are using e-verify--

some states require it, so make sure if you have that a state that requires e-verify, that you are using e-verify. The federal system to check. But if you use e-verify voluntarily or because you to, you can now remotely examine employee documents if you are enrolled in e-verify. Again, great, great tool to back you up.

But again, don't go through and do everybody's e-verify today if they were hired 15 years ago or 15 days ago. We got to make sure we're doing that all within three days of hire. Pay transparency. The list of states requiring some level of pay transparency and job postings continues to grow.

So we have two states that had laws go into effect on January 1 of this year. Illinois, employers with 15 or more employees must disclose salary ranges and benefits in job postings. This include if the employee works outside of Illinois but will report to someone in Illinois, so keep an eye on that. So it's not just for I'm hiring for someone in a state that doesn't require it.

If you are hiring and they are reporting to someone in Illinois, we need to comply with this. Minnesota. Employers with 30 or more employees must disclose salary ranges and benefits and job postings. We've got some additional states that are adding to this list later in 2025.

That includes New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Vermont, and this is joining a growing list of states: California, Washington, DC, Connecticut, Maryland, New York, Washington, Ohio, in certain areas. They already have some form of pay transparency in place already, so we recommend that you check your job postings. And if you're hiring remotely or located in any of these states, review the applicable pay transparency regulations for compliance. It just helps you to get rid of some nuisance lawsuits from folks that are looking for these types of things.

Unfortunately, that is out there. But I think even more importantly, it's just a trend that's happening and it's just increasing the expectation of candidates for pay transparency through the process for you there. This is a good one to maybe start to get in the mode of even if you're not in a state that's currently in that, has regulations around it, or is coming down the pike. Because I think they're coming in a lot of different states, but also you just don't want somebody in applying out of state and then not being compliant because of that.

So let's chat a little bit about trends in talent acquisition and retention. So from our clients, and we have clients across the country in a variety of different industries. So we're hearing two different situations about what's happening. We've got professional areas, tech companies still seeing layoffs increase and a real increase in candidate availability of really qualified candidates.

Technical, medical, blue collar roles, not enough qualified candidates. It's a really interesting dichotomy that we're seeing in the market right now. And overall, with our most recent unemployment numbers being at 4%, that is considered a healthy unemployment rate for the United States, and it does start to put a tiny bit of squeeze on employer is looking for qualified talent. Plus, as you all know, right.

Employees are just simply not switching roles as frequently as they were during the Great Resignation period of 2021 and 2022. So you might be feeling as an employer or as an HR professional, it might be easier to retain your current team members, but poaching that qualified person from a competitor is a lot more difficult than it was a few years ago. Additionally, it's happening outside in the market here. There might be potential reduction in benefits programs with this new administration, those federal benefits programs.

So it might create more individuals coming to the workforce, but are they qualified? So we are seeing some of our clients start to focus on skills-based hiring as an increased solution for employers looking for talent. This requires us to shift from exact required amount of matching experience for the role you're hiring for. Exact number of years of this.

Exact same role or specific educational requirements, and it switches us to think about hiring based on transferable skills and potential with a robust training program to structure a development structure to help new skills based hires succeed. So we can find somebody who's got these transferable skills. Let's talk about a bank, for example. So we work with a lot of different banks, so a loan officer.

So yes, it'd be great to be able to poach a loan officer from another regional bank in your area that's got the relationships, all those things. That would be ideal. It's just harder and harder to do that. So let's focus on key competencies like customer relationship management, sales and negotiation skills, financial analysis, problem solving.

So regardless of their educational background and their previous job titles, do they have these transferable skills? And then do we have a robust enough training system? So this is the other part that's really important when we talk about skills-based hiring is that do we have the most--

do we have a training system that's going to actually help them to learn to be a loan officer? Because we don't do that and we just expect them to absorb it through osmosis or everybody's going to fail in that scenario. I'd love to share my favorite anecdote of a story of someone that I recruited a long time ago. And it wasn't actually my hire, but I just encouraged her to apply at our organization probably about 10 years ago now.

And she was a meteorologist for the Air Force, and I was working at an HR company. And we were an air tech company, and we needed people who had the ability to manage technology, to train people on technology, and to be able to be very fine detail skills and analysis of data. And she was hired on as an implementation manager for getting new clients onto a payroll system and training them on that HR technology, and she just rocked it out of the park. So it's something where it's like, she never had any HR.

She never had any payroll. She never had any HR technology experience, but she was a hard worker. She was willing to learn, she was smart, and she came with these transferable skills that then set her up for success with a great training program. And she's still in HR and is still doing a wonderful job, so it really changed her career path.

Again, I didn't hire her. I just said, hey, you should apply for our great company. And really thinking outside of the box of where we could fit someone like that into our organization, so, again, thinking about that skills based hiring. Next we've got job tryouts.

So again, this is another trend that we're seeing with more and more employers that we work with is using job tryouts for candidates to help reduce our overall hiring costs, especially when we've got bad hires. So this can be some really great benefits for you as an employer. We've got skills verification. Managers can directly observe whether the candidate possesses the skills required to do the job well in a hands on situation.

We can reduce our hiring risks. This tryout period minimizes the risk of investing further time. Weeks, months, and time and money from that time period from a candidate who might not be a good fit for the company or position. And it also helps us with culture fit.

So that's hard to do sometimes in a couple of interviews. It gives us an opportunity to really assess whether a candidate aligns with the company's culture and values. It also can be great for the candidate. I know I've had an experience, where I joined an organization fairly early on in my career, where I didn't know better and I just trusted everything at face value.

And once I got in the door, the role was not like what they told me it was going to be or what was on the job description, and the actual company was nothing like they described it in the moment or in the hiring process. I would have loved to have had an opportunity to be there for a few days and really peek behind the curtain and see how things really work, because I would not have taken that job and I would not have been subsequently fired from that job. So we usually recommend, when we talk to clients about a job tryout program, three days to seven days. We want to give them more than one day.

That feels really short. Let's give them a few days to get their hands wet and really understand how the role works, how the company works, things along that nature. And more than seven days, you're kind of in the same boat as keeping them on and fully training them long term, so typically we see that. Now, we do want to do job tryouts in a compliant manner.

So we want to make sure that we are paying the employee during that time period because that's the biggest question we get. Well, we're just going to have them come in for a few days and shadow. Well, you have to pay them. You can't just have them come in.

It's not a volunteer situation here for them to just come in and shadow. The other thing we need to do--

and, of course, pay means at least your minimum wage, whatever it is in your local area. So make sure we're not just paying them something, but we've got to pay them at least minimum wage and we have to pay them overtime. They work over the overtime periods. The other thing we need to do is that we need to hire them all under your normal hiring processes.

So that's talking about that W-9 I talked about earlier. The W-4, if you have a state withholding. We need to make sure that we're fully hiring them on with the normal process and paperwork, so those are the two requirements that a job tryout program. Paying at least minimum wage and overtime if needed, and that we complete our I-9, W-4, et cetera.

As a best practice, we recommend that you do some sort of a document, like an offer letter that outlines this offer employment is for a tryout period only. The length, the duration is going to be determined in that, and that it agrees that there's no stated or implied, guaranteed of continued employment beyond the trial period. Management has the complete discretion regarding continued employment, so we want to make sure that that's all outlined. That's really clear to the employee or the candidate here of what's happening.

And we always like to also share that or recommend that you have a really clear list of things that they're going to be evaluated on during that period, and then you make a decision quickly. Maybe they've got other jobs that they're looking at or they're applying for. It's always good to make sure we're getting back to our candidates in any stage of the process very quickly when we're making decisions there. And last but not least is the best practice.

We recommend that you attach or include in your handbook something that says on occasion that the company decided to--

the company may decide to hire an applicant on a trial basis as deemed necessary. So those are just some best practices and requirements if we're going to start a job tryout program in our organization, which is something that we're seeing an increasing trend in here in 2025. Employee engagement, so we had our lowest COLI Cost of Living Increase since 2021 at 2.5. Many of you are already involved with SHRM, but they put out their recent study showing that businesses are budgeting for around 4% in 2025 for the cost of living increases, with additional 3.5%

for merit raises. That's across the country, across industries. So it might not be specific to what you're looking at, but just so you have an idea of what SHRM is posting right now. And then we still are seeing a number of employers that are making changes for fair compensation amongst similar roles.

So we might have seen this low cost of living increase, but we might have seen individuals within an organization having a much higher amount because they're realizing that, hey, we've got two people or a group of people that are doing a very similar role with similar experience, things like that. And there was a large pay discrepancy between them, so we want to make sure we're being fair on our compensation. Other things that we're seeing is recognizing the value of non-monetary rewards and attracting retaining top talent. So that's going beyond this traditional compensation, although we know that's number one on everybody's list is pay me well.

But what are the things that we can do in addition to paying competitively to attract and retain folks? So workplace flexibility. I think we're seeing more and more return to office mandates, but it's a pretty small minority overall from the organizations that went fully remote or were remote prior to COVID. Of course, there's hundreds and hundreds of industries that never were able to go remote.

That's not a part of that conversation. But what it can be a part, regardless of the industry, is flexible work arrangements. So in addition to remote work, if that's not a possibility, can we look at hybrid schedules? Can we look at flexible hours?

Can we have those be more a part of standard practices four days of 10 hour days during the week? Those types of things. Enhanced health and wellness benefits. So McGriff can help you with this, but how do we make sure we're doing a comprehensive health insurance plan, mental health support, wellness program, fitness subsidies?

All these are continuing to gain prominence this year because we want we're seeing more and more companies that are investing in their employees physical and mental health to create a healthier and happier workplace. And then long term incentives. So we continue to see an increase in things like stock options, profit sharing plans, retirement benefits with matches there. We want to align.

We're seeing more and more organizations, employers that are looking to align employees interests with the company's long term goals. So we can have something that's like, we're going to pay you X right now, but how do we keep our great employees there for a long period of time? How do we have them fully invested in the long term success of our organization? And these are some ways to do that with these stock options, profit sharing plans, retirement benefits.

I can remember early on in my career I was offered a teeny, teeny tiny stock option. And gosh, that was great. I did feel a sense of ownership with regards to that, and I did feel very loyal to the organization because they gave me that for my hard work there. So I think it's just understanding that we can have some well-rounded programs and we're continuing to see those evolve over the years, and into 2025 I think we're going to be talking more and more about those.

And last in the employee engagement side is, burnout has become a significant concern across a variety of industries, so this is not industry specific anymore. So we're seeing employers increasingly prioritize strategies to prevent burnout and promote work life balance. I think we're going to see or we're going to hear in the HR space, less and less of the terminology of work-life balance, which is the thing we were all talking about for the last probably 10 or 15 years, and I think we're going to start to see more and more of the conversation around work life integration. So work-life balance is where we kept work and life separate but equal, but we drew a line in the sand.

And when I'm at work, I'm at work. When I'm at home, I'm home. Well, in 2025, that's not really the reality anymore. A lot of us, our entire work can be on our phone or on an iPad, and we can be taking that anywhere we go.

The reality is that many of us are in a sandwich generation, where we're caring for our older relatives, our parents, as well as our children, so it just means that there's integration. There are school is calling while I'm at work and my colleague is texting me at night while I'm at home. It's just that's the reality of how it works in 2025. So how can we have that integration be productive?

How can we put standards around that? How can we put support for our employees around that to encourage a more integrated approach that doesn't burn them out? So again, we can talk about flexible work arrangements. We can talk about the fact that, hey, go to your kid's soccer game or basketball game at 2:00 PM and then you're going to log in afterwards.

But we need as employers to set some real clear guidelines around those pieces so it's not the wild wild west or one size fits. All right. So we need to make sure that we're being really clear on our policies and holding people accountable to those, but that gives them that flexibility to be able to have that work life integration. Time off policies.

As far as trends on this, we are definitely seeing a shift off of unlimited time off to set number of days on PTO, but that being generous. And so whether that's a PTO, PTO and sick, whatever that looks like for your organization, but we're definitely seeing a swing back from the old kind of the trend that was for the last 10 years or so in unlimited PTO. And we want employers, we want us--

I encourage you strongly to encourage your employees to use their allotted time off. That is a part of their overall compensation plan. Allow them to reduce, excuse me, to recharge and reduce stress. Come back refreshed.

Let them truly clock out and live their life, enjoy their vacation, whatever they're doing, and know that you've got it covered for when they come back. That's really important I think, again, when we're talking about preventing burnout of our employees and retaining them for the long term. And the mental health resources managing stress. These can be things like meditation apps.

We've seen yoga and wellness classes come in, breathing exercises, trainings. Things along that employers continue to push out. But the other thing I would say is, if many employee benefits programs have EAPs. And sometimes you have an EAP, an employee assistance program, you might not know you have it or you might not be pushing that to your employees.

But I would say if you have that, if you're already paying for that, make sure that your employees are being reminded of that on a regular basis, not just during open enrollment period to help them with those things that bridge the gap and help them manage stress when there's a challenging situation happening that they need that support from. And then you can also obviously, like I said, offer the apps, the workshops, training sessions with stress management, and just really equip your employees with practical tools to help you manage these day to day stresses. And then in closing here, if we go to the next slide, Lesonya.

As a reminder, for those of you who might not be aware, we work with McGriff on a retainer basis to support you as McGriff clients with your HR questions. So this is a HR support hotline that is at no cost to you as a McGriff client. You can call or email us. The phone number and email are listed here, and speak to one of our HR experts about any number of questions regarding your workforce.

I'll go through some specifics here shortly. But it allows you to get that second set of eyes on something, that second opinion on things if you're completely in the dark about it. So it can be anything from FMLA, can I fire this person? Onboarding questions, I-9 questions.

So this is that this HR hotline at 888-245-6272 or admin@seay.us. Again, that is at no cost to you as a client of McGriff. Now, we can go to the next slide because in the event that you want to dig in more on a strategic initiative like an employee opinion survey, disk profile analysis, compensation management programs, let's check to see are you paying competitively? Assistance with job descriptions, presenting harassment trainings.

These strategy and compliance components are offered to you at a special discounted price because you're a McGriff client, and so that helps you save money on these valuable services. And last but not least, we can also help with compliance support. So I know compliance is not fun, but it's also not optional. You have to be compliant, so we can work with you to create or revise your employee handbook.

If you hadn't have. If you haven't had an expert look at your employee handbook in the last two years, strongly recommend you do it. Not just because of the things we just talked about, but I didn't have time to go through all 50 states and all the changes that are happening sometimes on a quarterly basis there. So we want to make sure that you've got your employee handbook up to date.

We can also help you respond to EEOC claims, detailed wage and hour audits. I-9 audits, like I talked about before, if you want another set of eyes on that. So again, these are going to be offered to you at a heavily reduced rate because you're a McGriff client and you can call us again at 888-245-6272 or email us at admin@seay.us to speak to one of our HR consultants for that.

So that thank you so much, and I'll hand it back over to Lesonya to close us out. Thank you so much, Marci and Janie. Such wonderful information. As I alluded to earlier, unfortunately we do not have time to answer the questions.

I do appreciate everyone for submitting your questions to the chat and Q&A box. If you still have questions, please go ahead and send it. I am capturing all of the questions. I will make sure both Janie and Marci receive these questions, and I'll make sure that when I send out the recording as well as the presentation slides.

We'll make sure we send you your responses to those questions. So again, thank you both for a wonderful presentation. Also, I want to thank everyone for joining us today. On behalf of McGriff, we do appreciate your time, and we ask that you stay tuned for future webinars presented by our team.

Again, thank you all, and everyone please have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.