Work is a Verb A newsletter by The jobs exist. The candidates exist. The match is failing. Heat Geek installs heat pumps. This summer it opened eight roles, enough to grow its headcount by more than a quarter, and its chief operating officer told the Financial Times the entry-level jobs needed to be “filled yesterday.” The graduates she wanted were, in the FT’s words, nowhere to be seen. “We know exactly what we want,” Holly Foster said. “The struggle is communicating that … what we’re...
6 days ago • 5 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by The 48-Hour Search Monday morning: coffee, a clean spreadsheet, and a weekend's worth of saved postings. By Wednesday night, every open tab has your name on it. For two days, every click moves the search forward. Then the batch is submitted, and the next move on every application belongs to an employer. In the December 2025 revision of their NBER working paper "Application Flows", economists Steven J. Davis and Brenda Samaniego de la Parra analyzed 125 million...
19 days ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Your Calendar Sorts Backwards Two meetings get requested on the same Monday morning. The first is thirty minutes on which vendor to use for the new company hoodies. Two people, neither of them senior. It lands on Tuesday afternoon. The second is whether to correct the comp band on an engineering team that keeps losing people over it. It needs four people, two of whom run departments. The first slot where all four are free is three weeks out, long enough for...
28 days ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by There is a message sitting in my LinkedIn inbox from someone I have never met. It is friendly. It mentions a post I wrote and says something reasonable about it. It asks for nothing at all. I already know what the second message says. So do you. Everyone has been on both ends of this, if not on LinkedIn then in every sales email that opened with a compliment before it got to the point. The friendly "loved your post" note does not read as a compliment. It reads...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Last week, walking my dog Biba back from the mailbox, I found an actual letter. Handwriting on the envelope. It stopped me mid-step: that old warmth of being thought of by someone who wasn't in the room. Strange, because a letter is about as far from "being in the room" as communication gets. You write, you wait days, they read it alone... and it still did exactly what CEOs insist only an office can do. A letter takes real effort to produce. Someone sat down,...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by The Ladder Broke. Then It Got Longer. Landing a remote job in 2026 is genuinely harder than it used to be, especially if you're early in your career. Two new 2026 papers explain why, and together they make a case worth hearing: the fight is still worth having, and not just for the reason you'd expect. One team of economists found remote work is quietly closing the door on junior hires. A separate team found that once you're through that door, remote work is one...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by The number that predicts who's hiring Ask a CEO why the team shrank this quarter, and "AI" ends the conversation. No follow-up needed. Of course at any company where leaders have that mindset, that's what is going to happen. It's also what we're seeing in most of the headlines. But there's an interesting counter narrative forming. Two economists at Ramp and one at Revelio Labs skipped the guessing. They pulled real corporate card and bill-pay data from more than...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Your CEO Misses the Applause Someone actually measured it. For five years, the return-to-office (RTO) argument has been made in the language of output. Productivity. Culture. "The energy of being in a room together." Those explanations have always felt a little thin, and a team at Wharton decided to look underneath them. Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott, and Adam Grant studied more than a thousand leaders across three studies. They measured narcissism the way...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Knowledge work has a problem. Remote work got the blame. One number went viral at the start of June. Remote work, the headlines said, explains 64 percent of the rise in unemployment for young college graduates. A companion paper tied remote work to a third of the post-pandemic rise in mental distress. The prescription floated through the coverage like a given: bring everyone back. Most of the coverage skipped the fine print. The 64 percent is a preliminary...
3 months ago • 3 min read