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“When someone's habits don't match their ambitions, trust the habits.

The corollary: Do your habits match your ambitions?” -FS

👋 Welcome, Jobseeker

LinkedIn just laid off 1,000 people while revenue climbed 12%, recruiters are feeding cover letters into AI detectors, and Big Tech keeps swapping entry-level jobs for “AI-native” hires. Meanwhile, the HN hiring thread is alive, SMBs are scooping up grads, Maine just forced pay ranges onto job posts, and fresh Series B cash is creating openings outside the usual FAANG circus. This week’s newsletter is a reminder to stop treating LinkedIn like your entire career strategy.

• ⚖️ Offboard Gets Political: Rohan Marfatia backs Offboard’s push for stronger workforce support

• 🚨 The Big Story: LinkedIn cuts 1,000 jobs the same day revenue grew 12%

• 📉 Layoff Report: LinkedIn, GM, Upwork, xAI: 1,700+ cuts in seven days

• 🔎 The Inside Track: Meta's May 20 dread, LinkedIn's confirmed rumor, HN thread live

• 🧠 The Hiring Mgr’s Brain: Recruiters now run your cover letter through AI detectors

• 📊 Trends & Data: $300B in Q1 VC, 71% of tech jobs want AI, 974,000 grads to SMBs

• ☀️ The Bright Spot: Maine becomes 17th state to require pay ranges on postings

• 🏢 Companies to Watch: Exaforce, Vapi, Corgi, Cowboy Space: fresh Series B raises

⚖️ Offboard Gets Political:

Rohan Marfatia backs Offboard’s vision for stronger workforce support

This week, we sat down with Rohan Marfatia, candidate for Alameda County Supervisor, District 2, to talk about layoffs, AI disruption, county accountability, and the future of work.

Rohan framed layoffs as more than a company issue. They are an economic security issue. When someone loses a job, the impact can ripple into healthcare, housing, family stability, mental health, and the local economy.

That is why he is calling for a more proactive, data-driven county government: real-time dashboards, clearer resource navigation, stronger public-private partnerships, and better support for workers before they fall into crisis.

That is also why he supports what we are building at Offboard.

Offboard helps laid-off workers stabilize, organize next steps, access resources, use AI effectively, and move faster toward meaningful work. And with Offboard Redeploy, we are exploring how displaced talent can be connected to funded local projects, small businesses, civic needs, and workforce programs.

The future of workforce support cannot be a scattered list of links. It has to be coordinated, measurable, human, and built for the AI era.

🚨: The Big Story

LinkedIn cuts 1,000 jobs the same day revenue grew 12%

What happened: On Wednesday May 13, LinkedIn told staff it's cutting roughly 5% of its global workforce, somewhere between 875 and 1,000 jobs. CEO Ryan Roslansky framed it as a move to a 'flatter organisational structure' driven by 'shifts in customer behavior and slower revenue growth.' The same earnings cycle Microsoft reported LinkedIn revenue up 12% year over year. Reuters via Quartz.

Why it matters: The platform that 1 billion people use to find jobs just fired 1,000 of its own. If you're job hunting and LinkedIn has been your primary channel, the company running your channel is cutting the people who build it. Recruiter Search, InMail credits, and Premium support are all about to feel different.

Our take: Roslansky says the cuts aren't AI-driven. Read the memo again: he's reorganizing toward 'growth areas,' which is the same vocabulary Coinbase used last week and Meta used in April. 'Flatter organisational structure' is corporate for fewer middle managers and fewer ICs underneath them. Revenue is up. The choice to fire people anyway is just that, a choice. LinkedIn could have hired into the slow-growth lines, retrained people, or absorbed the margin. It picked the cheaper option. The growing-revenue-while-cutting-people pattern is now the norm, and it tells you everything about how Big Tech intends to make its AI capex math work.

What to watch:

• Microsoft's broader May restructuring rolling into Azure, Xbox, and now LinkedIn

• Meta's confirmed May 20 cut of 8,000 (10%) plus 6,000 cancelled reqs

• Whether LinkedIn job posting volume drops as the in-house recruiter product team shrinks

Your move:

• Export your LinkedIn data this week (Settings, Data Privacy, Get a copy of your data). Connection lists and message histories belong to you, not Ryan.

• Add 2 non-LinkedIn channels to your weekly search loop: Wellfound and the HN May 2026 hiring thread are both live.

📉 Layoff Report (Who got cut, how, and why)

LinkedIn, GM, Upwork, xAI: 1,700+ cuts in seven days

• LinkedIn: Announced May 13. Cutting ~5% of global staff (875 to 1,000 people) at the Microsoft-owned platform. Revenue grew 12% in the quarter just ended. Source

• General Motors: Announced May 11. Laid off ~600 salaried IT workers (10%+ of the IT org) in Austin and Warren, MI. Same week, GM had ~80 open IT roles tagged AI-native development, model engineering, and prompt design. Pure skills swap. TechCrunch

• Upwork: Announced May 7. CEO Hayden Brown cut ~24% of staff (around 145 people), citing 'two pizza teams are dead' and AI letting smaller teams do more. Stock dropped 19% in 5 sessions after. Upwork PR

• xAI: Confirmed week of May 11 by Elon Musk via X. Headcount reduction tied to a reorganization. No precise number released. The 'AI is the future' line, applied recursively to the AI company itself. Coverage

🔎 The Inside Track (What the press releases don't say)

Meta's May 20 dread, LinkedIn's confirmed rumor, HN thread live

• Blind (LinkedIn): Threads on the LinkedIn Layoffs board started escalating last week with posters citing 'massive layoffs soon' and percentage estimates ranging from 10% to 40%. Reuters confirmed 5% on Wednesday. Lesson: the Blind rumor mill was directionally right and 5 days early. Blind thread

• Blind (Meta): The 'Is there a mass layoff at Meta on 5/20?' thread is one of the most active posts on the platform this week. Managers reportedly have lists. If you're at Meta and your 1:1 next Monday gets moved to a group call, that's your signal. Blind thread

• Hacker News: 'Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)' is live. Ashby (~$153K-$275K), IBM Research (LLM + Rust), Loophole Labs ($150K-$195K remote), and OpenVPN ($140K-$150K remote AI Platform Engineer) are all in the thread. Apply through the company links, not LinkedIn. Thread

• Reddit r/cscareerquestions: Recurring theme this month: applicants reporting that recruiters confirmed they're running cover letters through AI-detection tools and rejecting anything flagged as 'likely generated.' Treat your cover letter like a real writing sample.

🧠 The Hiring Manager’s Brain (One thing HR actually cares about)

Recruiters now run your cover letter through AI detectors

Recruiters at mid-and-large tech companies are routinely passing cover letters through AI-detection tools and discarding anything flagged as likely generated. The bar is no longer 'did you submit a cover letter,' it's 'does the letter read like a real human voice with specific context about us.'

Multiple recruiter posts on LinkedIn and threads in r/cscareerquestions and r/recruitinghell this spring confirmed the pattern. Common ChatGPT phrasing (the word 'delve,' three-item parallel structures, 'I am excited to share' openers) is the tell. LinkedIn exec advice via CNBC

What to do about it: Write the first draft of every cover letter yourself, then use AI to fix grammar and tighten, not to generate from scratch. Open with one specific sentence about the company (a recent product launch, a blog post you read, a number from their last earnings call). That sentence alone clears 80% of detectors.

📊  Trends & Data (What the numbers are saying)

$300B in Q1 VC, 71% of tech jobs want AI, 974,000 grads to SMBs

• Global VC funding hit a record $300 billion in Q1 2026 (about 2.5x the prior quarter), with 81% going to AI. OpenAI ($122B), Anthropic ($30B), xAI ($20B), and Waymo ($16B) alone absorbed 65% of global VC dollars. Crunchbase News

• 71% of US tech job postings now require AI skills (up from 67% in March), and AI skill mentions are up 181% YoY per Dice. AI fluency stopped being a differentiator months ago; it's now a baseline. Dice Hiring Report

• Goldman Sachs says AI is destroying ~25,000 jobs per month and creating ~9,000, for a net drag of 16,000 monthly on US payrolls. Workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles have seen employment drop 13% since 2022. Fortune via Goldman

• Small businesses will hire ~974,000 recent grads (ages 20 to 24) between April and September 2026, while Big Tech pulls entry-level postings. The hiring isn't gone, it just moved. Fortune

What this means for you: Big Tech is contracting at the front door and expanding at the AI back door. SMB and Series B startups are absorbing the rest. Both paths require you to lead with a quantified result, not a job title.

☀️ The Bright Spot (Proof that it's not all bad out there)

Maine becomes 17th state to require pay ranges on postings

Maine Governor Janet Mills signed LD 54 on April 24, making Maine the 17th US state to require employers (10+ employees) to publish pay ranges in job postings. The law takes effect July 2026 and adds pay-history record-keeping obligations. Pay transparency went from 'controversial' to 'common-sense' in under five years, which is the speed worker-friendly policy almost never moves. More of this, please. GovDocs

👀 Companies to Watch (Fresh money, open roles, and reasons to apply now)

Exaforce, Vapi, Corgi, Cowboy Space: fresh Series B raises

• Exaforce: Closed a $125M Series B in May (HarbourVest, Peak XV, Mayfield, Khosla). AI-native cybersecurity. Hiring across detection engineering, ML, and GTM. Coverage

• Vapi: Closed $50M Series B led by Peak XV on May 12. Voice AI infrastructure. Backend, infra, and developer-facing roles. Remote-friendly. Careers

• Corgi: $160M Series B led by TCV on May 6. AI-driven insurance. Hiring engineers, actuarial-tech hybrids, and product. Careers

• Cowboy Space: $275M Series B led by Index Ventures on May 11. Space-based energy networks. If you've ever wanted to put 'orbital' on your resume, this is your window. Careers

• Ashby (YC 19): Posted in the May HN hiring thread. Engineering team grew 30 to 60 last year, plans to double again in 2026. Product Engineer salary $153K-$220K (Senior) / $190K-$275K (Staff). Careers