Amy Lindgren

Hiring bonuses are having a moment — thanks to a well-publicized recruitment push by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As you may have heard, their employment offer for targeted roles features $50,000 bonuses, with additional student loan forgiveness topping off at $60,000.

This is a rich package by any measure, and one that would not normally be offered to frontline workers. That said, hiring bonuses on a smaller scale are not uncommon, appearing in any industry or level where employers perceive an extra boost is needed to attract candidates.

These incentives might seem straightforward (Extra money up front? Why thank you!) but they can come with more strings than a macramé potholder. Read on for tips to keep from getting tangled in the knots.

• Understand the employer’s perspective. Why would an employer craft a hiring bonus instead of simply offering a better wage? In a nutshell, bonuses happen once but wages are forever. Where a bonus will be paid but not repeated, the worker’s wage will continue to increase. Not only that, but wages also serve as the foundation for percentage-based perks such as retirement benefits or future raises. The higher the initial wage, the more money the employer will spend year after year on the same worker.

Conversely, these are the same reasons career consultants urge their candidates to go for the wage first: It will mean more money in the long run. That said, negotiating for a bonus can be a viable alternative when candidates can’t get to the wage they want. It’s better than nothing, and could be easier for the manager to get approved.

• Understand the offer. To start, it helps to rename the hiring bonus for what it really is: A retention bonus. While you might get a bonus simply for signing on (sometimes this is accurately called a sign-on bonus), it’s more likely that you’ll receive only part of the pay up front, with the rest coming after you hit certain milestones. (That’s the case for the DHS bonuses, with the money being paid out in installments over the course of five years.)

In these cases, it’s not the fact of the milestones that matters, but their content and the conditions for meeting them. If, for example, you’re told you’ll receive $5,000 paid out in $1,000 increments every six months, that’s an easy requirement to track.

But what if you need to meet a certain work quota every six months, or find that the payments will depend on performance reviews? You can see where this is heading. Some of these factors are out of your control, which means that you might not see some or most of the payment you were expecting.

• Watch for the clawback. That nasty-sounding word is nonetheless accurate. Depending on the terms of your offer, an employer can “claw back” money already paid if you leave early or otherwise don’t hold up your end of the bargain. This can be a nasty surprise, particularly in the case of money you used to relocate or invest in the job itself.

• Check for stability. If your payout is staged for three years, or even five on the long side, are you certain the funds are going to be there? Will the organization? This isn’t the easiest thing to assess, but having the question in mind might motivate you to negotiate for a shorter window or more of the bonus up front.

• Get it in writing. If a recruiter or manager mentions off-hand that they’ll “sweeten the pot” with a bonus, your next step is to confirm that by email and then look for it in the formal offer. For example your email might include, “I enjoyed our meeting on Wednesday and learning more about this position. It was especially good to hear about the bonus you mentioned. I’d be interested in knowing more details about that as we talk more; it’s a great incentive!”

One reason for the email is to create the (electronic) paper trail, in case your hiring process gets handed off to someone else. But it’s also a way of testing the waters. If they were serious, they’ll take the bait; if not, they’ll either back-pedal or go silent. That’s not ideal, but it’s better to know early on if someone’s playing games with you.

When you receive an employment offer with the bonus described more fully, consider running it by an attorney or mentor before accepting, particularly if you see clawback wording.

Bottom line? Bonuses of all stripes can be wonderful things, provided you understand the terms and don’t count too heavily on receiving the total payout. Celebrate the moment but proceed with caution, remembering “All that glitters is not gold,” as the saying goes.

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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.

By Ariana Perez-Castells, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Job hunters beware: some of the hard-earned skills listed on your resume are going unnoticed by potential employers.

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Workers’ profiles on job posting websites often feature general abilities, like leadership, communication, teamwork, and problem-solving, a recent report from the Wharton School says. But they’re not highlighting the “specialized, execution-oriented skills,” employers are seeking. That’s created a “skills mismatch economy.”

“People are not representing their skills in a way that’s necessarily resonating with the skills that employers want,” said Eric Bradlow, the vice dean of artificial intelligence and analytics at the Wharton School, who co-authored the report.

Meanwhile, AI has been speeding the shift from a “role-based labor market to a skills-based economy,” the report outlines, making it all the more poignant to know what skills employers actually want.

Bradlow, says generative AI has been “a positively destructive bomb on roles and titles,” by making workers able to carry out tasks that they didn’t know how to do in the past. So “having a specific job title is becoming less relevant.”

The Wharton School worked in partnership with Accenture, a professional services firm, to analyze millions of job postings and worker profiles for the report. The study used data from Lightcast, a labor market data provider, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bradlow spoke with The Inquirer about their findings.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What are some skills included on resumes that don’t make much difference to employers, because everyone seems to have them?

A: Do we think it’s important to communicate? Well, yeah, of course, it is. Do we think it’s important to have leadership skills and manage teams well? Yeah, of course. Last time I checked, those were really important parts of the job — but everybody puts that down. We’re not saying in the report that those skills aren’t important. What we’re saying is there’s an over supply of people stating those skills, as opposed to companies saying these skills are what’s going to get you the job.

Companies are realizing that depth of skill is what’s going to be really important.

Q: Do people lack the specialized skills employers are looking for? Or are they just failing to highlight them on their resumes?

A: That’s something, trust me, I wish I could answer.

If we had people’s transcript data, or if we knew what courses someone had taken, then we could try to get an understanding of what skills people actually have.

I think two things are going to happen, based on this Wharton-Accenture Skills Index gap report. Number one is, you will see a migration where people [will say] “I need to acquire those skills, if I don’t have them, if I want a job.” Second, you’ll see [organizations] — whether it’s an academic institution or a for-profit institution — saying “wait a second, here, we need more people with this skill. We’ll create a certification program.”

Q: You found that some skills are actually tied to higher-paying jobs. Was that surprising?

A: I’m not sure I had hypotheses about which skills would be paid higher or lower.

I think maybe the part that surprised me a little bit was that there wasn’t massive swings and variation like “if you have this skill, your salary doubles.” That’s not what we found in the data.

Q: What advice would you give someone crafting their resume?

A: One is talk about the specific skills you have. Every resume I read says “I’m an effective communicator, experienced leader.” That’s fine, but that’s not what’s going to stick out and become differentiated, because everyone’s going to say that. To the degree that you have specific expertise and depth or skills, those are the kinds of things to put on the resume.

The second thing I would say is that … we should be in the skills acquisition business, be a lifelong learner. Skills will always be valued. Jobs in a particular workflow can go away. People with skills will be hired.

Take, for instance, a customer support agent in a customer satisfaction group. If you’re someone with exceptional problem solving skills, you’re hearing your customer, and you’re able to tie it to some remedy, that skill is not going to go away even if the job you’re currently in happens to go away.

Q: What skills are needed more or needed less because of the adoption of AI recently?

A: I don’t view it as AI replacing humans. I view AI as that decision-support tool you should use for every decision. If I were an employer today, I wouldn’t even consider hiring someone that didn’t recognize the power of artificial intelligence as a decision-support aid. I don’t know what business decision — pricing decision, product launch decision, product design decision, possibly even hiring decision — [for which] I wouldn’t use artificial intelligence as a decision support tool.

I would also say, equally, I’m very concerned about the agentic use of AI — in some sense totally handing over high stakes decisions.

Q: From where you stand, is AI coming for people’s jobs, as we often hear, or is it coming for their skills? What’s the difference?

A: Go through the history of mankind.

The train engine came. So you mean we don’t need as many horses? Electricity came. You mean we don’t need as much coal? Green energy came, and so now we don’t need as much nuclear fusion?

Doesn’t technology always come and translate one set of jobs to another set of jobs? It’s not AI is coming for your job. What companies are realizing about AI is there are certain roles and functions that AI can do extraordinarily well, with high accuracy, and in some cases better than humans can do. These tend to be functions, by the way, that many humans don’t like doing anyway.

I don’t see AI coming for your job any more so than any set of technology. This is an extraordinarily disruptive technology, but we’ve lived through periods of extraordinarily disruptive technology.

©2026 The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. Visit at inquirer.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

St. Paul has great water. It’s cold, refreshing and tastes good. Reminds me of the gin-colored cold water in Lake Superior. The official title of the water department is St. Paul Regional Water Services. Fine with me, just so when I go the tap, there it is, the best water in the country.

Why, I have been remiss. The unspoken charm of our town is the water. And I have gone to the taps all over Europe and the United States, finding no equal to what awaits me at home.

So, the other day, working in Siberian conditions, the guys in yellow vests, probably gals, too, were digging down to a busted pipe in our neighborhood. You can always tell when work is being done in the winter. The streets get slushy. They make a mess. More importantly, neighbors email each other wondering about water pressure. We are immensely pleased to learn that we aren’t the only ones with no water coming out of the tap. We always want it to be the work underway, not a leak in our basements. We do the same thing during power outages.

Whatever they were doing took them most of the day. Around dinner time, signs of life appeared. Out of the taps came a hissing sound as the pipes bled air. The toilet bowls rumbled. Not long after there was water, haltingly at first, a furious sputtering, a bit discolored. Understandable. I don’t know what they encounter down there.

By later in the evening, all seemed well. Still a little air bleeding and spurting, but for all practical purposes, she was up and running. I let it run just a bit — looked clear to me — and then slogged down a big glass of urban America’s best.

The next morning, I made coffee as usual, the coldest water possible being the key to good coffee. Then I went to the dentist and returned home just in the nick of time, if you know what I mean. I was in gastrointestinal distress and there being no other way to put it, from both ends at the same time. Holy mackerel. Maybe I had been too close to a kid who was under the weather. Or maybe I just caught a bug, but holy mackerel.

“Hey,” I heard from beyond the closed door. “Did you swallow a hunk of cigar again?”

“No.”

I never think poorly of our water and was hesitant to cast any blame. Nor did I wish to start an email blast to the neighbors, not wanting to bring up the topic of any similar reports. I suffered only briefly and what came over me didn’t last more than 30 minutes and I was back to normal and remain so.

The next day, I saw one of the Regional Water Services’ dark-blue pickup trucks in a different neighborhood. I was curious. I stopped and rolled down my window, gesturing for the occupant to do the same.

“How I can I help you?” the driver said. He wore a yellow vest.

“When you guys repair a break in a pipe, how long before I should drink the water in my house?”

“I’d let it run a couple of minutes.”

“Minutes?”

“Yeah,” he said, “let the air get out of the system. The water might be a little brown.”

I interjected that it was.

“Minutes?” I asked.

“Yeah, a couple of minutes,” he said. “Then it should be fine.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“No problem,” he said, “you have a nice day.”

What a pleasant exchange. No politics. No ICE. No taxes or fraud or Siberian temperatures. No angst or litmus tests or cops or undercurrents of complaining about anything from either party. Just a guy asking a water guy what the deal was. And he said minutes.

I’ll let that be a lesson to me. It’s damn good water, but best to let it breathe.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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This time last year, the hottest Chinese tech product was DeepSeek’s market-moving artificial intelligence model. In 2026, it’s something far simpler: an app for people worried about dying alone.

The bluntly named “Are You Dead?” platform rocketed to the top of the app-store charts in China before going viral globally. The interface is almost aggressively plain. Users, largely people living alone, tap to confirm they are still alive. Miss two days in a row and an emergency contact gets notified.

Besides its provocative moniker, there’s a reason the app went mega-viral without spending a dime on advertising — and didn’t even have to pretend to be a buzzy new AI product. Its surge coincided with the nation’s birth rate plunging to its lowest on record, at a time when marriage figures are falling and divorces are ticking up.

While many assumed it was developed for elderly users seeking to hold on to their independence, it was actually created by a team of Gen-Z developers who said in interviews they were inspired by their own experiences of isolating urban life. One-person households are expected to swell to as many as 200 million in the country by 2030.

These demographic changes aren’t unique to modern China, but they’re definitely not the kind of publicity Beijing wants right now. The platform was quietly removed from Chinese app stores this month. In a culture where frank mentions of dying are seen as taboo and inauspicious, the creators also said on micro-blogging site Weibo that they were planning on rebranding. The new international name, “Demumu,” is a Labubu-fied riff on the word “death.” It didn’t catch on as expected, and the developers are now crowdsourcing a new idea via social media.

Despite striking a nerve in Beijing and around the world, the product’s concept is annoyingly good. I’m jealous I didn’t think of it. As Big Tech and startups race to come up with the next hit AI application, the most common complaint I hear from actual humans is that many of these tools are solutions hunting for a problem. I don’t need a model to summarize a two-line message from a friend, and having software interpose itself in basic intimacy can feel more intrusive than helpful.

“Are You Dead?” does the opposite. It’s not trying to be clever, but purely practical. It offers a small sense of security to people living solo — even as its existence makes plain a rising loneliness epidemic. The name, a dark twist on the popular “Are You Hungry?” food delivery platform, channels the nihilistic Gen-Z humor of the lay-flat generation. Online, many Chinese youth didn’t treat it as offensive, but rather as a kind of memento mori.

Efforts to force AI into more facets of our life have rightly commanded the spotlight. But across Asia and beyond, eldercare tech is poised to boom. Beijing has been touting the silver economy as a future engine of growth, pointing to seniors’ rising spending power and willingness to adopt new digital platforms. Rather than discourage these innovations and the uncomfortable questions they raise, the government should welcome these tools.

In the U.S., the American Association of Retired Persons forecasts that older Americans’ spending on technology will rise to $120 billion by 2030, despite 59% of adults over 50 feeling it isn’t designed with their age in mind. There’s a ballooning opportunity globally for developers to tap into this market and ameliorate that disconnect.

But the deeper debate unleashed by the app’s virality is something that will be even harder for the industry to address: Is technology making us more or less lonely? Globally, social media has made it much more convenient to avoid meeting in-person. In China, super-apps have optimized everything — you don’t have to say a word to a real person to hail a ride or order delivery meals and essentials. And in the pursuit of AI supremacy, people are working longer hours, driven by a grueling (and technically illegal) 996 culture that encourages more time away from home.

DeepSeek was China’s splashy tech moment; “Are You Dead?” is the hangover. The no-frills check-in app didn’t top the charts because of brilliant engineering. It went viral because it translated demographic and social anxiety into a push notification. Beijing can scrub it from the stores and its creators can try to Labubu-fy “death.” The underlying demand it exposed for connection won’t disappear.

It’s also a warning shot for the AI industry: The next hit product likely won’t be built on summarizing our conversations. It will be one that confronts why we’re having fewer of them. In the race to make machines more human, China’s first breakout app of the year just asks if you still have a pulse.

Catherine Thorbecke is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia tech. Previously she was a tech reporter at CNN and ABC News.

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