Consumer Confidence Dips, Jobs Steady, Handbooks Hacked, AI Writing is Meh

Hey everybody, it's Gene Marks, and welcome to this week's episode of the Paychex THRIVE Week in Review. This is where we take a few items of news that impacts your small business and my small business, and we talk a little bit about it and how it impacts our businesses.

Now listen, the big item in the news that we all know is the tax and spending bill, and how all of this is going to affect our small businesses. While that is still in process right now, I’m not going to talk about it this week. Please know we will be diving deeply into it not only on episodes of the Week in Review going forward, but also on other episodes of the THRIVE podcast and Paychex and I will be doing a special webinar at the end of July where we will have tax experts involved where we will dig deeply into how the implications of that tax bill will impact your business and mine.

So, not ignoring it by any stretch, but we’re waiting until all the things get finalized so we can dig deeper into it. In the meantime, let’s dig into three items from the news that impacts your business and mine.

The first item comes from a report in the Wall Street Journal reporting on the Consumer Confidence Index from The Conference Board. The Conference Board is an organization where a lot of the people, media, and economists look for the Consumer Confidence Index. They do a survey every month.

Bad news: Consumer confidence declined in June. According to the report, the index decreased to 93 in June, which was a surprise to many analysts who were expecting an increase. Consumers are still worried about tariffs and inflation, according to an economist from The Conference Board even after attempts at de-escalation.

So, consumer confidence drops in June, and again, this is closely watched monitor and, also, indicative of a continuing drop in consumer confidence over the past few months. Yes, consumers are worried about tariffs, they’re worried about inflation. They are giving pause to their purchases potentially, and as business owners we need to be very much aware of that.

I don’t care if you’re a B2C company or a B2B company, if a consumer stops spending that impacts us all. So, keep an eye on consumer confidence, and hopefully, that is not too bad a sign for the economy as we head into the summer.

I do have good news though. Paychex has released their monthly Small Business Employment Watch Report, and the numbers are pretty good. Their headline says that U.S. small business employment held steady through the first half of 2025. Let me read you some details.

The small business labor market has remained stable with minimal changes observed through the first half of 2025, according to the report. The pace of job growth in U.S. businesses with fewer than 50 employees has fluctuated less than half a percentage point over the past six months. Hourly earnings themselves have continued to grow at a trend of about 2.79%t, which is below the 3% trend that we are hoping to see. Remember, inflation ranges right now at around 2.5 to 3%. So, earnings growth is still keeping up with inflation.

John Gibson, Paychex president and CEO, said that “Regardless of an uncertain and dynamic macro environment, the small business labor market remains stable and fundamentally healthy.”

He also said, “We're seeing many organizations take a more measured approach to strategic decision making, including hiring, as business owners wait for greater clarity on macro issues such as tariffs, inflation and taxes. This wait-and-see approach is reflected in our small business jobs data through the first half of the year, which has shown modest month-to-month movement since January.”

So, even though consumer confidence is down, that has been not so great news. Small business employment has remained steady in the first half of 2025. Thanks according to Paychex's Small Business Employment Watch.

All right, let me give you another piece of interesting news that came from the website JD Supra. It's J-D-S-U-P-R-A dot com. They are giving warning to employers about their employee handbooks because they are becoming a tool for cybersecurity threats and hackers. Can you believe this?

Let me explain to you how this is working according to JD Supra. Cyber criminals are obtaining copies of real or fake employee handbooks and distributing them by email, spoofing a legitimate employer's email address so that the mail and its attachment appear authentic. So, imagine your employees are receiving a copy of their employee handbook, which seems real and is coming from a spoofed email address or website, so that seems real, as well. The email then asks the employees to scan a QR code which is described as a way to acknowledge receipt of the handbook. Fair enough. That's not an uncommon thing to do.

However, when it's scanned, the QR code directs the recipient to a malicious website that impersonates a legitimate corporate login portal like a Microsoft 365 site or even your own site, as well, and then they ask for the employee's credentials to log in. And once the employee gives their credentials, those credentials are stolen and used by the hackers to access your email or corporate network system.

So, that's an issue. Be aware and be on alert that the new spoofing campaign is using employee handbooks to trick your employees into giving away their corporate credentials to get access to your corporate networks and email systems.

How do you protect yourself against this? Training is the answer. If I know about this, now you know about it. It's important that your employees know about it, too. So, make sure your IT firms are providing training. Consider subscribing to a lot of really good cybersecurity prevention software platforms that provide spoofing emails to your employees to try and trick them into doing stuff like this or downloading attachments or clicking on malicious sites and then reporting back to you and them when they've been fooled so they can learn from the mistake without any harm being done.

But again, be aware of employee handbooks.

Finally, and our fourth item of news has to come from LinkedIn. I wanted to just mention this quickly because I thought it would be interesting to all of us that use LinkedIn. According to LinkedIn CEO, their AI writing assistant is not as popular as it was expected. This is from CEO Ryan Roslansky of LinkedIn.

He says, “Writing by AI is not as popular as I thought it would be,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg.

When asked why he argued that the barrier is much higher to posting on LinkedIn because this is your resume online. Plus, users can face real backlash if they post something that's too obviously generated by AI. Interesting.

What it tells me is that first of all as humans we can detect when things are AI generated or not. We can see a faker when it's a faker and apparently so can people on LinkedIn. And when you're on LinkedIn, whether you're an employee looking for a job, an employer posting a job, or maybe you're just having interactions, comments, posts on the platform itself, using AI to write this stuff – it's an easy way to impact your credibility if other users sense that you're using AI to write this kind of stuff.

LinkedIn is a platform where transparency and honesty and being real is really, really important, and using AI is not something that you would really want to be doing that often on this platform.

And, by the way, this is not just me. This is being reported by the CEO of LinkedIn who is saying that using AI on the platform is not as popular as they would have thought.

My name is Gene Marks, and you have been watching and or listening to this week's episode of the Paychex THRIVE Week in Review. Again, we are going to be updating you on all the new tax legislation very, very soon.

If you want some advice or tips or help in running your business, sign up for our Paychex THRIVE newsletter. Go to paychex.com/thrive. Thank you so much for watching or listening and we look forward to seeing you again next week with more news that will impact your business. Take care.

Do you have a topic or a guest you’d like to hear on THRIVE. Visit payx.me/thrivetopics and send us your ideas or matters of interest. Also, if your business is looking to simplify your HR, payroll, benefits or insurance services, see how Paychex can help. Visit the resource hub at paychex.com/worx. That’s W-O-R-X. Paychex can help manage those complexities while you focus on all the ways you want your business to thrive.

I'm your host, Gene Marks, and thanks for joining us.

This podcast is property of Paychex, Incorporated, 2025. All rights reserved.

Other resources

• Updates on the Tax and Spending Bill

Paychex Small Business Employment Watch