Axios C-Suite: What Jim learned for the week of June 13

🥸 Unreal job candidates ... Here's one that was new to me: Our HR head told me this week that we weren't posting a high-level job publicly. The reason? We're getting slammed by bots posing convincingly as human applicants. At least one advanced through a few screens.

Turns out, this is happening everywhere. Gartner thinks that a quarter of all candidate profiles could be fake by 2028.

Why this matters to CEOs: Um, call your HR head. This is weird shit.

👽 More weirdness, folks: KPMG pulled a report on how AI is being used by businesses. The reason for taking it down: It exaggerated biz AI adoption. The reason it did that: AI hallucinations.

☀️ Great news: A lot more Americans are getting richer. Yes, polls show they don't feel it — but, empirically, they are.

This stat, based on data compiled by Stephen J. Rose and Scott Winship for the American Enterprise Institute, undercuts the popular "shrinking middle class" narrative: The upper middle class grew to 31% — up from 10% in 1979.

"Rather than the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, rich and poor alike grew richer — albeit at much different rates," they wrote in the liberal opinion pages of The New York Times.

Yes, the gap between rich and poor grew lots larger. But lots of people left the middle class — by moving up.

Adapted from an AEI report; Chart: Axios Visuals

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