Don't Waste the Chaos

Calling someone a 1099 contractor does not make them one. The IRS does not care what you wrote on the agreement, it cares about who carries the control. If your "contractor" works 40 hours a week, only for you, on your schedule, with your tools, you may have an employee you're not paying taxes on. The good news is it's fixable, and it can be fixed calmly. In this episode, Kerri...

Do you have to post the salary range on a job posting? It depends entirely on where the work can be done, not where your company sits. One remote listing can put you under a dozen different state rules at the same time. In this episode, Kerri walks through: Why there is no federal law requiring pay on job postings (and why that doesn't end the conversation) The states that require the range i...

Everyone wants to talk about culture. Almost nobody wants to answer the plain question: are you compliant? This is the first episode in an eight-part series on HR compliance without an attorney, built around a six-question self-check where every "no" is a gap.  In this episode, Kerri walks through: Why you need to know your headcount, and the thresholds that quietly switch laws on (15, 2...

88% of HR leaders say their organization still hasn't gotten real business value out of AI. It isn't the tools. It's that nobody handed them a plan. This finale of the AI Ready HR series turns all 11 episodes into a 90-day sequence you can run. In this episode, Kerri walks through: Why an AI roadmap beats a tool purchase (only 22% of workers say their company has shared a clear AI p...

I use AI every single day, so if anyone's going to tell you where to stop with it, it should be me. The more you automate in HR and leadership, the more the human parts of the job have to get stronger, not weaker. In this episode, Kerri walks through: The 5 things AI genuinely cannot do in HR and leadership: judgment in the gray space, trust and confidentiality, coaching and hard conversation...

Somebody at your company is already making decisions about AI, and there's a good chance HR isn't in the room. Kerri Roberts breaks down why that's a costly mistake and exactly how HR earns a seat at the table, even without a big title. In this episode, Kerri walks through: Why 52% of organizations don't involve HR in their AI strategy at all (SHRM, 2026) The real cost of that...

AI fluency is about to be as common as knowing how to use email. It's not a specialist role you hire for, it's a baseline skill every person in your business needs, and the training costs far less than you think. The problem isn't that your people aren't using AI. They already are. The problem is that nobody has told them what's allowed, what's off limits, and who to...

The job title on your org chart is not the job. LinkedIn says 70% of the skills your people use today will change by 2030, and AI is pulling tasks out of every role every month. If you're planning your workforce around titles and job descriptions you haven't updated in years, you're planning around a document that was already wrong.  In this episode, Kerri walks through: Why 9.9 out...

No policy doesn't mean no AI. It just means you don't know where it's happening. Your team is already using AI, probably on personal accounts, and most of them aren't telling you about it. AI governance sounds like a Fortune 500 word, but at a 30-person company it's four things you can put in place this month.  In this episode, Kerri walks through: What governance actually...

You've heard of FOMO. This is FOBO: the fear of becoming obsolete. Add technostress, the exhaustion of a new tool every week, and you get employees who either refuse to touch AI or use it quietly on personal accounts and never tell you. Your AI rollout doesn't stall because the tool is wrong. It stalls because nobody addressed the humans. In this episode, Kerri walks through: What techno...

AI is coming for the clerical layer of management, not the leadership layer. Approving PTO, copying last year's review template, building the schedule, chasing status updates - that's the half of the job that's going away, and honestly, good. What's left is the job managers were actually hired to do, and the job most of them were never trained to do. In this episode, Kerri walk...

Culture doesn't scale a company - systems do. Kristin Oja built STAT Wellness from one location into a multi-state operation, and in this episode she's honest about what actually made it work: the people systems under the growth, not a bigger brand or budget. In this episode, Kerri walks through: Framing business growth in stages - childhood, adolescence, young adulthood - and what &quot...

A policy isn't permission - it's protection. Your team is already using AI; the only question is whether you've told them the rules. Someone may be pasting compensation data or a Social Security number into a chatbot right now, with no guardrails at all. In this episode, Kerri walks through: Why 40% of employees already use AI at work, and only ~30% of companies have any guidelines...

Where do you start with AI in HR? Not with everything — that's how implementation goes sideways. In this solo episode, Kerri Roberts gives you the five specific HR tasks to automate first, a human checkpoint for each one, and the three things that should never be handed to AI no matter how far along you get. In this episode, you'll learn: Resume screening — load minimum qualifications in...

Is your HR function actually ready for AI — or are you about to pour a powerful tool into a broken foundation? In this solo episode, Kerri Roberts kicks off a new 12-part series on AI and HR with the most important question first: not whether you should use AI, but how ready your organization is to use it well. In this episode, you'll learn: The five-question HR AI readiness assessment — docu...

HR systems and tech are the last piece of the HR foundation — and if you have the wrong tools, or the right tools you're not using, none of it is working for you. In this solo episode — the finale of the 14-part HR foundation series — Kerri Roberts walks through how to audit your current tech stack, what you actually need at each stage of your business, and the five SOPs every small business...

Culture is the most talked about and least understood concept in business — and Kerri Roberts doesn't love talking about it, because too many organizations want to start there before they've built anything underneath it. In this solo episode, she gets into what culture actually is, the three things that kill it, what Google's Project Aristotle found about healthy teams, and four pra...

Leadership development for small businesses is the most consistently skipped investment Kerri Roberts sees — and it's also the one that causes the most HR chaos. In this solo episode, she breaks down why the individual contributor-to-manager transition is the hardest transition in business, the six core skills every manager needs right now, and how to build a four-level leadership development...

Reactive hiring creates desperate hiring, and desperate hiring creates bad hiring decisions. Most small businesses only hire when they're already drowning - the worst possible time to hire well. Workforce planning is the system that gets you ahead of it. In this episode, Kerri walks through: Why hiring is what you do, but workforce planning is how you decide whether, when, and what role you a...

"We don't have a lot of turnover" is a feeling, not data - and feelings aren't a strategy. If you can't say when your people left or why, you're making decisions blind. In this episode, Kerri walks through:  • The five categories of HR metrics every business should track: retention, hiring, engagement/absenteeism, performance, and compensation  • Time-to-turnover: how...

You're not failing your employees because you can't offer the big, comprehensive benefits package. People leave six-figure jobs for smaller employers all the time - because they stay for stability, trust, respect, and flexibility, not the package. In this episode, Kerri walks through:  • The five categories of benefits (foundational, voluntary, lifestyle, wellness, cultural) - and why mo...

Performance management isn't about reviews — it's about clarity. If your team is confused, resentful, or underperforming, it's an expectations problem, not a motivation problem. Most employees aren't failing to meet the standard; they just don't know what the standard is.   In this episode, Kerri walks through: • The three markers every role needs — what good, great, and &...

One employee asks for time off and you say yes. Another asks three weeks later and you say no. Neither of you realizes you just created a discrimination claim. In Part 6 of the HR Foundations series, Kerri breaks down leave management — the operational area where she sees the most lawsuits. Leave management isn't the flashiest HR topic, but it's where Kerri sees the most lawsuits land on...

Are your salaried employees actually classified correctly under federal law — or are you sitting on overtime liability without knowing it? Most small business owners don't realize there's a three-part exemption test under the Fair Labor Standards Act that every salaried role has to pass. In Episode 5 of the 13 HR Foundations series, Kerri Roberts walks through classification, pay equity,...

Most small and mid-sized businesses don't have an employee handbook problem - they have a "we don't have a policy for that" problem. Scattered Google Drive docs, a handbook from 2017, three managers making three different calls on the same issue. That's how inconsistency claims and wrongful termination exposure start. In Episode 4 of the HR Foundations series, Kerri Robert...