HR Mixtape

Most workplace advice assumes you can leave. Quit, find a better boss, start over. For plenty of people that option sits behind a student loan or a tight job market, and the advice has nothing left to offer them. Lynnae Brown, Consultant and Strategist at Lynnae Brown LLC, spent more than a decade training and managing people in mental health recovery. She built her work navigation approach during...

Most leaders who lose their edge still work hard. They log 60-hour weeks and sit through back-to-back meetings, and somewhere in there the judgment their job depends on starts wearing down. Jared Quoyeser, co-founder and managing partner of the Louisiana Impact Fund, spent more than 20 years at Intel and is chair of Louisiana's largest private employer. His book, The Flow Multiplier, lays out the...

Plenty of managers think leadership means carrying everything. They answer every question and fix every problem, then wonder why nobody on the team grows. Zach Arend, founder and leadership coach at Create Purpose, is a two-time state champion saddle bronc rider who spent nine years rising to VP of sales at a $300 million logistics company. Then he got demoted at 34, and that demotion is where his...

Most companies know turnover is expensive. Plenty of them still answer it with a pizza party on Friday and call that culture. Dr. Sharon Grossman, Retention Strategist at Turnkey Retention Solutions, spent years as a psychologist coaching people out of burnout before she turned to the problem companies would pay to fix. She wrote Don't Buy Their Lunch, Buy Their Loyalty and has taken the idea to t...

Every HR leader is being told to adopt AI faster than they can evaluate it. The harder question isn't whether to use it. It's whether the company behind it can be trusted with the most sensitive data your organization has. Toby Williams, president and CEO of Paylocity, joined the company as CFO in 2017 and has led it through the busiest product launch stretch in company history, culminating in the...

Pay used to decide who took the job. Now the first question most candidates ask is whether they can work from home, and companies still writing postings around salary alone are losing candidates before anyone even applies. Myla Ramos, co-founder and CEO of SearchPros, built the company from a local Sacramento staffing firm into a nearly $175 million global managed service provider. She cut her com...

HR asks for a new system, more headcount, a bigger training budget. Finance says no. The instinct is to assume the idea wasn't good enough. John Sansoucie, Founder and CEO at CogNet, spent years as a CFO inside HR service companies and PEOs before he built his own business process outsourcing company, so he has sat on both sides of that budget table. In this episode, he covers: Why HR requests get...

Leave of absence looks like paperwork until you're the one holding it. A request lands, and you're reading federal, state, local, and company policy against each other while an employee waits on an answer during the worst week of their year. Rachel Wyngaard, Senior Product Manager at Mitratech, worked in HR, talent acquisition, and recruiting before moving into product. She now leads the build and...

Retention sits near the top of almost every HR priority list. The main tool most organizations use to understand it is a conversation with someone who has already quit. Jim Link is the Chief Human Resources Officer at SHRM, the largest HR professional association in the world with more than 340,000 members. Before SHRM, he spent three decades in HR at GE, Porsche, and Randstad, where he held full...

A little less than half of workers now use AI regularly on the job. Of that group, 44% admit the output looks finished on the surface and holds nothing underneath. SHRM has a name for it: work slop. Dr. James Atkinson is VP of Thought Leadership at SHRM, where he leads the research teams behind that finding. He spent nine years at Gartner, finishing as Managing Vice President of Data Products for...

Most HR teams have already run their AI experiments. A pilot here, a policy draft there. Turning that scattered activity into something people actually use on a Tuesday is a completely different problem. In this episode: Why the biggest available gains from AI now come from teams working with it together, not individuals getting better at prompting How to pick a first project by finding the rock i...

Most HR professionals treat the annual retirement plan review like a status update. The advisor presents, the team nods, and everyone gets back to the work they actually understand. The plan keeps running. Probably. Andrew Farrell, Retirement Plan Advisor at North County Wealth, has spent 20 years working with businesses on plan design, compliance, and the advisor relationship. He's watched the sa...

Most founders treat culture as a launch-phase item: define the values, hire people who believe in the mission, and trust that early momentum carries it forward. It does, for a while. But as the team grows, the distance between the CEO and the day-to-day experience of employees widens quietly, and the gap between what's on the website and what employees actually live starts to show. Jeannie Kidera,...

Revenue growth is the metric every business celebrates. Record quarters become press releases, and the top line becomes a proxy for health. But when the revenue line on a P&L keeps climbing while the profit line doesn't, growth stops being a sign of success and starts functioning as a cover story. Ben Hansen, CEO of Profit Doctor and founder of an 8-figure staffing firm, built a team of over 100 e...

Most CHROs have a fraud problem they didn't sign up for. Deepfakes in video interviews. Synthetic IDs at the application stage. AI-generated credentials that pass every automated screen. Only 31% of CHROs say they're confident in their ability to prevent hiring fraud, and the technology making it easier gets more sophisticated every quarter. Nik Daruwala, Vice President of Sales at Checkr, has spe...

When performance problems show up at work, most organizations respond by adding something: a new policy, more training, another initiative. But those problems usually aren't what they look like. What gets logged as a performance issue is often a nervous system response to culture, and no policy fixes a nervous system. Shenandoah Chefalo, Trauma Informed Systems Change Consultant at Chefalo Consult...

Most change initiatives fail not because the strategy was wrong but because the communication didn't move anyone. HR leaders deliver their message, check the box, and wonder why nothing shifted. The problem almost never lives in the data. It lives in the absence of story. Mary Czarnecki, Brand Messaging Consultant at Mary Czarnecki LLC, spent more than two decades in marketing and strategy at John...

Most organizations assume they have resilient teams. What they actually have, in a lot of cases, are teams that have gotten good at tolerating hard things. The two aren't the same, and the gap becomes visible the moment something real changes. Aaron Golub, founder of Aaron Golub Consulting, made history as the first legally blind Division I athlete to play in a Division I game, serving as team cap...

Most organizations solve the wrong problem when they go global. They get the infrastructure right, find the talent, and figure out the cost model. Then the offshore team quietly drifts from the core org, and nobody quite knows why. Ingo Piroth, Chief Revenue Officer at Emapta, has spent 30 years in global delivery and workforce transformation working with enterprise clients across multiple contine...

In most industries, culture lives in your annual engagement survey. In hospitality, it walks out to the dining room every single night. It shows up in how your server handles a difficult table, in the energy at the host stand, and in whether your team feels taken care of or just managed. Donna Giarratana, Director of Human Resources at Baldi Management Group and founder of MoxeeHR, LLC, has built...

Most organizations treat meetings as the default answer to everything, but that's costing you more than you think. Rebecca Hinds, Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, researcher, and author of YOUR BEST MEETING EVER, brings a product design mindset to the most expensive form of collaboration in your org. She shares how to spot meeting dysfunction, use AI to audit your calendar, and make intenti...

Most high performers don't get passed over because of what they know. They get passed over because of how they lead. In this episode, Dr. Bushra Khan makes the case that emotional intelligence isn't a soft skill, it's the strategic operating system every leader needs right now, especially as AI reshapes what work looks like. In this conversation, she breaks down: Why 'be more strategic' on a perfo...

What does it really take to hire and retain people across a workforce that's part office, part shop floor? Jason Lerner, HR Director at Groundwater Treatment and Technology, has spent his career doing exactly that. He's grown his current company from fewer than 300 employees to more than 500 across six states, and he's cracked the code on attracting, developing, and keeping talent in grey industri...

Too many people treat resilience like a switch: either you have it or you don't. But what if the real way to build it is by showing up for hard things again and again, even in your off-hours? In this episode, fitness and wellness coach Nicole Zapoli draws a direct line from the weight room to the workplace, sharing how the discomfort you push through in a tough workout is the same mental muscle yo...

Your meetings are costing you more than you think. Between time lost to bad notes, missed context between conversations, and documents that take days instead of minutes, the hidden tax of poor meeting intelligence adds up fast. Artem Koren, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Sembly AI, is building the fix. His team started in 2019, well before AI was a buzzword, with one simple idea: if techn...