The HR Huddle

After a month on the road and eight industry events, Stacey Harris and Cliff Stevenson are back with plenty to spill. They share takeaways from Workday Rising, HR Tech, Oracle AI World, Dayforce, UKG, Unit4, CodeSignal, and People Analytics World. The big themes are a renewed focus on compliance, Workday’s expanding native payroll, Dayforce’s push into collaborative AI and customer-built bots, and...

Recorded live at Cornerstone Connect in Chicago, Cliff Stevenson sits down with Anna Goldberg, VP of AI Product at Cornerstone, to talk about how HR is moving past “AI for AI’s sake” toward outcomes that matter to the business. Anna explains how AI is speeding up skills work that once took months, and how that foundation opens the door to agents built around outcomes, from faster onboarding in hea...

What happens after the company you built doesn’t need you anymore? In this episode of The Pivot Effect, Teri Zipper and Susan Richards sit down with Diane Weaver, COO at Baryons and a tech founder. Diane is a fifth-generation entrepreneur and educator who grew up working on her family’s farm and being chased by paparazzi. Her grandfather was a television pioneer who taught her that technology shou...

Episode description In this special edition of HR We Have a Problem, recorded live at HR Tech, Cliff Stevenson and Stacey Harris sat down with Cornerstone’s Chief Marketing Officer Mini Peiris and Guna Jayaraman, who leads product strategy and technology. They recorded from the top of Cornerstone’s double-decker booth, and Cornerstone used the conversation to break news on two launches. The first...

Throwback Thursday: We’re revisiting one of our favorite conversations from HR, We Have a Problem. Teri Zipper talks with Melissa Reeve, creator of the Hyper-Adaptive Model and author of Hyper-Adaptive: Rewiring the Enterprise to Become AI Native, about why successful AI integration means spending 70% of the effort on people and only 30% on technology. They discuss how jobs will be deconstructed a...

Recorded on the road, between hurricanes and a packed conference schedule, this quick-turnaround episode has Stacey Harris and Cliff Stevenson sharing the HR tech stories everyone will be talking about at HR Tech next week. Stacey calls in from Workday Rising with the latest on Sana, the new Sana Agent Builder, agent-to-agent collaboration, and ambient agents. The two also recap Cornerstone Connec...

What happens when the job you build to solve a problem turns into your calling? On this episode of The Pivot Effect, Teri Zipper and Susan Richards talk with Denise Melton, pastoral counselor and Executive Director of Cumberland Children's House of Hope and the Threads of Hope Thrift Store.  Denise started out managing medical, dental, and legal offices. Then she turned her basement into a ch...

HR tech conference season is here, and this week's tea is piping hot. Stacey Harris and Cliff Stevenson of Sapient Insights Group cover the deals, the debates, and what it all means for your organization.  They start with a big round of deal news. Phoenix Education Partners agrees to acquire Fuel50. BoomerangHR raised $12.7M for its solution that tracks and manages former employees. Spott rai...

In this special episode of HR We Have a Problem, Cliff Stevenson steps out of the studio and takes you to NAPEO 2026 in Marco Island, Florida, the annual conference of the National Association of Professional Employer Organizations. There's no single guest this time, just unfiltered hallway and show-floor conversations with the people building, running and partnering with PEOs.    ...

Stacey Harris and Cliff Stevenson are back with more tea on the biggest HR tech stories of the last two weeks.  From a major AI security scare to a $166M investment shakeup, this episode covers a lot of ground on where the HR tech market (and the money) is heading.  In this episode:  Salesforce leads a $166M investment in HiBob, signaling HiBob’s shift from an HR suite provider...

On this episode of The Pivot Effect, hosts Teri Zipper and Susan Richards sit down with Peter Novak, founder and CEO of Strictly Speaking Group, for a conversation that spans seven years in a Jesuit seminary, a rare doctorate in dramaturgy, twenty-two years teaching at the University of San Francisco, and a second career coaching some of the world's biggest corporations on high-stakes communicatio...

Disengagement and burnout have barely budged in decades — Gallup still puts disengagement at 80%+. In this episode, host Cliff Stevenson sits down with mental fitness coach Todd Bertsch to talk about the early warning signs of burnout, why lasting change usually starts with an interruption rather than a pep talk, and a simple mindset shift — from "I have to" to "I get to" — that applies to everyth...

In this episode, Stacey and Cliff remember Dolly Parton and her legacy as a philanthropist and advocate of workers’ rights and pay equity.   In business news: Checkr acquires Truv, Lattice acquires Pando, and Adam Weber launches Helm. Silver Lake reportedly in talks to take Workday private in a $43B deal. Mobley v. Workday hiring discrimination case moves forward with broader scope. Work...

Hosts Stacey Harris, Sapient’s chief research officer and managing partner, and Cliff Stevenson director of research and principal analyst, break down the week's biggest HR Tech news.  In this episode:  A preview of Sapient Insights Group's research heading into HR Tech 2026 (Oct 19–24), plus a security scare from this week's research roundtables.  Deel pushes past $1.5B i...

On this episode of The Pivot Effect, part of Sapient Insights Group's HR Huddle series, hosts Teri Zipper and Susan Richards sit down with Summer Orellano, who now leads sales at Sapient, to talk about her winding career journey from managing Airbnbs in Florida, to joining Sapient as a contract office administrator, to stepping into a sales leadership role while seven months pregnant with her thir...

This week on Spilling the Tea on HR Tech, Stacey Harris and Cliff Stevenson break down a busy news cycle spanning leadership moves in HR tech, emerging AI governance issues, and workforce trends to watch.  In this episode:  People on the move: SAP SuccessFactors shakes up leadership as part of its AI-focused reorg, Ramco elevates Sandesh Balaji to ...

Cliff Stevenson sits down with Jeff Smith, CEO of 15Five, to talk AI, performance management, and what it really takes to build trust with employees in the age of automation. 🎙️  In this episode of HR We Have a Problem: 15Five's new Work Context connecting Slack, Teams, Salesforce & GitHub to performance data ️ AI-assisted reviews that turn real wo...

Stacey Harris and Cliff Stevenson break down a scorching week of HR tech news. (Literally it's over 90 degrees everywhere.)    On the M&A front, they dig into the Engagedly and Energage merger and what it means for talent management data and discuss a new strategic partnership between HiBob and    SLICE ...

After years climbing the corporate ladder including stints at Fortune 100 companies and multiple runs in the C-suite as a Chief Marketing Officer Jenn Ravalli hit a wall. No matter how much she achieved, there was no finish line. So, she made the leap: she left it all behind to found Maverick Meridian, a go-to-market strategy firm for companies that dare to be different. ...

Payroll data isn't just a compliance checkbox — it's one of the most valuable, real-time data sets an organization has. This week, we talk about why payroll data (unlike predictive data) reflects what's actually happening in your organization, and why that makes it a goldmine for AI-powered payroll applications — a theme that came up again and again during a recent UKG customer meeting. We also di...

The Future of HR Tech: Trust, Transparency, and Responsible AI AI is changing how HR teams recruit, evaluate, and build trust with candidates — but is the technology keeping up with the ethics? In this episode, we sit down with Daniel Joplin, Chief AI Officer, to unpack what responsible AI actually looks like in practice. Daniel walks us through the real challenges organizations face when adopting...

In this episode of Spilling the Tea on HR Tech, Stacey Harris & Cliff Stevenson dig into the market shifts reshaping how organizations buy, build, and use HR technology. From AI-first HRMS platforms launched by former Workday leaders to global expansion plays from companies like PrismHR, the competitive landscape is moving fast — and the stakes for HR leaders have never been higher. We cover what'...

In this episode of The Pivot Effect, hosts Teri Zipper and Susan Richards welcome guest Amy Gerhartz, Founder & Lead Coach of A Higher Way Of Living, as they talk through what it actually looks like to leave a career you built from scratch - and why the hardest part of starting over is often convincing yourself you belong in the new space. Amy highlights the specific fears that came up when she tr...

In this episode of Spilling the Tea on HR Tech, Stacey Harris and Cliff Stevenson cover several notable moves in the HR tech market, including Betterworks acquiring Rypple and Rod Johnson joining UKG as Chief Revenue Officer, with broader observations about where the performance management and frontline worker markets are heading. The conversation turns to pricing pressure across the industry, wit...

In this episode of HR, We Have a Problem, Cliff Stenvenson and guest Sudeep Cherian, VP Product Marketing at Cornerstone dig into what it actually means to bring agentic AI into the workforce technology stack. Sudeep walks through how Cornerstone's updated platform architecture layers a context graph and pre-built agents on top of the learning, talent, and skills infrastructure customers already u...