Hire Learning with Oz Rashid

Nimesh Mehta , Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Strategy Officer of National Life Group , has seen nearly every side of the business technology serves. After more than 14 years in leadership roles at Lincoln Financial Group , he has spent 18 years at National Life leading technology, strategy, customer service, and operations. We talk with Nimesh about why AI creates knowledge bu...

Aparna Chitale , Chief People Officer and Executive Vice President of Astronaut Operations at Virgin Galactic , holds a seat few HR leaders ever get, with one foot in people strategy and one in the customer business. Her career runs from first HR leader at Avaya India to a decade at Disney leading HR for the international parks. We explore how employee experience shapes the astronaut journey, why...

In this episode, we launch "Help Wanted," a new segment where our host, Oz Rashid , CEO of MSH Talent , answers anonymous questions from listeners in real time, without seeing them beforehand.  Oz works through five workplace dilemmas: a marketing manager who suspects they're training their replacement; a founder whose hands-off culture cost him a senior recruiter; a candidate turned down after e...

DeDe Halfhill , Founder and Principal Consultant of TAIOH Partners , is a retired US Air Force colonel with 25 years of service. Her career includes a tour with the US Air Force Thunderbirds , two command assignments, including a squadron in Iraq, and a role on the staff of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. We talk with DeDe about the 1948 Air Force leadership manual behin...

Michelle Link , Chief Human Resources Officer of Maximus , leads global HR for a workforce of 40,000 to 50,000 people. Her career includes HR leadership roles at Corning , Cigna , BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee , PRA Group , and ADS . At Maximus, she oversaw the hiring of 16,000 people in four weeks for the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.  We talk with Michelle about what gets sacrificed in emergen...

Toby Ramirez-Johnson , Senior Corporate Director of Human Resources of Omni Hotels & Resorts , started in the front office at the New Haven Omni in 1997. Today she sets HR strategy for more than 50 Omni properties, with a stint leading HR across the Southeast for Wyndham in between. We talk with Toby about what hospitality culture looks like at the front desk, how Predictive Index shapes inter...

Andy Martin , Chief Technology Officer of MJH Life Sciences® , spent a decade in machine learning and AI product roles at Amazon's Audible before taking on healthcare's hardest data problem. He credits his Amazon team, who were on the incident clock right alongside him, with shaping how he thinks about ownership today. He built an internal AI accelerator that turns marketers, HR associates, and op...

Jessica Kalinowski , Head of Reliability and Security of Beacon Biosignals , joins us to unpack how she took an engineering org from one or two releases a month to 130, all without a single AI adoption mandate. Her path runs through McKesson and connectRN , where she most recently served as Vice President of DevOps and Corporate IT. Jessica also makes the case that most hiring processes have grown...

Curt Kwak , Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at the Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner , spent most of his career protecting patient data and hospital systems before making an unusual jump: trading healthcare's private sector, including nearly a decade at Cambia Health Solutions and Proliance Surgeons , for a state regulator's desk.  Curt talks c...

In this episode, we talk with Laura McLand , Vice President of Human Resources at Sun Holdings , the second-largest franchise organization in the country. Sun Holdings operates 13 brands, including Burger King, Popeyes, Arby's, IHOP, Applebee's, Golden Corral, and Taco Bueno, across more than 1,250 restaurants and retail locations in 32 states. Laura's team of three fields more than 8,000 applicat...

In this episode, we talk with Philip Martoccia , Chief Operating Officer of Five-Star AudioVisual . Philip joined the company in May 2022 with zero experience in the audiovisual industry, and helped grow its revenue from $49 million to $115 million. Before audiovisual, his path ran through lifeguarding, a crisis hotline, a self-built tutoring company, and medical school.  We talk about why teams...

In this episode, we talk with Jason Reader , Chief Operating Officer of Davidson Hospitality Group . Jason began his hospitality career washing dishes at a Perkins in Pennsylvania, moving to Pyramid Hotel Group , Magna Hospitality , and Remington Hospitality before joining Davidson, where he now oversees nearly 90 hotels and resorts and more than 240 restaurants, bars, and lounges across the Unite...

In this episode, we talk with David Salama , Chief Digital Officer of Insomnia Cookies , about leading digital transformation at a brand built on nostalgia. David started his career pricing complex instruments at a hedge fund, then led the product side of the innovation lab at S&P Global. He went on to co-found FlyCleaners, raising more than $10 million and growing the business to 300 employee...

In this episode, we talk with Paul Hiltz , President and CEO of Naples Comprehensive Health (NCH) , an independent, locally governed health system in Southwest Florida. Paul spent 30 years turning around underperforming hospitals across Ohio and Kentucky before taking over NCH in 2019, where he has grown a $600M community hospital into a billion-dollar comprehensive health network with the #1 hear...

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Lilicia Bailey , Senior Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer of CommonSpirit Health , one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the country. Dr. Bailey started in psychology at Spelman, built global people functions at Cox Enterprises , and rebuilt the culture and engagement function at Belk before leaving retail for healthcare in 2016. She led p...

In this episode, we talk with Shana Sweeney , Chief Human Resources Officer of SugarAI , the AI-powered CRM company formerly known as SugarCRM. Shana has led people strategy at nearly every scale: benefits at Aetna , people operations at Google , utilities and manufacturing at Severn Trent , co-founding the health data startup Nuna, Inc. , and 11 years at SugarAI, where she rose from director of H...

In this episode of "Takes on Talent," we sit down with Marina Morgan , Founder and Principal Strategist of AIQ , a framework designed to measure how ready an organization is to adopt AI — not from a technology standpoint, but from a human and organizational one. Marina brings more than 15 years of transformation work across technology, media, and telecommunications, having sat with executive leade...

What does it take to market one of the most iconic franchises in professional sports — and hire the team to do it? We explore that question with Kristen Banks , Senior Vice President of Marketing of the Las Vegas Raiders . Kristen spent nearly eight years at the UFC , rising from Content Marketing Manager to VP of Marketing for Digital Products, before joining the Raiders to scale a brand that rel...

In this episode of "Hire Learning with Oz Rashid," we sit down with Mark Kendall Moore , Chief Security Officer of Dayton Children's Hospital , for one of the most unconventional career stories this show has featured. Before leading security across 32 locations in a pediatric hospital system, Mark spent nearly 11 years in the United States Marine Corps , including leading top-secret missions in su...

Keith Zubchevich is President and CEO of Conviva , a global leader in real-time experience analytics and one of the sharpest voices on AI in the enterprise. Keith joined the company in 2008 as its fifth employee and took over as CEO in 2021. Before Conviva, Keith helped take Riverbed public and launched a storage networking line at Cisco that did $244 million in two years. For nearly two decades h...

Ryan Lee is Founder and CEO of Trident Advisors , where he helps organizations accelerate AI-driven transformation and build intelligent workflow automation into the fabric of how they operate. He has shipped mission-critical systems at Apple Pay, Visa, and ADT, and is one of the few practitioners in the space who has led both the building and the advising sides of enterprise technology at scale....

Anna Belova , Founder and CEO of OpenWay AI, is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and serial entrepreneur. She built DEVAR into one of the most ambitious consumer augmented reality companies in the world — 15 million books sold across 75 countries in 27 languages, a no-code AR platform used by 250,000 creators and 200 universities in 180 countries, and partnerships with Google, Hasbro, McDonald's, and...

Oz Rashid sits down with Brett Fitelson , Technical Talent Acquisition Manager of Seminole Hard Rock Support Services , to explore what separates transactional recruiting from recruiting that genuinely changes lives. Brett came into staffing the way most great recruiters do: sideways. A yellow sticky note, a cold call to Robert Half, and a lot of persistence later, he discovered he was built for t...

Benny Czarny  is CEO and Founder of  OPSWAT , a cybersecurity company he bootstrapped from a San Francisco apartment over 20 years ago. It now employs over a thousand people and protects critical infrastructure across 80+ countries. He is also the author of “Cybersecurity Upside Down” and co-producer of the cybersecurity docuseries "Into the Breach." We dive into Benny’s founder philosop...

In this episode, we sit down with Yvette Martinez-Rea , Chief Operating Officer of Yext , a SaaS platform powering digital presence for some of the biggest brands in the world. Yvette brings more than two decades of operating experience across tech, gaming, media, and beauty — including senior leadership roles at Verizon , ESL Gaming North America , Yahoo , United Online , and Violet Grey . Yvette...