I Hate It Here

Okay, so as we wrap up this podcast season, we’re gonna make this final episode a little different…featuring Hebba and her thoughts, and apparently zero filter! This season of I Hate It Here was all about firsts and for the season finale, Hebba makes personal!  Listen as she walks you through three of her own HR firsts, performance reviews, terminations, and picking the right system, followed by w...

Madison Montgomery is back, and in this episode, we did what Paul Downs and Meg Stalter inspired us to do…turned our 1:1 into a podcast episode. The result is a session of unfiltered chaos covering our first ATS implementation together (which is going exactly as well as you'd imagine when two non-detail-oriented people configure a system while actively recruiting on it), Summer House drama through...

55% of orgs expect AI tool experience to be their most in-demand skill within two years!  Honestly, most of us are still figuring out what to have for lunch, so the timeline feels…a little aggressive.  In this final episode of the four-part AI Readiness Gap series, presented in partnership with TriNet, DeAnn Alcantar, Learning and Development Manager at TriNet, and Kelly Pacatte, Lead HR Complianc...

Geography shouldn't be the reason you can't hire your next best person.  And yet, that’s the reality for hundreds of orgs at the moment! I sat down with Sagar Khatri, co-founder and CEO of Multiplier, who literally built a company because opening a bank account in Japan took him 12 months.  We got into all of it: why compliance is a zero-or-one problem (and why so many companies are getting it ver...

There is a lot to say about joining a startup, and I’m saying that as somebody who has been a part of four of them. Nothing prepares you for the first time, because you truly have no idea what you’re walking into! Not even the offer letter or the job description paints the full picture, so Christine Song, founder of the 5 to 9 Society and former CPO at Knix, is here to give you her expertise. We'r...

37% of HR leaders are already saying that evaluating AI skills in candidates is going to be a real challenge. Hiring has always required us to assess things that are hard to measure, but AI is moving so fast that what you're looking for this week might be completely different next month!  In this episode, I sat down with Kristin Russum, Director of Organizational Development at TriNet, to get into...

Nobody talks about their first termination the way they should, which is with a little bit of trauma, because we never forget the people we have to let go of.  In this latest episode of I Hate It Here, I sat down with Jennifer Laurie, fractional CPO and founder of Equitable HR Guild, to do exactly that!  We went all the way back to her very first termination…the nerves, the Googling "how to fire s...

Women make up nearly half the workforce, and somehow, their health is still being treated like a line item someone might cut. Make it make sense! I've been wanting to do this episode for a while, and I'm not going to pretend I made it through without getting in my feelings at least once. I sat down with Kembre Roberts and Kevin Fyock from Aon to get into why women's health keeps getting deprioriti...

You know that feeling where you've been sprinting all day and somehow your actual to-do list hasn't moved an inch?  Your inbox is feral and new work just keeps showing up like it was never not invited!  Yeaaaah, that feeling has a name, and it's called not having a system.  I say that with full love and zero judgment because I have absolutely been there!  Today I'm sitting down with Liz Clarke, st...

Fun fact: 56% of HR leaders expect AI to change how we develop and train employees. So most of us can see it coming which is cool, but the problem is that seeing the freight train and knowing how to get off the tracks are two very different things!  I sat down with Lauren Gregor, who has built and operated businesses across industries and learned most of what she knows the same way the rest of us...

HR has this fun little quirk where almost nothing is black and white, and the concept of "right" and "wrong" is rarely as simple as it sounds in a policy doc!  This season, we've talking about firsts, and the moments that fundamentally change how you see this work.  Today, I sat down with Stacey Norville, VP of People Strategy at Pyn and host of one of my favorite podcasts, Toot or Boot, to talk a...

This episode kicks off a four-part mini-series called the AI Readiness Gap, produced in partnership with TriNet, where we're cutting through the noise and getting into the actual numbers behind AI readiness in the workplace.  --- 81% of orgs are out here figuring out AI in real time.  Not planning or preparing for it. Figuring. It. Out. In. Real. Time.  Which…same, honestly. But that stat hit me b...

We talk a lot about career pivots like they're these well-planned, LinkedIn-announcement-ready moments. In reality, they are almost NEVER that! Today I'm chatting with Lauren Schneider, Head of Brand and Communications at Compt. Lauren is a recovering TV reporter, millennial mom, improv performer, and someone who has quit jobs in the messiest, most human ways possible and lived to tell about it. ...

We have more data than ever, and somehow we're still making people decisions that feel like they were made with a Magic 8-Ball and a prayer.  Make it make sense! Dashboards, engagement scores, predictive analytics…it's all there, and yet the decisions still feel completely disconnected from what the numbers are saying.  In this episode of Better Decisions, I sat down with Doug Melton, Global Chief...

If you've been in HR long enough, you know this feeling. You see something wrong, you know it's wrong, and then you look around and realize the system you work inside of wasn't actually built to let you fix it. Today I'm talking to Keisha Toussaint, founder of BCC'd HR and someone who did what most of us only think about doing: she removed the corporate muzzle entirely. We're getting into the mome...

It’s kinda wild how many people of are still dealing with compensation issues today! Most companies have a comp strategy the same way most people have a fitness plan...technically it exists, but nobody is really following it. Haris Ikram, co-founder and CEO of Candor IQ, joins me this week to talk about his founder journey and why compensation is the most misunderstood, most mishandled, and most c...

Most AI conversations I sit through are either full of hype that doesn't hold up or sooo doom-and-gloom that I leave feeling like I should update my resume and move to a cabin.  This episode is neither of those things, and that's exactly why I loved it!  I sat down with Marinus van Driel, a partner at Aon who leads their workforce transformation team, to talk about what's actually happening with A...

We have all handed an engagement score to a CEO, watched them nod confidently, say something completely incorrect about what it means, and had to just sit there smiling while dying a little inside.  Just me?  …Definitely not just me.  The number isn't always lying, but the questions we've been asking for the last decade might be! My guest today is Anne Maltese from Quantum Workplace, and she has s...

L&D gets done dirty constantly and I have been saying this for years!!!  It's the function that gets underfunded, overcomplicated, blamed for culture problems it didn't create, and somehow still expected to fix everything with a workshop and a Kirkpatrick model. Hanan Sahourieh got into all of it: why L&D functions fail before they even get started, how ego and power dynamics quietly destroy learn...

Okay so this episode is a little different, because the layers here are a lot.  Morgan T. Stanley is my guest today, and yes, that is her real name, and yes, we have laughed about it many times.  We started as peers, then somehow ended up in a manager-direct report situation, then became peers again, and NOW she has my old job! We discuss everything — how we met, what it was like when the dynamic...

Retirement planning is one of those topics that always feels confusing and overwhelming…until someone finally comes along and breaks it down in a way that makes sense.  In this episode, I'm joined by Melissa Elbert from Aon to talk about why so many retirement strategies are lowkey failing employees, the outdated assumptions driving bad benefit decisions, and what HR and finance leaders should be...

Today, we're talking about a topic that shouldn't be controversial but somehow still is, which is being authentic at work!  As most of you already know, most workplaces either treat authenticity like a performance or punish you the second you actually show up as yourself.  I'm joined by Madison Butler, who literally wrote a book about this, and we're getting into why authenticity feels so dangerou...

I'm doing something a little different today and revisiting Season 6 where I asked every single guest the same question:  “What's one thing HR folks should rethink?”  And honestly, I've been in this whole new and rethinking era lately, writing about it in the newsletter, talking about it nonstop on the pod, and it just felt like the right time to bring these answers back because, let's be real, we...

We're out here constantly hearing that Gen Z is "so different" and Millennials "just don't get it," but nobody ever stops to ask how or why they're different.  It's not because we're lazy or entitled (though I know that's everyone's favorite narrative).  It's because we looked at the leadership systems y'all built, said absolutely not, and decided to burn it all down and start over! Amanda Litman...

Why does work feel so empty right now?  Like…we followed the rules and did the hustle.  We even swallowed parts of ourselves to survive professionally, and yet, here we are grieving something we can’t quite name. I often say that the most interesting things about me have nothing to do with my career, and it’s nice when those things have time to shine, y’know? I sat down with Ayanna Kelly to dig in...