Small Talk Window

My guest for this episode of the podcast is Ben Mones, founder and CEO of Fama. After he and I got past discussing what we feed our young children for breakfast, we left the virtual greenroom and started recording in earnest. Bad actors can do bad things while working at your company. That’s why hiring can’t just be about hiring people who can do the job. We need to hire people who will get the work done in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the organization once they join or even after they leave. Online screening can reveal deep behavioral intelligence about candidates like their Big 5 Traits without candidates having to do anything other than consent. And, it can also identify signs of misconduct in their online content, helping protect against things like violence, intolerance, and fraud -- much later, well past the time of hire. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ben, and so will you.

Epignosis CEO Nikhil Arora has been a guest on the podcast previously. In that episode, we discussed the curious and undeniable benefits of unlearning when it comes to fostering an organization's learning culture. As for this episode, it's interesting. Having a growth mindset is important to a business and to individual contributors in the workforce. The most visceral objectives for each differ, of course. An employer needs to focus on business outcomes: increasing profits, improving EBITDA, ensuring its own perpetuity very much as a “going concern,” in the parlance of accounting. Meanwhile, employees need to invest in their professional development to maximize their value to the organization. The great thing about all this is that the latter’s improvement fuels the former’s success. What’s more, high-performing employees instinctually understand this individual imperative and the benefit it brings to the whole. Nikhil and I delve into how uncertainty in the growth mindset leads to better business outcomes, and faster. It's about creating a safe place for failure, one of life's greatest teachers.

My guest for this episode of the podcast is Summer Delaney, who got her start in her career working for the iconic Katie Couric. Later, Summer founded CollabWORK, where she is CEO. Summer saw where recruiting had been for years and, with CollabWORK, disrupted things a bit. In many respects, recruiting today is still where it's been for a long time: with some evolution along the way, yes, a nevertheless elaborate system designed to approach finding talent with the conveniences of the online environment. In other words, it's been essentially just as recruiters approached it in the paleolithic era -- just kidding, the era predating the Internet. CollabWORK will integrate with an applicant tracking system. It plugs easily into the existing reality of recruiting today. At the same time, through community-powered hiring, CollabWORK reaches top talent in a way that other solutions won't. Through community-powered hiring, a hiring organization using CollabWORK can go to that coveted passive talent where they already spend their days -- behind the walled gardens of specialized online professional communities such as Slack and others. For more context, and to understand the ethos behind community-powered hiring, listen to my conversation with Summer. And, be sure to read this Open View Report on the topic.

For this episode of "Small Talk Window," my guest is John Hansen, CEO and chairman of Atana. We talked about Atana's jam: transforming workplace learning into a tool for cultural and business impact. A long-time entrepreneur with an uber-interesting career in leading companies and other organizations in high technology and abutting areas, John tells me Atana is his "swan song," a notable final accomplishment ahead of retirement. Committed to creating workplaces where employees feel respected, engaged, and safe, he really wants to leave an impact on learning in the world of work. And I cannot help but believe that he will. Atana’s approach reimagines learning and development (L&D) as a strategic asset—delivering engaging, impactful content while uncovering employee insights to inform leadership decisions. John explains it much better than I do. Listen to this episode and find out for yourself. To say John's enthusiasm for learning is infectious is a wild understatement.

My guest for this episode of "Small Talk Window" is Nikhil Arora, CEO of Epignosis. A learning technology company, Epignosis is known best for TalentLMS. So, logically, Nikhil and I decided to talk about unlearning, instead.... Wait. It makes sense. Really, it does. You'd think that unlearning would be the opposite of learning. And, by definition, it is. But unlearning is, in fact, a part of learning — boom, there's that logic.... In the world of work, we must get good at unlearning as we embark upon upskilling and reskilling ourselves. When we unlearn, we dispense with adhering to ways we’ve always done things. In this way, unlearning enables us to get better at doing these same things in better ways. Unlearning also means to let go of the things we’ve learned and become very good at, but that may no longer be needed — something we all need to do as artificial intelligence continues to enter the workplace. Nikhil shares many insights related to all this during the 12 minutes we captured. By unlearning, we clear the mental white space to learn entirely new things to create future value, thus future-proofing our own livelihood as we enrich the lifeblood of organizational competitiveness.

From here on out, we're switching to the first person when it comes to descriptions here of the latest episodes of "Small Talk Window." It's more fun this way. Prompted by the seemingly breakneck pace of artificial intelligence's evolution, I found myself recently thinking anew about Robot Dreams, a compilation of short stories by the famous science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov. I must've still been in high school when I read that book. How the final novelette in that collection is a profound mid-20th century take on how we may eventually relate to AI is unrelated to this episode of the podcast, which features guest Mike Stafiej, CEO of ERIN, an employee referral and internal mobility platform. What's funny, however, is that Lucy, my dog sleeping behind the microphone, was having what seemed like a dream during the recording. Mike and I were so far down a rabbit hole on the topic of how to keep humans in hiring in the face of AI as we barrel into the future of work, that we both wondered whether Lucy's dream was a nightmare about AI. Of course it wasn't. Knowing Lucy, I suspect she was dreaming about a squirrel getting away. You'll hear Lucy dreaming around midway through this episode. And please do listen to this 16-minute conversation with Mike. With ERIN, he has a front-row seat to AI's impact on recruiting today and where things may go. (Hint: the humans in hiring are here to stay -- no, really.)

Today marks the announcement of an agreement to merge between The Cloud Connectors, an integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) in enterprise HR technology, and Joynd, a provider of HR technology integration solutions. In an on-demand webinar, members of TCC's and Joynd's leadership explain the merger's rationale and many benefits. And the news makes today's episode of "Small Talk Window" all the more special. Host Brent Skinner's guest is none other than TCC's chief technology officer — Jeff Tremblay. And a potentially brand-new industry buzzword emerged from their discussion: People Data Chaos — or PDC, for short. What is PDC? Depending on the complexity of an organization's HCM and HCM-adjacent tech stack, people data sprawls across multiple systems and applications -- sometimes, far more systems and applications than anyone would care to count. The many, many integrations holding all this together are flimsy. They break, and with ever increasing frequency as the tech stack grows. That is the very definition of people data in chaos. And, yet, vendors of technology for HCM continue to regale us with visions of a future of work. They promise exciting, fancy things like self-evolving workforce skills ontologies fusing with artificial intelligence, modern psychometrics and learning content and more to produce ever deeper, more insightful and accurate people analytics. It all sounds great. We'll never reach the future of work with PDC in the way. Listen in to hear Jeff and Brent discuss PDC and much more.

For this episode of the "Small Talk Window" podcast, Ian Cook, vice president of product management at Visier, joined host Brent Skinner for an illuminating conversation. If you're in the profession of managing the employment of people, you've probably heard the mantra: advanced people analytics will help you finally get granular with your workforce to boost productivity and spark innovation, the lifeblood of competitiveness. And it's true. The newest stuff out there really works. It's understandable that people analytics may seem out of reach, however. All the administrative inefficiencies of untamed HR has a way of cascading throughout the enterprise (or small company) to lay bare a lack of maturity in human capital management. The circumstances are overwhelming. People analytics may seem like a luxury reserved for those who get their act together first. But it's unnecessary to be a well-oiled HCM machine to get started with people analytics now, not later. Ian and Brent explore the idea that businesses can get right down to it, right now, with people analytics no matter where they are with their sophistication -- or lack thereof -- in HCM. It is very rarely an either-or proposition.

The guest for this episode of "Small Talk Window" is Ashlie Collins, director of solutions at Joveo. An expert in neurodivergence in the workplace, Ashlie has conducted a ton of research on the topic especially as it relates to job seeking and talent acquisition. When we talk about diversity, it’s important to emphasize that it can apply to all sorts of things, including the mind. This isn’t just about people along the “spectrum” of autism, either. Say you have someone who’s suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD runs along its own spectrum. So does ADHD, for that matter. These are all forms of neurodivergence. Neurodivergent individuals can be some of the best talent out there, it turns out, but entrenched practices and norms in hiring can inadvertently leave them slipping through the cracks. Different minds respond to recruiting differently, and Ashlie recently wrote about all that at the Joveo blog. As for this episode of the podcast, she and host Brent Skinner dig deeply into how organizations can add flexibility to their talent acquisition processes to accommodate and promote broad neurodiversity in the workforce.

For this episode of the "Small Talk Window" podcast, host Brent Skinner went deep into the paint with guest Alex Furman, co-founder and CEO of Performica. What was their topic? Going into the recording, they weren't exactly sure except that they wanted to explore how we measure the return on investment of HR and people performance. And they concluded the discussion with a newfound respect for just how deep this rabbit hole goes. You probably know already, for example, but it's worth repeating and highlighting: payroll and a bunch of other things we spend on an organization's people show up as liabilities, not investments, in accounting spreadsheets. The reason why is complicated, but employee compensation isn't exactly, strictly outgoing money. Suffice it to say, we need to think this through better because the outcome will be to do better by our organizations' people.

The bulk of the HCM technology conference season for 2024 has come to a close, and the holiday season is nearly upon us. But let's turn the clock back about one month's worth. This is the second in a two-part series of "Small Talk Window" podcasts recorded with isolved from the floor of the HR Technology Conference & Expo -- the last week of September, millennia ago in HCM technology time.... Host Brent Skinner spoke with Jaylene Owen, PHR, MAIOP, director of HR and payroll at Sitka, Alaska-based Hames Corporation, where the HR technology installed is -- you guessed it -- isolved. Fittingly, it was HR Professional Appreciation Day. Joining Jaylene were isolved Vice President of Corporate Marketing Amberly Dressler (a content pro) and Amberly's former colleague there, Geoff Webb, an author, speaker and, yes, master storyteller. The topic was the book that Amberly and Geoff wrote together, "Center the Pendulum: HR Tales of Transformation for Better Business Outcomes." Their book highlights the challenges that People Heroes, as isolved calls them, face in simultaneously operationalizing HR and improving the employee experience. When it comes to improving the employee experience, you don't have to boil the ocean -- you just have to take your next best step. It was an intriguing conversation against the backdrop of a teeming expo floor, with Jaylene providing valuable context from an HR leader's perspective. By the way, isolved Connect 2024 is a virtual event taking place today and tomorrow (Oct. 29-30). If you're there, expect to hear plenty about the book's theme.

The HCM technology conference season for 2024 is coming to a close. Think of this episode of "Small Talk Window" as a redux. From isolved's snazzy, very pink exhibitor booth last month, at HR Technology Conference & Expo, host Brent Skinner spoke with Yutaka Takagi, their principal product evangelist -- amidst a bustling expo floor on HR Professional Appreciation Day, to boot. Every organization has an employer culture. Many work hard to define it. Many work hard, too, to embody it as leaders. But how many organizations give thought to whether an employee knows it's OK, on a whim, to mosey on down to the breakroom for a midafternoon coffee? "You can take a lot for granted," Yutaka says, and HR has an opportunity to lead in communicating the granular details of the employer culture. Who knows? You might even ward off quiet vacationing and other things your employees could otherwise be tempted to do behind the organization's back. Listen in to hear Yutaka's thoughts around this. The timing couldn't be better. At isolved Connect 2024, a virtual event taking place later this month, Oct. 29-30, the nit-and-gritty of employer culture will be among the central themes.

Sean Behr, CEO of Fountain and the guest for this episode of “Small Talk Window,” had a laugh with Brent Skinner, the host, over the headline here. You probably won’t reach anybody anymore on Hotmail, of course. But you probably won’t reach any of your frontline workers through email, period. Did you know? The vast majority of them, 84 percent, lack a computer, according to a 2023 survey by MarketSplash. And, according to SHRM, 60 percent of them will abandon an online job application process if it’s too lengthy or complicated. You’re losing frontline workers before you even get them. Making a frontline workforce’s experience as frictionless as possible is not easy, and yet it’s critical.

Today is a special day. It’s "Small Talk Window" host Brent Skinner's birthday, for one. Far more important, however, today is the day of the Women in HR Technology Summit, which again, this year, kicks off the in-real-life much-awaited annual HR Technology Conference & Expo in Las Vegas. So it’s only fitting that Brent's guest for this episode is Natalie Stones, co-founder of Talent Collective, whose tagline is, "paving the way for women in TA." Talent Collective focuses on women recruiters helping women recruiters. In this job market, Talent Collective's mission is critical to DE&I and all sorts of other things.

We’re hearing a lot about people analytics these days. Aren’t we? One big reason is the technology that powers people analytics has advanced light years in recent years. Alas, a few misconceptions have slipped past unchallenged amid this breakneck pace of innovation, and John Federman, CEO of HireRoad, joined host Brent Skinner to bust a few of these myths on this episode of the podcast. In the process, they also just might have moved the ball up the field when it comes to helping democratize people analytics. You don’t have to be HCM-mature or enterprise-mature to deploy them anymore. You can be a medium-size company and, in fact, mature faster in your HCM (and as an organization, period) by deploying state of the art people analytics right now, today.

Mike Erlin, founder and CEO of AbilityMap (and a repeat guest on the "Small Talk Window" podcast), had his team run Catwoman through their highly robust psychometrics instrument to unearth Catwoman's human skills and how she might best utilize these on the job. Let's just say there's a very clear reason she's the superhero who gives Batman the assist he often needs to catch the bad guys. And there's a bigger picture here about cats—something we've heard a lot about lately. Mike and host Brent Skinner dive deeply into why, when it comes to the world of work, it's never a good thing to discount anyone. You might rob yourself of highly talented people who bring unique skills to the table. And besides, embracing diversity is a core tenet of human capital management, after all.

There was an article published recently in The Wall Street Journal. The content, especially the headline, "The White-Collar Hiring Rut Is Here. That’s Bad News for Young College Grads," suggests there's a massive decrease in the number of candidates being hired by Fortune 500 employers into roles that require a bachelor's degree. Steven Rothberg, guest for this episode of "Small Talk Window," sees something larger and perhaps closer to the truth at play. Founder and chief visionary officer of College Recruiter, Steven believes employers are finally eliminating degree requirements for roles that never really needed them in the first place. Think scope creep. Who really needs a college degree to go into automobile sales, for example? Host Brent Skinner happens to agree and shares a few thoughts of his own, too, for this spirited conversation.

Much of the chatter out there says AI is going to take over our work and leave us with nothing to do. That’s certainly a possibility, especially if we do nothing about it. But consider what Kieran Flanagan, chief marketing officer of Hubspot (and venture capitalist), has to say. He proposes an elegant relationship between AI and humans, wherein the former is a tool to enhance the latter. It'll probably take couples counseling to get there, however. To explore how all that might work out, Mark Chaffey, founder and CEO of hackajob, joins host Brent Skinner for this episode of "Small Talk Window."

Joining as the guest for this episode of "Small Talk Window" is Lauren Miller. Lauren is an isolved People Hero. That means she uses isolved in her capacity as owner of an Arkansas-based location of Right at Home, provider of in-home care services to seniors and others facing physical and other challenges. It wasn’t too long before Lauren realized she was serving employees, too, not just her customers.

For this episode of “Small Talk Window,” Jocelyn King, CEO of VirgilHR, joins host Brent Skinner to discuss a Texas-based court’s eleventh-hour effect on the Federal Trade Commission’s brewing, hotly debated ban on non-competes. HR departments were going to have to comply with a key component of the (putting it charitably) now-in-flux regulation by Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024—tomorrow, if you’re listening to this episode the day it went live. The back-and-forth that has swirled around the FTC’s moves related to non-competes provides a caricature of the chaos and inefficiency that HR departments face day in and day out when it comes to compliance. Add in uncertainty, when stakeholders wait till the last minute to comply with this or that proposed new regulation because they bank on it not happening after all, and HR’s job becomes all the more difficult. Jocelyn should know and walks Brent and those tuning in through this television court drama–caliber story that unfolded in recent weeks.

For this episode of the podcast, we ask, “Why?” Why are you switching your learning solution or deploying one for the first time? The drive to focus anew on establishing a learning culture, implement a workable learning management system (LMS), or kick things off from scratch learning-wise at your organization is understandable. But you must first understand your "why." Your "why" affects everything downstream from the decision, after all—administration and governance, content strategy… you get the picture. Host Brent Skinner's guest is Barry Richman, a learning ecosystems expert formerly of Dunkin' Brands, explains why you must understand your "why."

Joining host Brent Skinner for this episode of "Small Talk Window" is Caitlin MacGregor, co-founder and CEO of Plum. Employer culture and employee experience can be really tough to get right. If you’re an organization that cares at all about any of that, you’re continually searching for ways to reconcile business objectives with the moral imperative of creating a great workplace. And, for a long time, leaders have been trying to do this by intuition, not with reliable data on their people. It’s because all the softer stuff hasn’t really been available, actionable—till recently. We're talking about data not just on productivity, but also on your people's behavior and innate skills, as humans. This is good news. Employer cultures properly informed by skills data naturally lead to better business outcomes.

Most of us have heard of firms like Gartner, IDC and Forrester. But what do we know about industry analysts, really? For this episode of the "Small Talk Window" podcast, Robin Schaffer, principal AR consultant at Schaffer AR, joins host Brent Skinner to discuss just what an industry analyst is and how the market—including the HCM technology market specifically—can best leverage them. Their role and how to work with them to your organization's benefit can be murky, certainly misunderstood.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of original sin in Western theology. Well, there is original sin in skills ontologies, too. It was the early 1950s, and the United States Army had established a behavioral science research and development institute. The objective? Introduce efficiency and standardization to the training process. Figure out who was best at what. A psychologist by the name of Paul G. Whitmore, founder of the initiative, made an executive decision that has dogged our discussion of people skills ever since. He classified them into two types—hard skills, which are easy to measure, and soft skills—which, at the time, were not at all easy to measure. This is the original sin of modern skills ontologies, says Mike Erlin, founder and CEO of AbilityMap and host Brent Skinner's guest for this episode of the podcast. We should lose the bifurcation and look at skills holistically. They’re all human skills, after all.

Kathleen Armbruster, director of talent acquisition at Studio Science and Brent Skinner’s guest on this episode of the “Small Talk Window” podcast, describes achieving a successful search in recruiting as being akin to finding treasure. Kathleen believes being a star recruiter isn’t just about knowing the mechanics, or even the strategy, of talent acquisition. She says you also need a support group around you, a circle of confidantes and peers who “get it”: as rewarding as recruiting can be, the day-to-day of it can sow doubt even in the most resilient practitioner. It is in these troughs that the recruiters who can turn to their network for pep talks and more not only survive, but thrive. Kathleen says the folks at recruiting software provider Qualifi, where she won the Recruiter of the Month Award in June, are a notable contingent of that support group for her success.

Many meetings are unnecessary, even accidents. There are plenty of other ways to gain visibility and experience togetherness without filling everyone's day with back-to-back-to-back meetings. Joining Small Talk Window Host Brent Skinner for this episode is Jamscape Founder and CEO Rene W. Schmidt, formerly of Uber. Their discussion explores how to satiate the desire for meetings without really having to have them. After all, today’s technology facilitates and cultivates the actual togetherness, collaboration, productivity and innovation that conventional meetings just can’t.

Just like the environment, social justice, and other assorted concerns near and dear to people’s hearts from a global perspective, global HCM is quote-unquote “glocal.” You must “think globally, but act locally,” and this is where the term “glocal" comes from. Joining Small Talk Window Host Brent Skinner for this episode is Rick Hammell, founder and CEO of Helios, a soon-to-be-launched global WFM play. He and Brent discuss why “acting glocally” just might be the number one thing global employers can do to protect and optimize the employee experience. Also co-founder and chairman of the board at employer-of-record Atlas, Rick does not disappoint, bringing a wealth of knowledge to the topic.

Think about the two main stakeholders in the world of work—the workforce and its employer. A natural pendulum sways back and forth between each of these stakeholder’s perceived and real needs. At times closer to where the employer would like it and, at other times, where employees would like it, this pendulum’s position always marks a compromise—conscious or not. Joining Small Talk Window Host Brent Skinner for this episode is isolved Chief People Officer Amy Mosher. Both stakeholders deserve validation in this relationship. Pulling in some interesting tie-ins with findings from isolved's Fourth-Annual HR Leaders Report, Amy and Brent discuss how the quality of the employee experience can be a direct outcome of how much validation each of these stakeholders gets.