HR Mixtape

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, work...

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 ...

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...

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 tog...

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 w...

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 th...

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. B...

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 ea...

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 fixe...

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 Messa...