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.