Talk Talent To Me

Rob sits down with Susan Charnaux, Chief People Officer at Appian Corporation, whose path to the role ran through engineering, law school, and a stint at McKinsey before she realized that HR was where she could do her best work. The conversation covers why Appian has doubled down on early talent while competitors automate it away, how they think about inserting humans at exactly the right moments in the employee experience, and what a deliberate AI enablement program actually looks like in practice, complete with AI champions, Friday morning workshops, and a company-wide prompt-sharing channel. Susan is clear-eyed about what AI is good for and what it isn't, and the through line of the episode is a simple idea: being efficient with the administrative so you can be generous with the human. Key takeaways Investing in early talent is a long game. The people running Appian today came in from university, and that pipeline only exists because leadership never stopped prioritizing it. Use AI to get efficient with the administrative so you can afford to be human at the moments that matter: first day, feedback conversations, a promotion congratulated in person. Appian pulled back on e-learning and reinstated in-person onboarding after realizing something had been lost in culture building. The investment is real but so are the returns. AI champions work because people trust peers more than top-down mandates. Show them someone like them doing it, bring in breakfast, and let them share their prompts. Gen Z is not naive about AI. They already have discernment about when to use it and when human judgment is better. That is an asset, not a liability. HR adds the most value when it is an enabler, not a police force. Learn the business, understand what the leaders need to get done, and be the person who helps them do it.

Rob sits down with Patricia Frost, EVP and Chief People and Places Officer at Seagate Technology, whose path to the C-suite ran through 32 years in the US Army, culminating as Director of Cyber Electronic Warfare and Information Operations. Patricia brings a framework for AI adoption that is military in its discipline and deeply human in its values: leave no one behind, train before you field, and let the people tell you where the friction is. The conversation covers how Seagate built a 400-person AI Forward Collective of certified champions, why HR, not IT, should own the AI transformation, how to measure impact beyond time saved, and what it looks like when a CPO uses AI to run her own week. This is one of the most operationally detailed AI adoption conversations the show has had. Key takeaways The AI transformation is not a technology problem. It is a people problem. HR needs to own it alongside IT, not wait for IT to lead it. Seagate built an AI Forward Collective of 400 certified champions who went through rigorous training, built and deployed agents, and now mentor peers across the org. Peer trust moves faster than top-down mandates. Don't just measure time saved. Measure energy, enthusiasm, and whether people feel more or less burdened. Some of the most important AI outcomes can't be quantified. The military never fielded new equipment by just handing it out and saying figure it out. Neither should your company. Train first, build confidence, then change the workflows. AI adoption has to come from the bottom up. HR leaders don't know where the friction lives in daily workflows. The champions and the employees do. Patricia on LinkedIn A Soundbeam Studios Production

Settle in for one of the most operationally wild episodes in recent memory. Kim was employee number 11 at a resort that didn't have an offer letter template, an HR system, or a building that candidates could walk into. Eighteen months later, 6,500 people were through the doors on opening day. The conversation covers how Kim built the EVP from scratch to win back hospitality workers who left the industry after COVID, why they ripped and replaced their ATS six months into the build when it couldn't handle 300,000 expected applications, and how benefits like childcare stipends, pay transparency, and weekly pay became genuine competitive differentiators on the Strip. This is a masterclass in building talent infrastructure at speed and under pressure. Key takeaways They planned for 80,000 applications and received 300,000. Scenario planning your recruitment capacity at multiple demand levels is not optional at scale. They ripped and replaced their ATS six months in when the vendor flagged the system might break under volume. The new one, Paradox, reduced application time from 20-30 minutes to 3-5 minutes via AI conversational chat. Benefits are a real differentiator when you deploy them intentionally. Childcare stipends, weekly pay, parental leave, and pay transparency were all firsts on the Strip and drove both attraction and retention. COVID wiped out a generation of hospitality workers who left permanently and felt like a number. Culture-first recruiting was the strategy to win them back, and belonging has been the competitive advantage ever since. AI handles screening, scheduling, and application triage. Humans make every hiring decision. Protecting that distinction freed the team to focus on the moments that actually require judgment. Don't fake it until you make it. Face it. Kim's advice for anyone building toward a senior people role: show up as yourself, surround yourself with the right people, and commit to staying curious about what's next. Links: Kim on LinkedIn LHH Recruitment Solutions  A Beautiful Working World A Soundbeam Studios Production

Rob welcomes back Colin Yasukochi, Executive Director of CBRE's Tech Insight Center, to walk through CBRE's annual Scoring Tech Talent report. Covering 50 markets and millions of data points, the report is the definitive map of where tech talent lives, moves, and works. This year's findings are striking: remote job postings in San Francisco have collapsed from 24% to 7%, New York has overtaken the Bay Area as the largest tech talent market in the US for the first time, and AI is simultaneously responsible for the biggest boom and the biggest cut in tech talent in recent history. Colin explains what is behind each of those headlines, which emerging markets are worth watching and why, and what it actually means to find tech talent when 60% of them don't work for tech companies at all. Key takeaways Remote work is effectively over for AI companies.  Tech talent is defined by what you do, not where you work. 60% of tech talent works outside the tech industry entirely. New York overtook the Bay Area as the largest US tech talent market in 2026, driven by finance sector investment in AI while Bay Area headcounts contracted. AI talent grew 45% year over year to 751,000, while AI-attributed job cuts hit 102,000, or 22.9% of all cuts.  Emerging markets like Huntsville, Halifax, Colorado Springs, and Dayton are rising for specific reasons tied to local industry, not just cost or population. The 15 most VC-funded AI companies grew their combined workforce from 7,500 in 2020 to 56,000 today. The AI hiring boom is real, even if it runs alongside the cuts. Links: Colin on LinkedIn LHH Recruitment Solutions  A Beautiful Working World A Soundbeam Studios Production  

Tracy St. Dic, Global Head of Talent at Zapier, built a quality of hire algorithm from scratch. What it yielded helped them measure their ability to get better at hiring over time, but it also taught them the five durable traits that actually predict top performance, why credentials are a weak proxy for ability, and Zapier's four-component AI fluency framework that every single candidate is now evaluated against. If you want a masterclass in what a modern, rigorous, data-backed talent strategy looks like, this is the episode. Key takeaways Ability is equally distributed but opportunity is not. Credentials are a weak proxy for whether someone can actually do the job. Zapier's quality of hire algorithm tracked new hires across their entire first year and found the same five traits consistently predicted top performance: navigating ambiguity, proactive ownership, stakeholder communication, cross-functional collaboration, and fast on-ramp. Slope not snapshot. How fast someone is learning matters more than what they know on day one. Zapier measures this even within the hiring process itself. Manager and employee alignment on performance is more predictive of success than the actual performance rating. Misalignment is the real red flag, not a low score. Zapier's AI fluency framework has four components: mindset, strategy, builder skills, and accountability. 100% of candidates must meet a minimum threshold before an offer can go through. Not upskilling your team in AI fluency is management malpractice. TA leaders own this responsibility for their own teams, not just the broader org. Links: Tracy on LinkedIn LHH Recruitment Solutions  A Beautiful Working World A Soundbeam Studios Production

Show Notes: Rob goes in-person for this one, recording live at Takkion HQ in Denver with CHRO Marie Wardenski. Takkion is a major player in clean energy with around 2,000 employees, 85% of whom are traveling wind technicians who never have the option to work from home, which makes the people function both critical and complex. Marie brings 20 years of HR experience across higher education, chemical distribution, oil and gas, and now renewables, and she has a lot to say about how HR earns its seat at the table, why the "policy police" reputation existed and how it gets dismantled, and what it actually takes to ascend to a CHRO role. This one is grounded, candid, and full of practical wisdom for anyone trying to build a career in people leadership. Key Takeaways: HR metrics only land with senior leadership when they are already framed in terms of business goals, not HR goals The policy police reputation was earned, and dismantling it requires HR to be proactive, not reactive, and visibly tied to strategic outcomes If you have a computer problem, you call IT. If you have a people problem, you call HR. Every problem is ultimately a people problem Being in office requires just as much intentionality as being remote. Physical proximity does not automatically create collaboration Business acumen is not optional for senior HR leaders. You will need to build it deliberately outside of your day-to-day work Understand the business you are in. HR can work in any industry, but the leaders who rise are the ones who become genuine thought partners to operations, not just subject matter experts in their own function Links: Marie on LinkedIn LHH Recruitment Solutions  A Beautiful Working World A Soundbeam Studios Production  

Selena is the Executive Director and Global Head of Talent Management at Cytokinetics, and brings a global perspective shaped by her upbringing in Beijing, a career that has wound through consulting, M&A integration at Jazz Pharmaceuticals, and culture transformation at Gilead. The conversation covers how to lead people through business transformation rather than just announce it, why 360 feedback only works when the recipient is ready to receive it, the architect versus contractor framework for thinking about senior leadership, and why HR needs to stop defending legacy processes and start asking harder questions about whether they still work. This one is for HR and talent leaders who want to think more provocatively about the function and their own role in it. 🔑 Key Takeaways 360 feedback only works when the recipient is genuinely ready to receive it. Rolling it out org-wide without a readiness check is a waste of everyone's time. Feedback meant to vent and feedback meant to help are not the same thing and should not be weighed the same way. The architect sets the vision and the blueprint. The contractor executes the room. Organizations in transformation need leaders who can hold both, not just one. The 70-20-10 learning model says 70% of development happens on the job, yet most L&D budgets still go to the 10% classroom training bucket. Ask why before defending it. 🔗 Links Selena on LinkedIn LHH Recruitment Solutions  A Beautiful Working World A Soundbeam Studios Production

Katie Rakusin, Director of Talent Acquisition at Merit America. has seen the AI hiring surge hit in real time: 33,000 applications in five months, 10,000 in May alone, and yes, the bots have officially arrived. The conversation covers how her team is restructuring its entire hiring process around the assumption that candidates are using AI, why stopping bot detection might actually be the smarter move, and how a real four-day work week gets built and protected at scale. Katie also makes a strong case for why human judgment should be the last thing you automate, and what early-career TA pros need to hear about staying relevant in a market that keeps changing underneath them. Katie on LinkedIn LHH Recruitment Solutions  A Beautiful Working World A Soundbeam Studios Production   Key takeaways Stop trying to detect AI in applications. The detective work is exhausting, biased, and misses great candidates  It's not "did you use AI?" It's "can you defend and own what's on the page?" AI can surface and prioritize candidates, but a human must make every decision on whether someone moves forward. Surfacing is not the same as deciding. A four-day work week only works if leadership actually models it. Write your rubric before you turn on any AI screening tool, or you will just be scaling your existing biases across thousands of candidates.

Jim has held senior people roles at Hulu and Quibi, but he'll tell you this job is different: the stakes are higher. The episode digs into why employer-sponsored healthcare is broken, how health deserts across rural America make virtual care a necessity, and why recruiters are leaving one of the most powerful differentiators in any offer completely undersold. Jim also weighs in on AI in the healthcare context, why employees quietly using ChatGPT for health questions is a real risk employers are ignoring, and why the companies that laid people off in the name of AI efficiency are the ones now quietly backtracking. For HR, TA, and total rewards leaders, this one is a genuine perspective shift. Key takeaways Healthcare is table stakes today but will soon be a true talent differentiator Health deserts in rural America mean virtual care is not a perk, it is the only path to timely, quality care for millions of employees. Recruiters routinely glaze over benefits in the offer conversation and are leaving a major differentiator on the table. Employees are already using ChatGPT for health decisions every night. Employers who ignore this are not protecting anyone. AI adoption is an evolution, not a revolution. The companies that treated it as the latter and cut headcount are the ones now backtracking. Do many different things early in your career. The broader your exposure before you specialize, the smarter and more strategic an HR leader you become. Links Jim on LinkedIn LHH Recruitment Solutions  A Beautiful Working World A Soundbeam Studios Production

Steve Cadigan, the first CHRO of LinkedIn and one of the most candid voices in the talent space, discusses where AI is genuinely helping organizations and where it is quietly doing damage. Steve challenges the assumption that replacing humans with AI is a strategy, makes the case that entry-level talent is the most AI-fluent generation in history and companies are cutting them at exactly the wrong moment, and shares what Prudential is doing with skills mapping that every organization should pay attention to. He also gets personal about why he walked away from the C-suite, what it actually takes to build a culture where experimentation is safe, and why the human skills of communication, conflict resolution, and influence matter more right now than any AI tool. If you lead people, hire people, or advise organizations on talent, this one is essential. Key Takeaways: Most recruiting AI is solving a volume problem, not a quality one, and the candidate experience is paying the price. Cutting entry-level roles to save costs is a three-year recovery problem in the making. Prudential maps every new hire's skills to every job in the company on day one. Steve thinks every organization should be doing this. The consulting firms AI was supposed to replace are now being hired to manage AI adoption, because the real challenge is cultural, not technical. AI tools were built by tech companies and handed to the rest of us half-formed. We are the foster parents now. Conflict resolution, clear communication, and influence are the skills that win right now, more than any AI tool. Links Steve on LinkedIn LHH Recruitment Solutions  A Beautiful Working World A Soundbeam Studios Production