← The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast
The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep389 - HR vs People Ops: Semantic vs Substantive Difference?
01:03:14
Loading summary
Transcript94 lines
- [00:07]
A
Okay, so, you know, as you know, I work with David Lloyd. And so I said to him afterwards, because he's a mad socialist, I was like, would you get, like, Would you like, get like, slag rotten by your, like, professional contacts if they knew you were in such a bourgeois establishment? And he said, nothing's too good for the working class. Perfect.
- [00:29]
B
Perfect.
- [00:30]
C
Yeah. And to be honest with you, as we all know, the socialist movements have always been led by the middle class. Anyway. It's all. It's all disaffected elites, me, aspirational and disappointed elites that lead the working class revolution. Anyway, welcome everybody to Brain Food live on air, bringing it to you every Friday. And no fail. I hope it's no fail because I think we failed a couple of times recently, mainly because I didn't know how to operate version 3 of Crowdcast and ended up cutting sort of the show and the live stream off before we even started. Anyway, I hope we're going to be okay. We are baking here. I think it's the last day of a mega heat wave we've been having in the UK. 36 degrees here, it's just way too hot. But hopefully we can soldier through the rest of the day. All right, let's do some sound checks before we kick off any further, folks. If you're watching this on Crowdcast, do let me know whether the audio and visual is fine. Just let me know in the comments there. We should be broadcasting this on a number of LinkedIn. So my LinkedIn, I believe Adam's LinkedIn. I also think Rob Walker's broadcasting this. Maybe even Jesse Swan is broadcasting this. If you're watching this on any of those linkedins, do let me know whether the. The audio visual is fine. You should see me and Adam on screen. And yes, thank you, Jesse. Appreciate it. Okay, good stuff. We have Adam Gordon here. Good to see Adam, as usual. Even though it feels this year you've been intermittently on the show. That's probably my fault because there's all kinds of movements in and around the diary. But great to see you as usual. For the folks who don't know you, Adam, you might as well introduce yourself.
- [02:10]
B
Who are you?
- [02:10]
C
What is you do?
- [02:14]
A
Yeah, I was on. I was on more regularly and you never asked me to do that. But now every time I come on, you ask me to introduce myself because people have forgotten who I am. Yeah, Madam Gordon, I've been in recruiting since 1999 and I've been building companies in this space since 2009. The last one was candidate ID which we sold to ISIMS. It was marketing automation technology and I am the founder of Poetry, which is hiring enablement technology. I am not inspired by building another version of something that's been built to death already and by just really looking at what's the white space and what can we do differently, what could do better areas nobody's actually really attacking and how can we improve talent acquisition.
- [02:54]
C
Fantastic stuff. And do follow Adam on LinkedIn as well. His chat is generally okay. Also one of the people that contributes positively in public spaces like that. So check it out. Okay. We have to thank our sponsors. Of course without our sponsors we cannot do this show. Brain Food Live is always sponsored every week and this week's sponsors one of our favorites. It is of course Greenhouse. Greenhouse, I think for the last decade or more have been more or less in that top right hand side quadrant of the leading ATS on the market. Obviously if you are interested in upgrading your current product, Greenhouse usually in the conversation, if you are doing that, by the way, they've published an ATS vendor guide which I hope is basically as neutral as they can get it. It's always interesting when a vendor produces a product for users to go and buy products. But do take a look at it. I think it is an interesting document and like I say, and I think Greenhouse and everyone else would agree with me, there's not one size fits all with atss. It has to be right fit for your context and your circumstances. And this is the reason why, you know, the ATS market remains super fragmented. So Anyway, check out greenhouse.com if you are upgrading your product. And also I've just shared the ATS Buyer's guide there as well. Go ahead and download that in case you are actively looking to do just that. All right, excellent. Adam, let's review the newsletter real quick before we get on with the topic which is HR versus People ops. Semantic or substantive difference? That's the topic of the day. But let's get into the newsletter real quick from last week and see whether we can cover a few topics that were interesting.
- [04:41]
D
Me.
- [04:42]
A
Yeah, so it was a really great newsletter first of all. And the first one that I want to talk about is Tim Ferriss's article about Has AI killed Non fiction how to books? I wonder if AI has actually killed non fiction books full stop. But anyway, he pointed out that his own book sales have dramatically dropped over the last two years. And so for example, if I want to know, how can I live a life where I'm on a four hour work week I could go on to ChatGPT and type give me the playbook for living a four hour work week and it'll give me the answer I don't need to buy his book and read his book. Sadly for Tim, it's probably going to be doing it based on having read his book. So anyway, it's exactly what's happened. Yeah, so there's a problem in this area. It's really, it's bigger than that. The point is bigger than that. If you have got a business which is only about the provision of information, then you're going to have to think about your model because it's either already dead or it is going to die at a faster or slower pace according to a variety of factors. But it's a really interesting thing to consider.
- [06:08]
C
Yeah, really interesting credit to Tim Ferriss by the way, for publishing his own sort of data, so to say, you know, he's telling about the collapse of his sales of his books which is basically how he makes 80 of his money. So he's been brilliant over the last two decades really as the ultimate, an acceptable self help guru you could probably say. But yeah, he's saying, look, it's all
- [06:31]
A
over for the books.
- [06:33]
C
People are getting the information from another source and that source, as you say, is AI that's been trained on his books. And there's an ethical problem with that, all of that, of course, but obviously compensation is not going to go Tim's way. Very, very interesting. Okay, give us one moment, couple more to this.
- [06:51]
A
Okay, so Jennifer horsbrough. Yes on LinkedIn that she'd asked Jem, Claude or Gemini, I think it was Gemini, Gemini to write her CV as Jennifer. She then changed her name to Jeff and said write my cv. And it did the same thing, but it made her sound a lot more authoritative and capable and competent. I mean this is to me absolutely mental that this is actually still happening. Now the bigger insight here really is if we're using AI is biased. If we are using a large language model is absolutely biased. If it's like vanilla, it's got not the filters that's needed. So we have to consider that AI is still not good enough to make decisions in hiring. It's great for guiding us, it's great for providing recommendations, but we still need to involve humans in the decision. That's what I took from Jennifer's article, but I found that experiment really intriguing.
- [08:10]
C
Yeah, really, really interesting and she wrote brilliantly about that. So I've just shared the link in the chat stream there folks. Go check it out and hit Jennifer up. I'm sure she'd be happy to chat with.
- [08:19]
A
We should probably bring it on the podcast to be honest.
- [08:21]
C
It's an interesting experiment, but yeah, LLMs are obviously trained on the common crawl. That's all of the world's Internet sort of say. And that of course is extremely biased. I mean it doesn't take you a huge amount of thought to think about that. Firstly, predominantly it's in English, so we haven't talked about the linguistic stuff, but most of the Internet is English. Most of that English is American English. And most of the product, the people writing that stuff, where are they coming from? What's their demographic, what's their background? It's not representative of anything like the global population. And we shouldn't be overly surprised about comes of this type. Although having said what you said, Adam, I do believe we are already using these technologies to do screening. And when you're talking about, you know, sourcing assistance, screening assistance and stuff like this already in use and we're not going to sort of put that genie back in the bottle, mate. So it's like, okay, we just got to find a way through it because we're diving in implementing the tech, we
- [09:25]
A
have to do it.
- [09:26]
C
From practical point of view, no one can review 10 million CVs coming at you. But how do we mitigate this bias? Answers in a postcard, folks. Let me know in the comments. Okay, give us one more item.
- [09:38]
A
Right, based on the title, you won't be surprised to learn that this one was written by academics. Algorithmic monocultures in hiring. So some US academics did some research which found that many employers are using the same hiring AI. So if you have been rejected once, the likelihood is that you're going to get rejected and across every company that is using that technology. So they analyzed millions of real job applications and they found evidence of considerable bias in this as well. So people who are black or Asian were again much more likely to have been disproportionately affected by this baked in bias. The point isn't that AI shouldn't be using it used in hiring, it shouldn't be banned. It's just more that there needs to be. It's just a reaffirmation that there needs to be further transparency and independent testing done in here. So the interesting question is if everyone is using the same AI assessments, does it mean that we are missing the same great candidates like all of us? Yeah, yeah, really good point.
- [11:03]
C
This is about market dominance as well. So I think they Basically studied certain verticals where there was a dominant provider. So let's say there's provider a that does CV screening or what have you. 80% of the market uses that, that's installed or used by maybe a thousand companies. But you as a candidate, you're being assessed by the same thing and across those sort of 800 companies. Or you're going to be marked down because you'll be marked down on what. And that's the problem that they're pointing out to. I think there's lots to think about with the methodology. I think there's loads of things we've got to criticize in that. But the concept of market dominance I think is definitely something we need to think about. And also the market dominance goes further back, such as the dominance of Anthropic and OpenAI generally. Gemini as a party third as a third player empowering these products in the first place. Are we that comfortable with that type of vendor lock in? You know, so anyway, lots to think about and not easy for us to do. Right, we're going to get back into this. So folks.
- [12:09]
A
Quite right.
- [12:10]
C
Randy, what does it mean for AI interviewing? We don't know. We should, by the way. Yes, quite right, Rob, Bridge of hope coming back. I'm actually going to be seeing those guys in a couple of weeks, so. Good excuse for us to do that. All right, let's get on with the show. HR vs. People OP semantic or substantive difference? Adam, I do think you don't know too much about this because you are. You and me are the same though. We're kind of like agency side. So we never really had wrestled with this idea of what is the difference between. And this obviously stems. But you do know something about where it stems from. And it stems from that conversation that the CEO of Bolt had about a month or so ago where he was interview at a conference and he said basically, look, I fired my HR department and guess what? All the HR problems went away. That was the strap line. And it obviously everyone just lost their shit and they just piled into him. But it turned out that afterwards, within seconds later of that one line, he said, actually what I did do is replace, replace it with people ops and that's all different. And then it got me thinking, it's like, okay, how is it different exactly? And is that difference just a matter of wording, branding or is there something substantively different about it? So I'm looking for your opinion on that, Adam. Are you on the semantic side? It's just words really, or do you think Actually, there is a difference.
- [13:31]
A
Well, I just want to make sure that I clarify this because I want to understand. Are we talking about human resources versus People Ops, or are we talking about HR OPS versus People ops?
- [13:44]
C
Human resources full stop. Versus People ops full stop. Right.
- [13:50]
A
I mean, I do feel like you might say that I know nothing about this, but I think I could write a pretty good blog about it. And the only reason for that is because if you recall, in the early poetry days I spent, I did 200 focus groups and 200 interviews with people who are working in things like recruitment enablement. But a lot of those people were in things like People Operations was actually the teams they were in. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna say I'm an expert. Let's bring our guests on. One thing I do want to mention, though, is the words really matter. And I've never liked the term human resources. It's dehumanizing it, personal, you know, it. It positions humans as, like, assets to be kept on a balance sheet, for example. So I never really like that. So the move from the HR to the people, I do quite like it sets a different tone. But human resources versus People ops, let's find out what our experts think.
- [14:50]
C
Yeah. And I think even if it is semantics, it does make a difference because as you say, when you start describing things as hr, you know, you, you, you, you, you are dehumanizing the people. Just like atomic units being moved throughout the business. But that's not really the case.
- [15:05]
A
I mean, it's not. It's not a coincidence that a lot of early HR teams reported into finance. Right? It was under the finance director.
- [15:14]
C
Yeah. Folks, I want your vote on this. If you look on the right hand side of your screen, folks, you should see a poll I want you to vote on. That question is very simple. HR versus People ops. Is it substantive difference, meaning there's something more than just the words, or is it just semantic and not diminishing the semanticness of it, but is it generally a branding issue? Let's have your votes. Votes as we get our guests onto the screen. Okay. Jess has been very active on the. The chat there, so that's a good cue to bring Jess on straight away. We've got a really good. Well, every show is good, but let's bring. Let's bring Jess on. She's been brilliant for a long time, and time has not been. We've not been able to get her on often enough. But let's see. We can do that. Chris Brown, is he there? Yes, he is. Move to gallery.
- [16:07]
A
That's good, man.
- [16:09]
C
Dude, we've got an ensemble cast here. Hey, Jess, how are you doing? Hey. Hey. Hello.
- [16:18]
E
So nice to see a beautiful face.
- [16:20]
C
I love the color palette choice at that. You know, the pastel green is fantastic. I love it. Jess, for the people who don't know you, why don't you quickly introduce yourself?
- [16:30]
A
Who?
- [16:30]
F
You.
- [16:31]
C
What did you do?
- [16:32]
E
Yeah, absolutely. Hi, everybody. I am currently the VP people. VP People Strategy and Operations at Leapsum, which is a HRIS full stack performance engagement all the way through to reporting and AI functionality. Prior to that, I was the COO of a company called Talentful, which is in the recruiting space in the US and uk and then the COO prior to that as well. Before a long after a long history of working in people, operations and hr. I'm also the author of two books. One of them is called Built for People how to apply product management principles to your people ops team. And the second one, Purpose and Work, about how you can build meaningful and fulfilling workplaces as an employer that give people a sense of purpose and motivation.
- [17:17]
C
And that latest book is just out, isn't it? Jess, isn't that you're on a book tour or something?
- [17:22]
E
Yeah, I'm almost done. I'm. I'm excited with one. One more big event and then I should be able to move back into just being a normal human.
- [17:30]
C
Yeah, good stuff. Sorry I missed you whilst you're in the UK by the way, but there's a decent chance I'll be in New York in a couple of weeks. So if you're still out over there, I'll come and see you. Okay, cool. Let's. Let's say hi to other guests. We have Manjuri here. Manjuri. Sina. Great to see Manjuri. Can you quickly introduce yourself? Manjuri, who are you? What it is you do?
- [17:48]
F
Hey, Hong. Hey, Adam. Great to be here after a couple of months. Hi to both the Adams I saw. There are two Adams here, so I'm Manjari, based in Berlin. For those of you who don't know me, I'm pretty out there in the speaking segments. Been around this time in Transform Vegas, we'll be there at VR Developers giving a keynote. So look out for that. In my other life, I actually lead or head people and culture. I'm not using the word HR, Adam. Now the moment, although that's what is usually used for the global go to market organization for Miro and in my previous life I've headed and held People leadership positions for Fortune 500 companies like Accenture, scale up startups like the Zalandos of the world and Olexis, which is a process company across different continents, different parts of the world. And I am passionate and a champion of good AI. AI used for good AI used for use for everything which is non biased. I was really, really loving the conversation Hong and Adam that you were having. And in fact I had a post yesterday about the recent workday angle in California where they've actually said that they, they could be sued because of the bias that was involved there. So I think we, we really need to put a stop where we don't have transparency. As Adam was saying that we need accountability. We need a lot of transparency, especially when it comes to people decisions and HR and TA tech products.
- [19:27]
A
Yeah, fantastic stuff.
- [19:29]
C
Manjuri, great to see you here and I've again shared the link in the chat stream. Go and connect with Manjuri. Chris Brown, great to see you sir. Quickly introduce yourself.
- [19:37]
A
Who are you? What is you do?
- [19:39]
G
Yep, nice to see you again, hunk. So I'm also based in Berlin, originally from Manchester, but I've been here since 2012. Now I am a fractional head of people. I, I've been doing this now since about 2020. So I've also been in house and experienced the joys of that basically from company size, anywhere from 30 up to 250 people roughly. So I've inherited classic HR teams, classic people ops teams, also built them from scratch. I think on the topic of this, I don't personally really think it matters what you call it. It's more about the actions of the team. Although I do have a preference for one over the other. I've got to say, as Adam was saying, I really detest the word hr human resources. I'm not a fan, but yeah, at the end of the day it's not about what you call yourself, it's about what you do.
- [20:32]
C
Great stuff, Chris. Okay, good stuff, Adam. Let's go bring you in. Who are you? What it is you do? Adam Horn.
- [20:41]
D
Hey folks. Yeah, thank you for having me and awesome to be here. So I'm co founder of OpenOrg. We've built what we like to call a second brain for startup people and talent teams. So one workspace for finding the most relevant resources, content, playbooks, support, everything you need in a very small solo lean team that you don't often manage to get. So we're also very lucky because around that we've built this audience and community of thousands and thousands of people teams and we get to spend a lot of time with them. So, so we get to see a lot of what people are building, what they're trying, what they're thinking, what they're struggling with. And we get to see a lot of how startups and scale ups are operating and working and how those people teams are setting themselves up as well and we get to help solve those problems too. And yeah, I guess on the poll, just to add my 2 cents to kick off, I hit Symantec, but I'm with Jesse here a little bit. Like, I don't have an issue with hr. And I was making some notes before this. I think one of the most progressive like folks that I know in this space is Juby Yao and she loves the term hr. Like she, she proudly like wears that badge, but she is responsible for so many of the amazing things that we talk about in the progressive people up space as well. So I don't think it matters too much what you label it. It's more about, you know, the founder mindset and what comes down. But yeah, excited to get stuck into this with everyone.
- [22:09]
C
Okay, fantastic, Adam. And finally, last but not least, we have Darren Bush here on the screen. Darren, great to see you. Quickly introduce yourself.
- [22:16]
A
Who are you?
- [22:17]
C
What did you do?
- [22:18]
B
Yeah, no problem. So, yeah, Darren Bush at the moment I'm director TA for Kyndryl. Look at the. I look after the projects here. Projects here. So Kyndryl itself was spun out by BM about four years ago. So we're going through a bit of a change. Getting new RPO provider, new ats. Obviously we use workday as well as Andrea mentioned and just going through that transformation. Obviously you've been part of the TA for a number of years, sat under hr. So I have an opinion about in terms of how HR should be in the future. Looking forward to discussing in more detail.
- [22:51]
C
Yeah, fantastic. Okay, thanks everybody for introducing yourselves. I'm going to glance at the poll real quick just to show everyone what that looks like. I think it's visible, but it looks like it's pretty even substantive at 43, semantic at 53. So a lot of us think actually it's just a bunch of words, but a significant amount actually think, yeah, there's more to it. Folks. Let's bring it back to how all this kicked off. I think all of us did see at least the clip of the Ryan Breslaw interview, which kicked off a huge storm. He became the BET Noir in HRTA for, for about a month or so because he said yeah, all the HR problems are due to HR being there. I'm going to get rid of them. And the clip kind of full stopped it. And everyone thought, what a dick. But it turned out sort of immediately after that, like literally last second, he said, I replaced it with people off. So if you watch the entire sort of conversation 17 minutes long, I think he broadly recovered from that aggressive position and essentially said, yeah, you know, we, we. It was people ops. And to quote him a little bit more, he said that the reason why he changed the name and changed the people is because he wanted to go. And this is classic tech bro stuff, but he was saying he wanted to go into like war mode. So he, he, he associated HR with peace mode, meaning external environment is benign. It's very simple how you grow a business. There's no shocks out there, no big deal. You, you can go very procedurally it's all well and good, but actually now we're in this like, chaotic world. No one can judge what's going on. You just need more active people who can make quicker decisions, I guess, or be more decisive or, you know, not be so consensus driven. So I think that's generally his vibe. Now, what is our take on that? Is it a per. Is it literally about the personalities? Who does the job? What are your thoughts here, Jesse?
- [24:50]
A
Hey.
- [24:51]
E
Yeah, I wrote about my comment in the chat, but I don't really have a problem with words like human resources. I actually feel it's kind of like an inherent contradiction in the way that he kind of set this up. I think people operations is actually like a massive softening of the reality of what these jobs are here to do. If you followed any of my writing, you'll see that I've written about things like employee lifetime value to CAC payback ratio, and try to understand the ROI of the investments we're making in our human side of the P and L. And I've definitely had people kind of challenge me on that before, feeling like I was kind of reducing them to a line on the P and L, which is, I mean, probably a little hard to hear, but like, yes, we are a line on a company's P and L, and our job is to have a greater impact on our company's profitability and growth than not. So I find it a little funny that the semantic tone he's taken actually kind of, I think, removes it further from the fundamental financial realities of the business.
- [25:48]
D
And.
- [25:49]
E
But yeah, I think ultimately what he really is trying to say is that he's reframed what he wants his HR team, or people, operations team, whatever he wants to call it, what he wants them to do and how he wants them to think, which is not like a spectacularly new idea. I think a lot of people have worked in teams where we've changed the profiles, the job descriptions, and the hiring strategy for our people ops teams or our HR teams because we felt there was a need to be maybe more adaptable, more commercial, more technologically focused, whatever it may be. And probably with that came some redundancy or disruption to the orchestra structure. So I don't think there's anything like new. I think the way he said it was like kind of purposely antagonistic and I think he did it really well. I think it was successful. Right. It got a lot of attention. The company hasn't been doing great the last couple of years and he nailed the PR stunt, so good on him stuff.
- [26:40]
C
Manjuri, come to you because I think you did also share your thoughts publicly on this as well. Can you, can you sort of mention what your line of commentary was then and has that changed in any way since that time or what is the current position, how you feel about this?
- [26:56]
F
It actually hasn't changed. So I think the first time I saw the, the clip, my reaction was, what a child, you know, And I, and I saw a comment from Katrina Collier on that saying he's 12 or something. But you know what really hit the nerve with a lot of us HR leaders or people leaders, you know, whatever you call it, for me it's potato, potato, is this is actually happening in the industry. He's probably the only one who called it out, called it out in a very bad manner. A lot of founders, and I'm really putting the stress here, a lot of founder tech bros are doing this even in their organization. So if something wrong happens or something bad happens, the HR leader is kind of put up to blame. Whereas the decisions usually are taken by the founder, HR is usually informed at the last minute, and yet the blame is put on hr. That's one. Number two, I've seen a lot of my peers fighting for that seat at the table. But you never get the seat at the table. Number three, you have been citing a number of challenges that your own people in the organization have been telling you, either through listening exercises or, you know, Skip level exercises, etc. And founders don't want to hear that. They don't want to hear that decision making is a problem. They don't want to hear that swim lanes are a problem. They don't want to hear that the strategy is misleading for the baseline population in their organization. And unfortunately this usually comes from the tech pros who've never been in big corporates and never seen what good looks like. And that's, that's the gap that I'm seeing here. If you, if and this, there's a, there's a big role that I see whom, where the board steps in. Where the board steps in. When you have a founder who's a child, could be innovative, could be very, you know, like a genius, great, great product but let's put a stop to some things and that, that's where the mature and grown up board comes in to say this is probably the right time. You bring in a CEO who understands the operations, who understands why a chro is needed and for heaven's sake do not make a chro report to the cfo. That exactly shows where you put the care and the people whether it's on top or are they just dollar value which most organizations are doing right now as well. The moment you want to see a better PNL go and find where to cut and where to lay off. That's what most, most companies do. So this, this was you know to, to boil it down, every founder or almost 9 out of 10 founders are thinking like this and I agree with Jesse that they think about human beings in that P and L doc but not so many come out and actually say that and that's why probably this, this guy got the brunt of all our feelings that we have in our regular day to day work in, in a lot of social media.
- [29:46]
C
Yeah, a really good manjiri and you know, no real sympathy for Ryan on that because he did step out I think deliberately is stir the pot and CEOs tend to basically have that capability to. But really interesting observation that you're thinking that this may be a very startup phenomena, young rapid growth company. It's in some respects artificially on an artificial growth pattern. So to say VC money chucks in, you're going to grow really fast. Obviously things are going to happen very different from Corp. And Adam Horn, I want to bring you in on this. You made the comment on the chat there. What's your observation? What's your thinking?
- [30:27]
D
I actually really liked everything he said genuinely. If you watch the entire video for 17 odd minutes HR, the clip about HR is at the very end. He also comments about the fact that he sacked 99% of his leadership team because they were doing a terrible job. He also criticized the sales team and the account execs because they were doing a terrible job with their customers. So obviously from a PR point of view, all the focus is on hr. He has come in though and made like wholesale changes to an entire business. And I have seen that as a founder myself, I've been through almost exactly the same journey as him on a much smaller scale, albeit. But you set out with these amazing intentions. You want to build great culture. We had unlimited PTO like you mentioned. You put all these great stuff in and it is great during peacetime. I agree and I don't like the war and peace analogy, but using his, his language, I think like it's great when times are good. That's actually really feels quite easy to do this stuff. But he's now having to come in and unpick a lot and the business now has pulled back and shrunk. And he talked a lot about the fact that he's got a lot of big corporate executives in and what is now 100 person tech startup effectively. Like they shouldn't be there, they don't need to be there and they've got the wrong mindset. So he's now going to unpick a lot of that. And I think part of this change from an HR point of view was probably the. I don't. It's very hard to work out what it looks like from that little clip, but my guess is they probably grew their HR function quite a lot in line with everything else that's had to shrink and had to resize and reshape like all the other teams have done. And I think, yeah, I feel I was nodding into everything he said, if I'm honest. Like he's having to turn a business around that wasn't performing. And the HR change in particular, little bit semantic. Who knows how he sees HR or thinks about hr. But I like to think that because of how they started out with the good intentions, he probably isn't a terrible guy. He probably does care about people. He probably does want to build a good company. He's having to make some hard decisions now. Love it.
- [32:35]
A
Adam.
- [32:35]
C
So important context. The business was kind of had grown up to a certain point but actually was struggling and needed turning around. He can't just sit there and like maintain as it is. He had to go in with a big chopper and he chopped loads of people. And maybe HR would be a friction in that sort of need for radical change. Therefore they had to go too. And the idea is, look, we got to go back to what they were, which is a rapid growth startup you know, break things fast, etc. And stuff like this, which, you know, different from corp. Thoughts on this, Darren Bush?
- [33:10]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think it's similar to Adam in some ways, but this is a good chance for us to like review in terms of the HR function as well in terms of what they need to do next. I think every, every, every defense department and function is now looking at themselves and how can we streamline, how can we better. Because the way I've seen it, we have this talk is, and you put it obviously in the agenda is that there's a pendulum on the left to right. There's the left on the left in terms of like the, you know, terms of the people, police. There's the, the guard, additional guardrails. And on the right, maybe it's the tech bros, you know, who trying to push and trying to do too much and trying to avoid those guardrails. At the moment, I think we're trying to find the path where to go forward because you need to, you need to be aligned to the business at the moment. I think that's what's coming clear is you've got to make sure that you, what you're doing is it's got business outcomes. Things Jesse said about the roi, I definitely, definitely agree with that. I think there's definitely more owners and pressure on that and we're feeling it. So you need to, I think there's a chance to kind of redefine exactly how the HR function could look at. I think when someone like a CEO says those things. Yeah. Your action is they're like it. Obviously, you know, it's, it's not great to hear, but actually we need to reflect and say what can we do better to ensure that, you know, we're not in the firing line and they actually are delivering at the moment.
- [34:24]
C
Excellent. Chris Brown. Is it possible for the same person to do that about switch like change of tempo, change of mode or do you need to swap the person out? Because I'm just reminded here of, you know, certain, certain tribal formations in, in. In sort of North America where they had a peace. Literally had a peace chief. And the peace chief would be the person in charge of the tribe during times of peace. But they'd have a war chief that would swap in if ever they was it. They were in a situation where a paga was going on because. Because different skills needed. Right. Different skills needed. Do we need to have a similar setup where we swap sort of the leadership based on the external circumstances, which is what I think this guy Ryan Burst will try to do or is it possible for the individual to kind of do a mindset shift and apply it in a different way? Thought on it, yeah.
- [35:18]
G
I would say also just to go back to the point as well, when everybody was talking about that, my thought on this was first of all we're looking at the outcome of why is the business got into such a shitty position whereby they're having to let go of all these people. Like where does that lie there? And the second one is, which then connects to the point that you're saying here, which is for sure somebody who's working at a thousand person organization typically has a different mindset to somebody that you need at a 20, 50, 100 person organization. There's different levels of you need to be switched on about stuff, you need to have a different mindset about things. So I would actually agree and I've seen this firsthand where you get to these different inflection points, points in startups where you've got someone who's very good at stage maybe 50 to 250 or so and then after that it's not really their cup of tea either. They're not very open to doing that themselves because they're personally aware of where they want to go. But other, other people can take that step and continue to grow. So I think it's like anything, it's however you want to look at it. It's a bit like you have a football team or whatever, there'll be certain people who are good for certain things and you need to know when the right point is where you need somebody to step on or step off for the business.
- [36:26]
C
Yeah, I think so. Any thoughts on this? Adam Gordon? I'd love to get your view on it. Like do you need different personalities for different stages of your business? That doesn't seem like too far a stretch to think about, does it? And you need to reshuffle based on external circumstances.
- [36:44]
A
Yeah, 100%. So when we were talking earlier about startups, for example, a lot of startups, maybe even most startups, I don't know, tech startups are founded by engineers and engineers think in quite binary terms. There's a right and there's a wrong, there's a black and there's a white. But as an organization grows and it starts to have more people, that doesn't necessarily work quite the same. On this concept of like people who align item on the balance sheet. I mean I don't disagree with that and I deliberately only have three people in my company, we're doing the job of about 20 people and we've only got three because we're just so, so efficient. So I do agree with that and I've taken that line myself. However, if you are in a highly, highly competitive talent environment like professional services or healthcare or like big tech, I feel like a lot of people just don't want to be considered that. And therefore you are losing a competitive lever in terms of talent attraction by just going, we pay you this amount, get on with it. You're in that box and that's what you are. And you're a resource. So I think it can. I mentioned in the comments, like for an Elon Musk type business where you're sleeping under the desk for a couple of hours and then get on with the rest of your job or else you're fired. Fine. That's a competitive strategy by a business like that. You're not going to do that at PwC, for example, so. But I'm, I'm really enjoying hearing everybody's perspectives.
- [38:15]
C
Yeah, it's interesting and I'm, I'm pleased we haven't gone down the, the moralizing route because, you know, people are trying to make decisions, I think not necessarily for, you know, performative purposes, trying to save things a little bit. You know, as a CEO, I guess your job is to try and turn, turn the board around if it's not working. Let's talk about operational function. What is the difference in actual things they do? People Ops versus hr. Again, there's a ton of overlap. Again there's people think they're actually totally semantic. But if we could pick out a few things where there is difference and you know, consistently enough difference, what would those things be that would help clarify in my own mind any thoughts on this. I'll open it out. Anybody can answer this.
- [39:04]
E
I can give some thoughts from my end. I don't think there's any like universally agreed differences between these things. I'm going to go a little off piece, but I promise it's relevant. In like 1996, I think it was the Ulrich model kind of came out as being like the preeminent way to run your HR team. And then we had HR shared services in that model with bps, which is a very brand new idea. Business partners. And that was the way that we ran our HR teams for a really long time. So when I started working In HR about 15 years ago, what my team did was, at least what I did was I physically printed out letters of offer, I put them into an envelope, I mailed them, I got them back, I scanned them, I emailed them to myself, and I uploaded them to PeopleSoft. And I thought that was like the best job ever. The work that we've done since those days has changed so dramatically. If there's a people team out there now that is still printing, signing, scanning, uploading letters of offer, I would like to hear it. There are better ways to do it. But what I think is interesting is that the work back then was broadly administrative. It required a great deal of human labor in order just to get keep on top of the compliance that was required to run a business and to process payroll. And we don't really live in that world anymore. And we're like dramatically, I'd say we've been moving further away from what it was when we all started using really modern HR tools. So, such as Greenhouse, you've mentioned, or Lever or Ashby, and the hrs that also exist in that kind of generation. But what has kind of fundamentally remained fairly static is a lot of HR teams are still operating by the Ulrich model, which is a organizational model that was built before some of the people that are working in HR were even born. And I think that is kind of a fundamental reason why people now are starting to try and push back and change the ways we talk about our teams. Because it's so fundamentally different than the HR teams that existed in the past that people are still, I think, kind of burdened with or think about when they think about the roles that they're doing. So to try and drive this mindset shift you spoke about before, I think sometimes people just do need a bit of a facelift and refresh on the way that their roles are being described in order to understand the fundamental differences between one model and the other. But I don't actually think we have one unified like this is a people operations team and this is a HR team. I think what is unified between those things is this is a mechanism to try and point to push the expectations and deliverables of the HR team into a different place that people are more easily able to understand and appreciate. That's my point of view.
- [41:34]
C
Yeah, I appreciate that, Jess. Really good. And I love the fact that you track it to technology transformation. So in other words, hr, classically, if you're in filing cabinet era, a lot of your time is going to be spent doing literal paper shuffling because there's no efficient way of doing it. So yes, maybe that's the administrative history of this function. But with the use of digitization now, with AI arriving of course, which accelerates sort of the movement of information through a business. Then all of the, if you like, information carriage is no longer part of the function, anybody's function, which may mean change of focus. Adam Horn, I think you want to say something. Go ahead.
- [42:16]
D
Yeah. My broader point in chat was we see a lot of startups who started in the last like two or three years and the levels of revenue per employee, etc. That they are hitting versus larger companies who have been scaling pre and after Covid. They have this huge advantage and these companies like Bolt are trying to now unpick, frankly to reduce headcount and get to a point where they can stay competitive. That means fewer employees, it means fewer traditional HR issues you don't have, particularly if you're working remotely, which I think he mentioned. It doesn't mean there's no er, challenges, but you are probably less likely to have the level of er, challenges that a much larger business will have. So you don't need the specialist er, teams that larger companies have got. And to Adam's point, I think HR is the sort of bigger, broader catch all and it is interchangeable. Some of the most progressive startups will have a head of HR and you know, they could be doing, you know, some of the most incredible stuff. But I think where the slight difference, maybe, maybe if there is some intentionality behind it is I see people ops as being that sort of mindset of trying to highly optimize your people. And take, if you look at your, some of these startups are doing now with your perplexities and curses, etc, you are building the sort of operating system, as it were, behind your people and your job is to get the maximum level of performance from those people as possible. So everything that Adam said there, like the processes, the systems, the tools, how do we automate and knit these things together to make our people's lives as easy as possible so they can do as good a job as possible. That's what traditional HR do and they are separate.
- [43:57]
C
Yeah, I'm going to summarize that real quick and forgive me Adam, but I want to use a crude summary which doesn't do just, just to your nuance, but basically performance management was, let me be a line manager issue, like employee enablement. Line managers do that but the HR just don't. A reactive type of function, but people ops perhaps do. So people ops are a enabler. They have to think, okay, do the people have the tools they need? Is there a better way of doing it? Where's the training Basically enablement, function. Manjuri, you're shaking your head. I need to hear your thoughts.
- [44:32]
A
Go ahead.
- [44:33]
F
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for that. I have lots to say but I think the time is not enough. I'll come back to this. People ops is for me, it's what keeps the lights on and it's the dissatisfier part of the organizational psychology. So they are the ones who are ensuring that your contracts are signed, your termination agreements are signed. So preventing risk, preventing any kind of compliance issues which is, which can be really, really. Which can really land an organization in trouble if you don't have that. But that's the operational angle. They also maintain the technology ops of people side people tech ops, the hris side, data maintenance, etc. A lot of that is done by people ops and these are different operating models across corporates, across scale ups and across startups. You don't have the same operating model in the same form in different organization. That copy paste doesn't work. Now to the point of we need less resources, etc. I want to bring a very interesting point here. After this whole hoopla happened with this Bolt CEO, the mobility company Bolt actually had to come out into the social media and they had posting that we love our HR team, we appreciate our people and we have not done any layoffs with our HR team. In fact we are hiring these right. So I think that's, that's where I want to go back to when I said what good looks like for your ultimate leader. These are the. And, and I've seen those examples in my own life where a leader has partnered with me at that adult level understanding what HR can bring for them. We have seen a success, successful turnaround for business. So you talk about arrs. I can, I can give you a result of the first two successful quarters of Miro. After working and partnering with our CRO who understands the value that I bring in and our organization brings in. But on the other hand you have a lot of. And this is going back to last week in Stockholm. In the future Talent Conference and future Talent Summit conference there was a panel of VCs and I had never. This was an eye opening thing for me. There was a presentation by one of the VCs that showed two sides of the board. One side of the board shows dangers and the other shows opportunities. And in the dangers and this is the most interesting part, this VC showed one element as tech pros and it was an eye opening aspect because a lot of us talk about it. It's not because we don't like tech bros. Tech bros are doing good stuff. But there are a lot of things that they don't open their eyes to and are not not ready to learn. And this is where it was like VCs are thinking at a different angle. The other thing that he said, they don't want to invest in a company that just cuts, cuts, cuts and cuts. They want to invest in a company that thinks when they hire. That's what I, you know, I was really impressed Adam when you said I have three people, I don't need more. I think before I have work, you know, I'm with AI. You need to really think when you hire who you hire. And not every time blame. The kind of third thing that I would come to is the war and peace time human resources organizations, people and culture teams have taken companies through Covid era, the overnight switches to virtual environments. Some of the leaders don't even know how that happened. As a TA leader at that time, I know how I changed hiring globally from in office to remote. And still we succeeded and hired success. 6,000 people in a year. But where does that leader say what, what did your TA organization do if it didn't have that? Who would do that? Second, we've all seen the impact of Russia, Ukraine, war. I was working for a company that has seen it pretty close. If not for the HR team, that culture part wouldn't have remained in the organization. So when founders say something like that, peacetime, wartime, your HR organizations have actually seen, seen you through, made you successful through these war times already. What, what really kind of put me off and I heard this CEO say that was the disrespect and you don't have the other side of the story. Do you have the Chro or the VP people actually saying how many times she or he would have brought these problems to the CEO and what was done with these problems? We only heard that HR is bringing me noise after I lead the team. I don't see, I don't hear any noise. Yeah, because there's nobody to bring it to you doesn't mean that the noise has gone. So that's, that's, that's. I think that's something that triggered a lot of us in this conversation with this bold CEO. Not the good one.
- [49:06]
C
No, appreciate that Manjuri. And quite right. I think we, one thing we can agree on was that the, the incident was, was profoundly disrespectful. I think we can all agree with that. And maybe that was a calculated gamble to stir a few things up or whatever it is. But let's not sort of not recognize that the guy was, was offensive, especially to the people he let go. Okay folks, we're going to keep going because we've got tons of things to talk about still. But before we come off air, we always have to make sure that we give everyone the opportunity to continue connecting with everyone else and continuing this conversation even when we come off air. Because we do have to come off air in about 15, 15 minutes. So the way in which we have to do that, folks, very straightforward. Grab your LinkedIn URL, share it in the chat stream. If you're watching this on Crowdcast, if you're watching this on any of the other LinkedIns, just grab your LinkedIn URL and share it in the comments. And then make sure you connect with everyone else who's doing the same. And worst case scenario, you're going to walk away with a dozen or so new connections that you can continue this conversation with. Okay, let's move on to the, the, the, the, the, the people Ops rebranding the re. Do you think that HR eventually recedes? Because it's a fact that people Ops now has a little bit more of the zeitgeist. And even though let's say there may be genuine substantive differences, but we're gonna also see some sort of like rebrand all the way through as companies move from, you know, large pyramids to much flatter diamonds. Let's say org structure changes, become more AI enabled. Does people Ops eventually become the dominant way in which people who work in the people industry describe each other? Any thoughts on that? Darren Bush?
- [51:05]
B
Yeah, I mean just as well. Just listening as well to everyone. I think everyone believes in terms of the value that HR provides. But do we, do we have a PR issue here? Hence why is this the, the rebrand around the people Ops, Are we sharing enough around the value we're giving? Are we. This is, you know, because obviously the policy he's saying those things but if he can see the value each time, would he say those certain things about, about us? I mean HR seems to be always the full. The full. I would say well I'm full person to always be like let's, let's reduce. Let's list like you wouldn't say that about your sales team. You wouldn't say about limiting your finance team. HR is very much a bedrock of it says what we do. To answer your question, I do believe that it will change. Unfortunately I have very depressing view in terms of the global employment market in the Future. But I think those companies will get smaller, they will scale down. And I think, and I feel very much on the point Adam was saying about the resource side. There are certain things you can get now where you potentially you could, you know, there's agents there you can chat to to, to get your information much quicker in the flow of the mo. In the flow of work. Do you need to have such a large scale on the people side? But the same also is every other function as well is looking at themselves and doing that. So I think there's probably two things is we probably need to do like an exercise in terms of showing our value and also redesigning around like what. How we can actually what can we do in this new era?
- [52:29]
C
Yeah, very good. And rebranding may be a sign that we have a PR problem. You don't see software engineering having to rebrand. You know, sales doesn't rebrand, but the people ops, recruitment, personnel. We've had this long sort of history of maybe not articulating our case particularly well internally. Okay, Jess, your view on this people ops, does it become the dominant terminology, sort of say into how we describe ourselves?
- [52:59]
E
Yeah, look, I think despite the fact that I kind of disagree broadly that HR is a negative way to describe it, I do think that the kind of commonly held position is people don't love being referred to as resources and people don't love the name hr. They have negative connotations with it. I think a lot of teams are for that reason changing towards something different. So yes, I don't really think it's like particularly meaningful in my day to day work. I think Manjuri also said, like, I'm kind of six, one, two dozen the other. I'm like fairly lukewarm on whether or not I think this actually matters. I would much rather be doing things that actually have impact in my team, like arranging them in a way that means that they can deliver great work. Teaching them how to lead this AI transformation and the skills gaps we're going to see emerge, understand how to assess performance and pay and what is starting to become an extremely imbalanced and an equitable world of opportunity. These are the things I'm much more interested in talking about. Whatever my team wants to call themselves, you can go ahead, go for it.
- [54:00]
C
What about skills, Chris Brown? What about do we need to look for different skills? If we do shift to a more people ops type of type of view,
- [54:14]
G
I would, Yeah, I think, in short, we, we need to look for different skills. I think there's in my Experience, you typically get a very common kind of profile who's good on the classic HR ops or people op side of things. Someone who's very good around creating contracts, the repetition of everything. But I don't think we can afford to continue doing that. You only have to, you know what's going on at the moment with LLMs and everything else. While I don't think it's going to dictate our lives so much as some of the tech bros would have us believe, I do think that those companies that are looking at finding these people who are able to do the mundane but also layer on some of the extra parts of the automation side of it. I think those will be the ones who really are able to move things forward and then to really establish people ops as a, I don't want to say like a property function, but one that finally gets the respect that it deserves. Because we all know that when everything's running smoothly, you know, you don't hear about anything. But as soon as anything goes wrong, then we're the first ones to get the clap on the back of the head. So yeah, I would say definitely upskilling.
- [55:24]
C
Very interesting. What about sort of the use of automation? Does People Ops become the name of the HR professionals that end up specializing, let's say, and automating processes in different departments and so forth? Do you see that as a pot potential future Adam Horn?
- [55:42]
D
Yeah, my point in chat was like again, different horses for courses. Like I think in the startup world People ops has been the default for years. Honestly, like HR really hasn't been a title that you see in a great deal of like eight, like young startups. But we are already moving beyond that a little bit now in terms of like seeing some of the roles and areas within people teams that are springing up now around AI and automation. People teams are hiring for AI engineers and that's really exciting. But like also we don't know what happens with that. I think also we will eventually start to see that responsibility, I think disperse back out into other teams and you probably will have someone automating within a particular function still. It won't all be on hr, but I think HR probably in the startup world again are the ones leading a lot of this stuff in companies, which I think is really cool.
- [56:33]
C
Yeah, it's an opportunity, isn't it? I mean, I don't know whether anybody saw, what is it, the Atlassian chro ended up becoming head of automation or something and it was like actually makes sense because you're looking at Organizational processes, job construction and so on. Maybe the job is to think about okay, can a human do it? Can a robot do it? Expansion of scope to what HR traditionally does Manjuri bring you on. It's interesting to see your job title is probably the longest job title on LinkedIn, isn't it? And yes, the idea is org success. So it's reorientation on managing the human resources which seem in some way to be separable to the business to actually the purpose is to enable the organization to make the organization or succeed. As the change as that job title expanded the sort of your scope in any way.
- [57:33]
F
Manjiri it was the first. It actually set us up for success. Miro didn't have business partners, HR business partners in the. In the ulrich way. As such they were HR generalists. And when my previous chro who actually hired me into Miro joined the company, this was the first support function, partnering enablement function that she was setting up for the business leaders. Because I mean let's face it, for the past two years at that time Miro was not successful post the hype in the COVID time. So this is where she placed it because this is converting your talent strategy first of all designing it, converting the talent strategy into business performance. And we wanted to drive a high performance culture ultimately get those quotas achieved over exceeded and get the ER into books. And with this, this was the change that she brought. And rather than calling us head of business partner and business partners etc. The head of the function was called head of GTM or AMT which is the engineering side org success. So in that way you also have leaders of the organization viewing you not as traditional HR but viewing you as a partner of driving the success for the organization. Viewing you as a partner as a part of the GTM leadership team rather than an extended arm of the. Of the HR team. And it, it helps. I've seen so many times that people just messaged me and said HR said this, can you talk to them? And I was like okay, I'm also part of the team, but fine, I'm fine. If that's the. So I think the words in, in those senses when you're starting the. Starting a function or setting up a culture, you want leaders from the other side also to have an eye level conversation. This helps to begin with. And you then of course need to define what is the. The scope, where is this role going to partner with the leader, etc under that.
- [59:24]
C
Yeah, really interesting org structure. Dan Bush, you wanted to say something?
- [59:28]
B
Yeah, probably a Little bit on the org structure as well. But the, there's. I think everyone at G agrees here maybe that there was a lot of administration in hr. So there's so much in administration form filling checks and balances. We talking about the automations piece. That is we are open to that kind of changing at all. I think about that the org structure. I work for two enterprise companies. How many times I must come through about a dozen org structures. We're going to take this, this division, we're going to smash this into this other division. We then have to finance an HR on the hook for this. And this comes back to again, there's a lot of work that goes into it and there's no real value apart from obviously managers kind of saying this is how we're going to set it up. There's so much work that goes into it and it's not, it's not very administrative. So that can change. Maybe an audit of all the things we do as a function and say what is administrative? How can we remove that? How can we automate that? So other guys pointing out how can we put a bot in there too to replace it. So I definitely start seeing that happening over the next 12 months.
- [60:29]
C
Very interesting. It'll be interesting to Track sort of LinkedIn data, wouldn't it to see the rise and decline of certain job roles. We saw that a little bit during COVID where you know, pre Covid I think was the fastest growing job was the DNI moment. Of course Trump comes in, DNI drops to the through the floor. Maybe we could tap up LinkedIn again and say okay, where is People Ops? And within that nested within new People Ops. What are the new job roles that are being created there? Job titles being created there. That could give us a bit of inspiration, you know. Okay folks, we have to leave it there because we've had a fantastic conversation. I don't want anybody to bake any further in this heat. Please have a very good weekend. I've got to thank our amazing guests for joining us. Jess, wonderful to see you. How long are you hanging around for the in the UK by the way? You're going shortly, are you?
- [61:20]
E
I'm going to be in the UK for July 9 for the modern People Leader Live, the conference that's being held there by the the MPL boys.
- [61:29]
C
Okay, cool. So I hope you boom, boom, boomeranging back to the uk. Fantastic. I'll definitely see you when you come back. But as I say New York happening for me, I think mid July. So if you're there, we'll Manjuri Cena,
- [61:41]
E
great to see you.
- [61:42]
C
We'll catch up soon. Chris Brown, Adam Horn, Darren Bush, thank you all for joining. Brilliant to have you on the show, folks. Learn a ton.
- [61:51]
F
See ya. Bye. Bye.
- [61:54]
C
Cool, cool, cool, folks. Thanks for watching everybody. I know it's like a super hot day. I've always got other things to do, so I do thank you for your attention. Hope you enjoyed the show and you got some value from that. We'll be back next week, of course, every week. No fail, next week is directly after Wreckfest, in fact. So I'm not even sure how ready we are to have that conversation, but we're going to be talking about the evolution of talent CRM, folks. How do you build community in the AI powered era? Now, Adam Gordon, I might actually bring you in as a guest for that. Forget co hosting as a guest for this show because this is actually something
- [62:29]
A
you might know something about. Yeah, but I'm not gonna be, I'm gonna be on a boat and I won't have any wi fi. So I, I ain't here, I'm afraid.
- [62:39]
C
Sadly, no, that was the optimal. All right, no worries, Adam. Listen, great, Senior, thank you so much for joining as well. I'll see you around, mate. All right, folks, that's it. I'll see you in Rec Fest. Okay. Next week, Thursday. By the way, if you are looking for tickets, I've got about two complimentary tickets left for Wreckfest. So if you're still watching this somehow, because it should have gone off air, but if you're still watching this and you want a free ticket, just DM me in the comments. Just let me know whether you want a ticket and I'll DM you and we'll get you down to Nebworth and we'll have a good chit chat there. All right, that's it, everyone.