Built by People Leaders

Timur Novopashin founded International HR Club while working in-house as a talent acquisition leader at a large international food tech organization. The community now serves 1,800+ HR and talent professionals across Slack and Telegram, operating as a free, curated peer network for globally-distributed People teams. Timur Novopashin built the International HR Club on a core framework: human-centered, AI-powered people processes supported by verified membership, zero-toxicity moderation, and structured knowledge sharing.

For CHROs and VPs of People at 100–1,500 person companies, the operational friction is immediate. A company expanding into multiple EU markets needs salary benchmarks, immigration law guidance, and location prioritization—fast. Timur Novopashin explains how International HR Club members crowdsource these answers in real time, turning community space into a practical business tool. The episode unpacks how People leaders choose between local, global, subscription-based, and niche communities, and when building your own network becomes the right move.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

Tom Hunter founded Story Recruitment seven months ago after a decade in accounting and finance recruitment. The firm specializes in placing first finance hires and CFOs for founder-led tech, fintech, and deep tech companies across Australia—sectors that capture 80% of the country's VC capital. Hunter's core framework centers on storytelling-led hiring: candidates at this caliber join for mission and vision, not marginal salary increases. He built a network of 29,000+ finance professionals and hosts The CFO Track podcast, where he interviews Australia's top CFOs on leadership and scaling.

People leaders at scaleups face a recurring friction point: founders burning 20%+ of their week on finance or recruitment decisions they shouldn't own. Hunter unpacks when to make the first finance hire (hint: it's rarely a CFO), how fractional models deliver strategic value without full-time cost, and why the 100–150 employee mark is the culture inflection point where storytelling either scales or collapses.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

Ralph Kellogg is Chief Human Resources Officer at Lutheran Family Services, TEDx speaker, and author of Leading While Human: Notes I Wish Someone Had Given Me. He brings 20+ years of executive leadership experience and publicly disclosed his anxiety disorder and panic disorder diagnosis in his 2022 TED talk. In this episode, Ralph Kellogg introduces the ACT model — Acknowledged, Compassionate Accountability and Transparency — a framework he created during the pandemic to equip managers with a structured approach to mental health conversations.

For people leaders at 100–1,500 employee companies, this episode addresses a critical scaleup challenge: informal manager-employee relationships that worked at 50 people break down as headcount grows. Ralph Kellogg explains how to train managers to build trust before crisis moments, how to avoid the stigma trap of pulling assignments away, and why curiosity — not fixing — is the leadership discipline that scales. He also shares the operational case for relationship-building: Gallup data shows 70% of people leave organizations because of their relationship with their manager, and replacing a high performer costs more than investing in the manager's relational capacity.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

Jen Paxton is SVP of People & Talent at Roofr, a high-growth SaaS company, where she reports directly to the CEO and owns both talent acquisition and HR — the full employee lifecycle. A three-time startup-to-acquisition People leader with more than a decade in startups, Jen has scaled companies to $50M ARR and built an HRBP coaching program at Roofr where every manager gets a dedicated HRBP as a personal coach. Her single biggest argument: HR should lead the AI transformation inside the company, not wait for it to land on their desk.

For People teams at 100–1,500 person scaleups, informal communication breaks down and no one has full visibility into what every department is building. Jen explains how HR's cross-cutting position — touching every department — makes it the right function to own AI change management, communication, and cross-team visibility.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

Johanna Flórez Restrepo is LATAM Chief People Officer at CryoHoldco Biotech, one of the world's top five stem cell banks, with over 15 years leading HR and organizational transformation across 8 countries, 2 continents, and organizations of 120,000+ employees. Her single biggest argument for People leaders: stop asking for a seat at the table and build real influence, so business leaders say "I need you here with me." Johanna Flórez Restrepo teaches a three-part Influence-over-Imposition framework — listen to understand, anchor to the final objective, and match empathy to each person's level.

In this episode, Johanna Flórez Restrepo unpacks the friction that hits companies scaling through rapid growth, M&A, and digital transformation: policy and compliance stop working as the primary lever with CEOs and directors, cultural change starts feeling like invisible work, and a single crisis — like a full cyber attack — can put payroll for thousands of employees at risk overnight. For People teams at high-growth companies where the leadership team can no longer oversee everything directly, her operating principles turn HR from rule enforcer into trusted business partner.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Johanna Flórez Restrepo on LinkedIn

Kylee Ingram is the co-founder and CEO of Wizer, a decision intelligence platform that maps how decisions get made inside organizations. Before decision science, Kylee Ingram spent years in documentary filmmaking, television production, and six years as head of production at a startup accelerator, giving her both a human and a systems view of organizational problems. Her core concept is cognitive drift: as companies scale, decision-making narrows toward sameness because the top leadership's thinking style — 75% of Western CEOs are outcomes- or options-focused — gets replicated down through middle management, eroding the cognitive diversity that existed at founding.

For a company between 100 and 1,500 employees, this drift is the quiet friction point. The informal alignment of the founding team disappears, teams clump into two or three decision archetypes each, and leaders can no longer oversee every call directly. Kylee Ingram argues the fix is not restructuring — it is designing who is in the room for each decision.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

Stacey Richey is Global Vice President of People at Smartcat, an AI-native technology company. With over 20 years leading people operations in high-growth technology companies and an early career in private equity consulting spanning firms from $5M to $5B, Stacey built the "intelligence fabric layer" — a system that records and extracts signals from every meeting, call, Slack message, and email to identify high-leverage workflows for AI and to create one single source of truth across the organization.

Most companies treat AI as a productivity tool, which produces marginal efficiency but misses the structural redesign that compounds. Stacey argues that for a 100–1,500 person scaleup, institutional knowledge trapped in individual heads gets lost every time someone leaves. Her fix is to redesign work around "jobs to be done and missions to be handled" and to make the People team the owner of that transformation.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

Clark Ingram served as Chief Human Resources Officer for four companies across four different industries — publicly traded and privately held — over a 30-year career that began in finance, not HR. That finance lens is the foundation of his core operating philosophy: people and profits are co-equals, held together rather than ranked against each other, and every workforce decision carries a number. Clark Ingram is the Founder and President of People Profits LLC, a financially focused human capital management consulting firm built around three chronic problems: employee turnover, chronically open positions, and skills gaps. His standard engagement target is to cut a client's turnover by 40 to 50 percent in the first year.

The operational problem Clark Ingram unpacks in this episode quietly breaks mid-sized companies: the assumption that more recruiting solves a retention problem. At the 100–1,500 headcount stage, people teams often run hard on the recruiting treadmill — hiring fast, watching attrition eat the gains, and never diagnosing why the exits keep happening. Clark Ingram's argument is that the root cause is almost always organizationally specific, that compensation programs built on tenure rather than value accelerate the problem, and that most HR teams have handed leadership a scapegoat — "turnover is a leadership issue" — instead of owning the fixes within their control.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

Savio P. Clemente is a keynote and TEDx speaker, healthcare leadership strategist, journalist, and board-certified coach who has conducted more than 2,000 interviews with executives, clinicians, and high performers. A two-time cancer survivor and stem cell transplant recipient, Savio treated his 29-day hospital stay in 2024 as a field study in high-stakes decision-making, and built his Adaptive Resilience Framework around what he observed. His central thesis is that the first thing that fails is clarity and after that performance.

The episode targets the Post-Crisis Leadership Gap — the period after a restructure, leadership change, or failed initiative when things look stable but decision quality, alignment, and confidence quietly erode. For People teams at scaleups of 100–1,500 employees, this is the exact moment informal oversight breaks down and no one owns the recalibration. Savio explains why this drift widens into a chasm when leaders skip the recovery phase.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

David González is Head of People Performance & Growth who joined Snowflake to build its performance architecture after the company came out of hypergrowth. David holds a PhD in Performance Improvement and started his career in advertising, working on Coca-Cola, Bud Light, and Procter brands before shifting into People work through his "Brand ME" project and the Center for Creative Leadership. His central argument in this episode: use AI to automate the administrative core of HR and redeploy People professionals as "performance architects" — executive coaches and strategic truth-tellers who handle judgment, politics, and behavioral change.

For People leaders at 100–1,500 person scaleups, González targets the exact friction of this stage: data scattered across the company, multiple inconsistent performance scales, and siloed, subjective decisions. He describes arriving at Snowflake to find "an untended garden" and walks through the Performance Excellence Architecture he built to replace it.

Links & Resources Mentioned: