Human Cloud

By WRKdefined Podcast NetworkBusiness Technology Management

Human Cloud episodes

October 27Charlie McGinn, President at Safeguard Global, Why Growth Now Comes From Global Talent Pools
The best engineer for your next project might be in Romania. The best accountant might be in Mexico. For most companies, hiring them used to mean registering an entity, waiting eight months, and hoping the market worked out. So they didn't. Growth stayed capped at whoever they could find, and afford, at home.
That has flipped. When Charlie McGinn started selling employer of record in 2011, buyers asked how it was even legal. Now they ask why one provider over another, and the smartest companies use EOR as a growth strategy: a way to reach talent pools they can't find or can't afford in the US, and to test a market before they commit to an entity.
We're building Human Cloud so companies can find the partner who gives them access to that talent in minutes instead of months.
In this episode, Charlie McGinn shares:
Why growth now comes from accessing global talent pools, and why "a pocket of very highly skilled individuals in Romania" beats competing for the same people at home

PEO vs EOR vs staff leasing, in plain English: what each one solves, and why co-employment is illegal in some countries

The real cost of the cheap EOR: a $100 to $200 monthly fee on the label, then FX, transfer, and termination fees on top

If not EOR, then what: contractor misclassification, back taxes plus a 100% fine, and why an entity takes months to set up and just as long to unwind

Talent access is the new EOR: how sourcing and EOR are merging so companies can hire globally without paying 15 to 30% placement fees, and why Human Cloud and Safeguard Global are building toward the same future
Charlie McGinn is President at Safeguard Global. He joined in 2011 as the first sales hire for its employer of record business, rose to SVP of Global Sales and Alliances, and now leads its recruiting and embedded services.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms — so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.

Proudly presented by Safeguard Global. The employer of record that lets you hire, pay, and manage teams in 187 countries without the risk. ⁠Meet Safeguard Global on Human Cloud⁠.
52 min
October 20Amir Reiter, Founder & Chairman at CloudTask, Humans + Agents For Sales & GTM
Everyone in go-to-market got the same memo: blast a million emails, automate LinkedIn, plug in an AI SDR, and watch the pipeline fill. It is not working. Inboxes are numb, positive replies get answered by bots, and the CEOs who tried to automate the whole revenue team are not doing well. Whatever is easy stops working the moment everyone does it.
Amir Reiter built CloudTask so companies that are not Anthropic or Meta can still hire A-player sales talent: nearshore teams in LATAM, same time zone, paired with leadership in the US, with the systems and coaching to be productive in 90 days. CloudTask has staffed go-to-market teams for Expensify, Apollo, RingCentral, and Vonage.
We're building Human Cloud to do the same thing across every flexible talent category, so businesses can find the right partner for the hard roles in minutes instead of months.
In this episode, Amir Reiter shares:
Why the AI SDR is not working, why "whatever is easy does not work," and why the phone, the five-minute callback, and the 60-second ad follow-up are the highest-converting plays again

The barbell method: leaders in San Francisco or Austin, three SDRs per account executive in LATAM, and why nobody builds nearshore leadership unless they sell there

Contractor of record vs employer of record: when a five-person remote team should skip the EOR, when an office or an IPO means you need one, and why the right agreement per person beats one policy for everyone

The go-to-market structure for a 10-person startup, a 2,000-person company, and a Microsoft, and why you do not title a CRO before $15 to $20 million in ARR

Agents that come with the talent: why the next LATAM hire ships with an agent, how AI already coaches and scores 100 reps every morning, and why Human Cloud and CloudTask are solving the same access problem from opposite ends
Amir Reiter is the Founder and Chairman of CloudTask, the LATAM-focused marketplace for go-to-market and sales talent, based in Medellín, Colombia. He also serves as CRO of a hyper-growth company, where he is building a 100-person sales team.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If building a sales team across the US and LATAM without the compliance headache is on your desk, Safeguard Global owns that risk for you.

About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms — so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.

Presented by Safeguard Global. The employer of record that lets you hire, pay, and manage teams in 187 countries without the risk. ⁠Meet Safeguard Global on Human Cloud⁠.
38 min
October 06Joel Kammeyer, Head of Community at Direct Collective, How Connection and Community Turn Contingent Buyers Into Leaders
The contingent workforce is the one corner of business where the playbooks are not public. Banks, the Big Four, and Fortune 500 programs do not publish how they run their VMS, vet a freelancer, or catch candidate fraud. That knowledge lives in people's heads. Which means the leaders who win are the ones with the best access to other leaders.
Joel Kammeyer joined Direct Collective in June 2026 after 14 years running programs at Epiq and Cerner. Direct Collective is a curated community of 300+ contingent workforce leaders: Ask the Community, city chapters, monthly member matches, peer pods, and a no-fee job network for leaders caught in a reduction.
We're building Human Cloud to do the same thing for the supply side, so businesses can find, vet, and safely engage the right flexible talent solution in minutes instead of months.
In this episode, Joel shares:
Why "buyer" is the wrong word, and how a peer network is what earns a contingent leader a seat at the table
The three things keeping 300+ program leaders up at night: agentic AI inside the program, candidate fraud across the full worker lifecycle, and the freelancer and SOW spend still outside the VMS
Why AI cannot replace peers in this industry: there is no public data, so the human in the loop is the data
A day, a month, and a quarter in the life of a Direct Collective member, from Ask the Community to chapters and peer pods
Why the hiring manager is already going around procurement, and what the carrot and the stick look like for leaders who do or do not build a network
Joel Kammeyer is Head of Community and Contingent Workforce Programs at Direct Collective, following seven years running the contingent program at Epiq and building the program and internal MSP at Cerner from scratch.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
42 min
September 26Eric Ly, Co-Founder & CEO at KarmaCheck, How Back Office Automation In Background Checks Is Radically Cutting Healthcare Costs, And What Every Talent Leader Can Learn From It
Everyone wants to talk about AI in the front office: matching, interviewing, diagnosis, the sexy stuff. Almost nobody is talking about the back office, where administrative burden has quietly become the biggest cost in the system. In healthcare, the number of doctors and nurses has stayed roughly flat for 50 years while the number of administrators has gone up like there's no tomorrow. That curve is the problem.
Eric Ly built KarmaCheck to bend it. KarmaCheck is a background check and credentialing company focused on healthcare, where credentialing is the path to reimbursement and a doctor who gets credentialed in one month instead of six means more revenue and more care delivered.
We're building Human Cloud to do the same thing for the flexible workforce, so businesses can find, vet, and deploy the right talent solution in minutes instead of months without the administrative drag.
In this episode, Eric Ly shares:
Why the AGI debate is now an academic question: the technology is already good enough to shift real work, whether or not we ever cross the line
The 50-year chart every operator should see: flat providers, exploding administrators, and why that is the real driver of healthcare cost
Why credentialing is the path to revenue, and what cutting it from six months to one does to a health system's margin
Why the biggest AI opportunity is in the back office, not the front office, and why almost nobody is building there
How every compliance-heavy function, from procurement to HR, has the same disease, and why Human Cloud and KarmaCheck are attacking it from opposite ends
Eric Ly is Co-Founder and CEO of KarmaCheck. He previously co-founded LinkedIn, where he served as its founding CTO, and has spent three decades building in Silicon Valley across multiple waves of technology.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms — so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
36 min
September 24Kelly Monahan, Founder of Beyond the Desk, How Leaders Can Reclaim the Plot With AI And The Future Of Work
The tech industry laid off thousands of people 18 months ago. This past year it hired almost all of them back, nearly one to one. That whiplash is what happens when companies chase AI headlines instead of a workforce strategy. Technology does not create value. People working with technology create value.
Kelly Monahan built Beyond the Desk to keep leaders from losing the plot on exactly this. Her team of behavioral scientists works with executives on the people side of AI transformation: change management, reskilling, and work redesign. Her new book, Reclaim the Plot: How Leaders Rewrite the Story When AI Rewrites Work, is out September 29.
We're building Human Cloud so leaders can act on the same thesis from the talent side, finding and deploying the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months, and re-spending the capacity AI frees up on people who create new value.
In this episode, Kelly shares:
Why AI transformation has no technology problems left. The tooling and data are solved. What remains is change management, reskilling, and work redesign, and that work belongs to HR, not the CIO
The CHRO skills supply problem. Boards now want systems thinkers with product and engineering fluency, and Google's formula is a third product design, a third engineering, a third traditional HR expertise
AI is the elevator, not the skyscraper. Companies find 45 to 50 percent automation in real workflows, but few know how to re-spend that capacity dividend on new value instead of headcount cuts
The dark corners: "tokens over talent" mandates, arbitrary 25 percent workforce reduction targets, and why every AI agent still needs a locus of control with human accountability
Why the flexible workforce wins this transition. Independents keep growing while workforce participation shrinks, small businesses are building AI-native flexible teams first, and it's the same thesis Human Cloud is building infrastructure for
Kelly Monahan is the founder of Beyond the Desk, former leader of the Upwork Research Institute with prior roles at Meta, Accenture, and Deloitte, and author of Reclaim the Plot (out September 29, 2026).
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
38 min
September 22Tony Buffum & Colin LaBeau, The Science Powering True Speed to Talent Transformation
The share of workers in traditional full-time jobs shrinks every year. Companies that keep fishing in that pond are competing over a smaller and smaller pool. The talent that is actually growing works on contract, works remotely, and lives on the other side of state lines most employers are not set up to cross.
Colin LaBeau runs FoxHire, an employer of record that has served staffing and recruiting buyers and sellers since 1992. FoxHire builds the compliance rules for all 50 states directly into its software, so hiring across the country stops depending on somebody remembering the law.
We're building Human Cloud to solve the same problem from the discovery side, so businesses can find the right flexible talent solution and engage it without inheriting a compliance project.
In this episode, Colin LaBeau shares:
Why payroll and employment law turn the US into "the fifty countries of the US", from Massachusetts pay-timing rules to three different PTO accrual laws stacked on one worker in Chicago
Why speed to talent, not cost savings, is the real value of an EOR, and why the metric that matters is hours shaved off offer-to-start
The onboarding trap nobody prices in: a new hire chasing four separate vendor emails, and what integrating those vendors into one flow actually does to time-to-start
The risk you cannot put in a bill rate, including PAGA exposure in California and misclassification class actions in Illinois, and why the real danger is what you do not know you do not know
Where he thinks onboarding goes next: a worker-owned digital wallet holding credentials, IDs and screening results, so the same background check stops getting run from scratch every time
Why 24 states requiring healthcare staffing licenses, bill rate caps and margin caps is not a passing phase, and why employment gets harder from here
Colin LaBeau is President of FoxHire, an employer of record specializing in compliant employment across all 50 states, with deep expertise in healthcare staffing and onboarding speed.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
35 min
September 15Mark Herbick, Founder & CEO at Pursant, The Science Behind Selling A Business
Every founder running a talent solution gets the same email. A broker, a strategic, a private equity associate, asking whether you would ever consider a conversation. Most founders have no framework for answering, so they either ignore it or take a meeting they were never ready for.
Mark Herbick has sat on both sides of that table. He built and exited a national facility services platform, then founded Pursant in 2010. His firm now works on 40 to 50 transactions a year, most of them between $50M and $150M in enterprise value.
We're building Human Cloud to make the flexible workforce market legible from the buyer side, so companies can find and vet talent solutions in minutes instead of months. Mark does the same work from the ownership side, making a company legible to the people who might buy it.
In this episode, Mark Herbick shares:
The three tests that answer "is now the right time to sell": is the business sale-ready, is the market buyer or seller favorable, and are you actually ready to get out
Why a declining sales trend during a sale process kills deals at any size. Buyers will not catch a falling knife. Flat is the worst case you can afford
The counterintuitive state of today's market: buyers are starved for deal flow, private equity has raised more capital than it can deploy, and genuinely good companies are scarce
Why uncertainty no longer stops M&A. It just makes due diligence far more rigorous and far slower
The turkey-in-the-oven problem. Owner readiness gives you no early warning, and by the time the button pops it is too late to build enterprise value
Mark Herbick is the Founder and CEO of Pursant, an M&A advisory firm working on 40 to 50 transactions a year. He completed a dozen of his own transactions as an entrepreneur before founding the firm.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
36 min
September 08Maruf Ahmed, CEO at Dexian, Why Every Leader Should Cut The BPO, Not Headcount, Then Drive 20% Top Line Growth Through AI
Most AI headcount conversations start in the wrong place. A leader sees a 20% workforce reduction and a 10% stock bump and calls it strategy. Maruf Ahmed has watched three technology waves roll through the talent market from inside a company that staffs half the Fortune 500, and he thinks that math is backwards.
The layer AI actually automates is not your team. It is the BPO contract sitting next to it, because low-level repetitive process work is exactly what outsourcing was sold on in the first place. Cut that, and what remains is judgment, relationships, and institutional knowledge. That work gets more valuable, not less.
Dexian has been in business since 1994. Maruf started it with his brother as a side hustle that produced $400 in revenue over its first two years. It is now 70 locations worldwide, 10,000 employees, and 2,000 clients.
We're building Human Cloud from the other side of that same shift, so companies can find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months.
In this episode, Maruf Ahmed shares:
Why the BPO business is in trouble and staffing is not, since AI consumes the repetitive foundational work outsourcing was built on and leaves human judgment as the scarce input
The ROI reframe most C-suites get wrong: stop counting "I saved someone an hour" and start counting top line. Let recruiters screen 10 candidates a day instead of cutting half the team
What is happening to entry-level roles, where demand for junior developers and testers is falling, and why that is the exact tier where people used to learn systems, fail, and build judgment
Why Salesforce refused to let Dexian's digital agent sit a certification exam, and what "it's for humans only" reveals about how unprepared our systems are for a digital workforce
Where rates are actually moving: no wage depression on standard roles, real inflation on AI specialists and forward deployed engineers, and nearshore demand replacing bulk offshoring
Maruf Ahmed is CEO of Dexian, a talent and technology solutions provider he built with his brother from a side business into a global firm, and was named to SIA's 2026 Staffing 100 North America list.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
36 min
September 01Michael Bassin, VP of Sales at Simera, on Turning the Team He Hired Into the Company He Sold
Most talent companies start with a thesis. This one started with a health crisis.
Michael Bassin was a chief revenue officer in Israel when he lost hearing in one ear overnight. The treatment made things worse. Two years of debilitating symptoms later, he left his job, left the country, and started a business for the simplest reason there is: it was the only kind of work he could still do. He could manage about four hours a day, from wherever he happened to be.
So he built a cold email agency and staffed it remotely. Mexico, the Philippines, India, South Africa, the UK. Over a few years he replaced nearly the entire workforce with South Africans, not as a cost decision, but because the work was better. That team became the product. Talent Sam was a complete remote hiring solution for companies hiring in South Africa, with the payroll, tax, compliance, and employer-of-record layer built in. Simera acquired it in 2026.
We're building Human Cloud from the buyer's side of that same problem, so companies can find and deploy vetted global talent partners in minutes instead of months.
In this episode, Michael Bassin shares:
Why the businesses that survive are the ones that own their workforce, not their distribution channel, and how Google and Microsoft deliverability changes killed a profitable agency that depended on them
Why South Africa is a genuine arbitrage: a currency that collapsed on top of first-world infrastructure, education, and work culture that did not
Why the best offshore talent refuses to work freelance, and how misclassification risk quietly forces companies into employer-of-record models
The honest reason a working talent company sells: Talent Sam had HR, payroll, and compliance handled with the press of a button, but sourcing could not keep pace with AI-native recruiters
Why Simera's CEO would rather acquire people than hire them, and what that says about how talent companies get valued now
Michael Bassin is VP of Sales at Simera and the co-founder of Talent Sam, acquired by Simera in 2026. He is also the author of I Am Not a Spy, a memoir of studying openly as a Jew in Egypt and the UAE and later serving as an Arabic interrogator in the Israeli army.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
48 min
August 29Rich Wilson, CEO at Gigged.AI, Special Book Launch: The 40-40-20 Workforce
The 80-20 workforce is over. Full-time headcount is no longer a badge of honor, SOW spend is a $2.1 trillion market and the fastest-growing work category, and every enterprise is being asked what it is doing about AI agents. Rich Wilson has a number for where that lands: 40% full-time, 40% on-demand specialists, 20% AI agents.
Rich coined 40-40-20 in a blog a year ago. A CIO took it to their board as a business model. Now it is a book: The 40/40/20 Workforce, a 39-page, free, ungated guidebook for leaders, built from Gigged.AI customer conversations plus McKinsey, BCG, Gartner, and CIO.com research. Gigged.AI runs the model itself: 8 full-time, a fractional bench nearly double that, AI throughout, 282% growth in 12 months with zero new hires.
We're building Human Cloud to be the front door to the 40% on-demand layer, so businesses can find, vet, and safely engage the right flexible talent solution in minutes instead of months.
In this special book launch episode, Rich shares:
Why 40-40-20 is the enterprise number and 80-20 is the startup number, and why full-time headcount stopped being a badge of honor
Redefine the work before it becomes a role: 80% of the time the answer is a person, 20% of the time it is AI, and you can decide in 20 minutes
Whose fault it is when an agent goes rogue (the person orchestrating it), and why guardrails come before deployment, not after
Why only 30% of projects can be staffed from the skills you already pay for, and how a skills and agent inventory beats writing the Big Four a check
The 500-person company that calls asking for "an agent by Monday," the CEO-led AI mandate that makes adoption easy, and why the biggest adoption headache CIOs report is inside their own dev teams
The line Rich will not cross: an unpaid freelancer on a Friday afternoon talks to a human, not an agent
Rich Wilson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Gigged.AI, following 12 years in recruitment at Allegis Group and three years at Gartner advising the world's largest companies on how they hire. Human Cloud community members can get a free printed copy by messaging Rich.
Read the book free: https://gigged.ai/the-40-40-20-workforce/
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
52 min

About Human Cloud

From the publisher's feed

Welcome to the Human Cloud, where technology-led talent strategies take organizations from human "resources" to human potential. Each week, Matthew Mottola, CEO of Human Cloud and 4x entrepreneur, and…

Share Human Cloud

Sign up to save your podcasts

Human Cloud

Human Cloud episodes

About Human Cloud