Punk Rock HR

Dr. Dafna Aaronson says coaches and general managers are already mini data scientists, and AI can give them a gut check before they make the call. At work, Laurie has seen it used as a rip and replace for human judgment instead.

In this episode of Punk Rock HR, Laurie Ruettimann sits down with Dafna, who pairs a PhD in AI and machine learning with a master’s in sports psychology. They get into how AI handles performance versus potential, and why the first question for any organization is whether it wants AI at all. Laurie also tests the sports analogy against her Chicago Bears and a Lou Holtz video from early in her HR career.

Topics covered:

Visit Dafna Aaronson’s website: http://dafna-aaronson.com/Connect with Dafna Aaronson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dafna-aaronson/

James Lord says a background check tells you whether someone has been convicted of a crime, but a reference tells you about their character. He has spent nearly 20 years in HR tech, and the last decade of it focused on references. In 2025 he joined Refapp, a Swedish platform bringing structured, evidence-based reference checks to North America.

Plenty of companies skip references or treat them like a box to tick. James says that’s a risk, especially when you’re hiring for roles that come with trust and access. With AI-polished resumes and teams that are only in the office part of the week, he argues that a real reference is how you learn how someone behaves when you aren’t watching.

If you’ve ever skipped references to close a req faster, or called a candidate’s friend and learned nothing, this conversation is for you.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

Start your extended free trial of Refapp: https://www.refapp.com/hey-laurie-friend

Stefanie Fackrell was laid off in 2023 and decided to bet on herself. The next two years tested that bet hard. Her brother, who was also her best friend, was killed by a drunk driver in 2024, and a year later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She kept building her business through all of it, and she kept showing up online to help people find work.

She's now head of talent for two venture-backed startups through her firm, dysruptiveHR, and she isn't sugarcoating the market. Many white-collar tech jobs aren't coming back, and most of the job search advice flooding your feed is wrong.

If you've been laid off or think you might be next, this conversation is for you.

In this episode, you'll hear:

Chapters:

Laurie sat down with Meg Bear and Amy Wilson on their podcast, the Meg & Amy Show, and the conversation was good enough that she wanted to share it with Punk Rock HR listeners too.

They talk about financial freedom and what it actually buys you, and why Laurie thinks AI is taking the blame for problems that are really about childcare, housing, and a missing safety net.

If you want Laurie's honest take on work, money, and what's really breaking people right now, this is the conversation.

In this episode, you'll hear:

Lisa Sterling said "absolutely not" when she was first asked to take a Chief People Officer role. Not because she didn't care about people, but because everything she believed about organizational performance was at odds with what HR was supposed to be. She took the job anyway, with one instruction: get rid of all of it and build what you actually believe in.

She's now CPO at Perceptyx, and that's still her operating mode. The engagement score obsession, the job architectures, the performance reviews that produce ratings instead of growth. She's not interested in any of it, and she's building something to replace all of it.

If you work in HR and you've ever felt like the function is measuring the wrong things and asking you to own outcomes you don't actually control, this conversation is for you.

In this episode, you'll hear:

Lisa’s argument that HR doesn't actually control engagement, and why the score is the wrong KPI

The capability operating system she's building to replace job descriptions and performance ratings

How Perceptyx is moving from data collection to actual behavior change

Why she tells her own team to leave HR if they want to grow

How she ended up running global customer success on top of the people function

The difference between a CHRO and a CPO, and why she doesn't call herself the former

Her imposter syndrome moment (and epiphany) at the New York Stock Exchange

Most companies have no idea how their employee experience actually compares to their competitors. Not because the data doesn't exist. Because nobody's looked at it.

David Barrett, founder and CEO of Welliba, built a platform that does exactly that, using publicly available information to measure workforce sentiment across hundreds of thousands of organizations. 

The companies that treat their people well are outperforming the ones that don't. That's the short version. The longer version is more interesting, and a little harder to sit with.

If you work in HR and you've ever been asked to justify a people investment with hard numbers, this conversation is the one you've been waiting for.

In this episode, you'll hear:

What six years of S&P 500 data shows about employee experience and business performance

Why the strongest predictor of high performance isn't technology, pay, or flexibility

What companies that are profitable but burning people out actually look like in the data

Why most pandemic-era people investments never got properly validated

Why the manager and coworker relationship still outpredicts perks and programs

What Unhappy Performers are, and why the term might be more optimistic than it sounds

Twenty-six years in benefits gives you a particular kind of clarity. Rae Shanahan knows what the industry got right, and she's direct about what it got wrong. Now Chief Strategy Officer at Businessolver, she comes to this conversation with research and the research tells a story most HR teams aren't ready to hear.

The system was built for employees with time, financial stability, and enough clarity to search, compare, and choose. Most people don't have all three.

If you work in HR and you've ever wondered why better benefits technology hasn't fixed the problem, this conversation is for you.

In this episode, you'll hear:

Why personalization in benefits is reactive by design

What anticipatory benefits looks like in practice

Why financial fragility keeps showing up as an enrollment problem

How AI can help without replacing human judgment

What the benefits professional of 2035 (yes, that’s right) actually needs to know

The CEO is pumped. The engineers are burnt out. And HR is the last to know.

Gemma Versace is Chief Client Officer at X-Team, and her company's research on AI talent strategy should be required reading for every HR leader. The confidence gap between executives and the people actually doing the work is wide, and the organizations that ignore it are losing their best people.

If you work in HR and you've ever felt like AI strategy happens around you instead of with you, this conversation is for you.

In this episode, you'll hear:

The gap between executive confidence and practitioner reality on AI talent

What that disconnect looks like inside a real organization

Why HR reports the lowest AI confidence of any function

Why job description clarity predicts AI maturity more than budget

The difference between naming governance as a problem and fixing it

Why most organizations can't prove AI ROI to finance

Why long-term embedded partners outperform short-term contractors

Tameka Vasquez grew up in tech, where moving fast and breaking things was gospel. Then she started working with leaders outside that world and realized the gospel didn't travel. Most leaders, she found, are only equipped for change they've already seen. Everything else gets met with fear.

That's the gap she has spent her career trying to close. Not by predicting the future, but by changing how leaders relate to it. Her framework, SHIFT™, treats the future as a verb. Something you do, not somewhere you arrive. The goal isn't certainty. The goal is building enough capacity to lead when nothing is certain.

If you're tired of the inevitability narrative, the one that says the future is already decided and your job is just to comply, this conversation is for you.

In this episode, you'll hear:

How growing up in tech shaped Tameka's assumptions about change, and what working in slower-moving industries taught her about how rare those assumptions are

The story of her Guyanese heritage and why multigenerational survival in precarious conditions is the personal foundation underneath all of her professional work

Why she no longer tries to clear a credentials bar that keeps moving, and what she says instead when someone asks what qualifies her

A full walkthrough of the SHIFT™ framework and why she calls it a practice rather than a program

The false binary between being first and getting left behind, and why the whole spectrum in between is where most real strategy lives

Her argument that discomfort with inevitability is a more honest starting point than certainty, and why she works with that discomfort rather than around it

Why outsourcing critical thinking to institutions and thought leaders is cultural laziness, and what leaders actually need to do instead

Andrew Norcross built NASA's website. He built the New York Times' website. He's been engineering the infrastructure of the internet for 20 years. Now he's building fences and painting houses in Florida, because AI ate his job and he refuses to be complicit in what replaced it.

This is an episode about what happens when someone with real skill, real principles, and zero interest in using AI suddenly has no market for the thing they're best at. Norcross didn't rage-quit. He just stopped pretending the emperor has clothes. He watched an industry swap craftsmen for pattern-recognition machines, compared it directly to the 2008 subprime collapse, and walked away to do work with his hands until the inevitable correction comes.

If you've ever wondered what integrity costs in a labor market that no longer rewards it, this conversation is for you.

In this episode, you'll hear:

How Norcross built the architecture for NASA.gov, the New York Times, GitHub, and Disney, and why that work has disappeared

His direct experience with bad AI-generated code 

Why the AI investment bubble looks a lot like subprime mortgage lending, and why the math doesn't math

His reminder that AI is not intelligent, it's a pattern-recognition machine, and why the word choice matters

Why no machine will ever account for the chaos and unpredictability of human behavior

His pivot to referral-only handyman work

A frank conversation about college vs. trades

Why he gave up on long-term career planning entirely

Why going to sleep sore from physical labor feels better than putting money in the wrong pockets