The POZCAST: Decoding Success with Adam Posner

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Takeaways

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Key Topics:

- Work with people you respect, admire, and can learn from.

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This special episode is brought to you by our dear friends at Blood Cancer United. An organization very near and dear to me.

I’m here to remind you to give to causes that make a difference. You want to help, but you don’t know where to start? Blood Cancer United is at the top of my list. They are the global leader in helping patients and families with blood cancer, and your dollars fund research, patient support, and advocacy. Please give today here:

Thank you for supporting this important mission.

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Chapters

Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast

For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com

This special episode is brought to you by our dear friends at Blood Cancer United. An organization very near and dear to me.

I’m here to remind you to give to causes that make a difference. You want to help, but you don’t know where to start? Blood Cancer United is at the top of my list. They are the global leader in helping patients and families with blood cancer, and your dollars fund research, patient support, and advocacy. Please give today here:

Thank you for supporting this important mission.

Learn more and donate here: https://pages.lls.org/voy/nyc/nyclls26/aposner

Chapters

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Introduction to Anton Newtonboom

Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast

For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com

This special episode is brought to you by our dear friends at Blood Cancer United. An organization very near and dear to me.

I’m here to remind you to give to causes that make a difference. You want to help but you don’t know where to start? Blood Cancer United is at the top of my list. They are the global leader in helping patients and families with blood cancer, and your dollars fund research, patient support, and advocacy. Please give today here:

Thank you for supporting this important mission.

Learn more and donate here: https://pages.lls.org/voy/nyc/nyclls26/aposner

Chapters

These episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams.

Learn more and check out a demo:  https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner

Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast

For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com

CHAPTERS:

00:00 – The Witching Hour: An Impromptu Stop-and-Chat Day 10, final afternoon, luggage everywhere — Adam spots Mike Johnson at the Onboarded booth and pulls him into an unscripted conversation that delivers more insight than most prepared interviews.

02:00 – Meet Onboarded: The Messy Middle of HR Tech What Onboarded actually does: orchestrating the compliance-heavy gap between recruiter technology and back-office HRIS — federal, state, local obligations, background checks, integrations — built elegantly for high-volume hirers.

04:30 – From Checkr to Onboarded: The Origin Story Mike's background building trust and safety infrastructure for the gig economy at Checkr, why that exposed the far greater complexity of W-2 hiring, and what made him want to solve it.

07:00 – Building With People You Know, Love & Trust The team that followed Mike from his previous life — people whose kids and spouses he knows, who've gone on trips together — and why that trust foundation is the real secret ingredient behind Onboarded's early traction.

10:00 – Family First as a Company Value — Not Just a Talking Point Offsites where spouses and kids are invited, a hiring philosophy that prioritizes family relationships above work, and why Mike believes that's not a soft value — it's a performance strategy.

13:00 – The White Space Nobody Else Was Solving Every HR software product has its own onboarding experience. Nobody had built the orchestration layer that unifies the end-to-end worker experience across all of them.

15:30 – Enterprise Software Re-Architecture: 5 Months, Not 5 Years The speed at which AI is upending enterprise software is being radically underestimated. Not a five-year transformation — a five-month one. What Claude and coding agents are making possible right now.

18:00 – Compliance Is Not Vibable Federal, state, and local compliance obligations are discrete, black and white, and non-negotiable. That's Onboarded's moat — and why no amount of AI creativity replaces domain expertise in this space.

21:00 – Enabling Builders on Top of the Compliance Foundation How Onboarded balances compliance rigidity with entrepreneurial flexibility: partners and independent builders using the platform to build their own products on top of a compliance-ready foundation.

24:00 – The Founder Philosophy: Say Stupid Stuff to the Right People Finding people you trust enough to say your dumbest ideas to — who will push back hard and still be with you when the dust settles. That's the real engine of innovation.

27:00 – Where to Find Onboarded onboardr.com — a freshly launched website with a free trial and direct scheduling available.

TAKEAWAYS:

1. The Messy Middle Is the Most Underserved Layer in HR Tech

Every recruiting tool has onboarding. Every HRIS has onboarding. But nobody built the orchestration layer that connects them elegantly for the worker and for the operators managing it all. That's the gap Onboarded identified — and it's larger and more painful than most people outside high-volume hiring environments realize.

2. W-2 Hiring Is 10x More Complex Than Contractor Onboarding

The gig economy built an enormous amount of infrastructure for contractor trust and safety. But the W-2 world — with its federal, state, and local compliance obligations, background check requirements, I-9 verification, and benefits enrollment — is a fundamentally different problem. Mike learned this at Checkr and built Onboarded to solve it.

3. Enterprise Software Is Being Re-Architected in Months, Not Years

Mike's view on AI's pace is one of the most direct in the series: people are underestimating how fast the change is coming. Not a five-year transformation curve — a five-month one. The coding agents available today, powered by tools like Claude, are already capable of building enterprise- grade software. Every software company needs to be honest about what that means for their product.

4. Compliance Is the One Category AI Cannot Vibe Away

The federal, state, and local obligations governing W-2 hiring are not ambiguous, interpretable, or creatively solvable. They are discrete, binary, and non-negotiable. That is Onboarded's defensibility. No vibe coding tool can build compliance infrastructure. That requires domain expertise, legal knowledge, and years of working inside the problem — and that's exactly what the Onboarded team brings.

5. The Right Moat Is Domain Expertise, Not Just Technology

In a world where building software is getting cheaper and faster, the companies with genuine defensibility are those with deep domain expertise that can't be replicated with a good prompt. Mike's background at Checkr building trust and safety infrastructure for the gig economy is the foundation that makes Onboarded's compliance product credible — and the reason partners trust it enough to build on top of it.

6. Build With People You Know — Especially Your First Team

Mike's intentional choice to build Onboarded with people from his past — people whose families he knows, who've traveled together, who have real relational history — wasn't nostalgia. It was strategy. Trust that's pre-built from shared experience is the fastest path to a high-functioning founding team. You spend zero time establishing credibility and all your time solving problems.

7. Family First Is a Performance Strategy, Not Just a Value

Onboarded invites families to offsites. They prioritize the spousal and parental relationships of their employees as an explicit part of their culture. Mike's reasoning: companies that ask people to choose between family and work get less from both. Companies that make space for the whole person get more output, more loyalty, and more resilience when things get hard.

8. The Best Founding Teams Can Say Stupid Things to Each Other

Mike's counterintuitive founder philosophy: the most important feature of a great founding team isn't complementary skills or market knowledge — it's the psychological safety to say your worst ideas out loud without losing credibility. When you can argue, disagree, say the dumb thing, and still trust each other completely, you can work through anything. That's the trust foundation that makes the rest possible.

9. Enabling Others to Build on Your Foundation Is a Growth Strategy

Onboarded isn't just a product — it's a platform. Partners and independent entrepreneurs are building compliance-ready applications on top of the Onboarded foundation, extending its reach and value without the company having to build everything itself. In an era of rapid AI-enabled building, making your core defensible and your surface area open to builders is a powerful combination.

These episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams.

Learn more and check out a demo:  https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner

Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast

For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com

CHAPTERS:

00:00 – Serendipity: How This Episode Happened A mutual friend, a caffeine need, and a chance introduction — Adam welcomes Lívia Martini, CPO of Wellhub, in what turned into one of the most data-packed conversations in the series.

02:00 – Meet Wellhub: 16 Years, 100,000+ Partners A global wellbeing platform serving companies of all sizes across gym studios, personal trainers, nutrition, sleep, mental health, and physical health — one platform, fully personalized.

04:30 – The Adoption Problem: Why Great Benefits Get Ignored The biggest challenge in corporate wellness isn't the product — it's education and adoption. People leaders have to be genuinely bought in, and the first step has to be frictionless.

07:00 – How a Wellness Movement Starts Inside a Company What happens when adoption takes off: colleagues watching each other change, bad knees getting better, muscle being built. The movement becomes self-sustaining — but it has to start somewhere.

09:30 – 5% vs. 50%: The Adoption Gap That Defines the Market The industry average for gym-only wellness benefits is 5% adoption. Wellhub's platform sits at 40-50%. Breadth, personalization, easy onboarding, and people team support drive the gap.

12:00 – The 86% Number That Changes Everything 86% of employees say they would consider switching jobs if their company didn't offer wellbeing benefits — and that number is growing year over year.

15:00 – Wellness as a Healthcare Cost Strategy Healthier employees mean lower medical costs. Wellbeing benefits aren't a morale spend — they're a healthcare offset. The direct business case, made clearly.

17:30 – GLP-1s: Medication Is Only Half the Solution Why weight-loss medication without lifestyle change is unsustainable: muscle mass loss, bone density loss, the rebound effect. GLP-1s need to be paired with nutrition, exercise, and sleep to hold.

21:30 – Sleep Is a Weight Management Tool Most People Ignore Lívia's personal data: two to three nights of poor sleep raises her weight regardless of diet or exercise. The interconnected nature of sleep, weight, and wellness — and why all of it needs to be addressed together.

24:00 – AI at Wellhub: Coach, Recommendations & Selling at Scale An AI wellness coach, personalized content recommendations, and AI tools on the sales side to explain the product at scale across companies of all sizes and geographies.

26:30 – Letting Teams Experiment: The Chaos and the Clarity Wellhub gave its people teams license to experiment freely with AI — lived through months of productive chaos — and is now in the best practices sharing phase where one solution is solving 15 problems.

29:00 – Transform 2026: Connection Over Content Lívia's first Transform — and her verdict: the value is in the unscheduled moments, the hallway conversations, the person who sits down mid-introduction and becomes the best exchange of the conference.

31:30 – Where to Find Wellhub wellhub.com for product, partnerships, and getting in touch — and a reflection on what makes conferences like Transform genuinely worth attending.

TAKEAWAYS:

1. 86% of Employees Would Consider Switching Jobs Over Wellbeing

Benefits

This is the most striking retention data point in the series. Wellhub's annual survey shows 86% of employees would consider or actively switch jobs if their company didn't offer wellbeing benefits — and the number is growing. For HR leaders and total rewards strategists, this moves wellness from ancillary to foundational in any competitive benefits package.

2. Industry Adoption Averages 5%. Wellhub's Is 40-50%.

The gap between a generic gym benefit and a well-designed wellness platform isn't marginal — it's a 10x difference in adoption. The combination of breadth, personalization, easy enrollment, and people team support is what drives utilization from a footnote to a movement. Companies

measuring benefits ROI by the number of options offered rather than the percentage of employees actually using them are measuring the wrong thing.

3. Wellness Benefits Drive Healthcare Cost Reduction

The business case for wellness investment isn't just retention and morale — it's medical spend. Healthier employees drive lower insurance claims, fewer sick days, and more sustainable long- term healthcare costs. Lívia makes this connection directly: wellbeing benefits are a healthcare offset strategy, not a culture spend.

4. People Leaders Have to Be Genuinely Bought In — Not Just Compliant

Adoption starts at the top. When HR and people leaders are personally using and visibly championing a wellness benefit — not just administering it — that signal travels through the organization. Lip service produces 5% adoption. Genuine conviction produces 50%.

5. A Wellness Movement Is Self-Sustaining Once It Starts

The most powerful driver of wellbeing benefit adoption isn't communication or incentives — it's the moment employees start watching each other change. A colleague's bad knee gets better. Someone builds muscle. Someone sleeps through the night for the first time in months. Those visible transformations create organic pull that no marketing campaign can replicate.

6. GLP-1 Medication Without Lifestyle Change Is a Dead End

Lívia's GLP-1 take is the clearest and most medically grounded in the series: the medication works by burning energy indiscriminately — it doesn't distinguish between fat, muscle mass, and bone density. Stop taking it without having built sustainable habits, and the weight returns. The medication is a tool, not a solution. Nutrition, exercise, and sleep have to accompany it for the program to hold.

7. Sleep Is a Weight and Wellness Variable Most Companies Aren't Tracking

Lívia's personal data: two to three nights of poor sleep raises her weight regardless of diet or exercise. This connection — between sleep quality and metabolic health — is well-documented but largely absent from most corporate wellness conversations. Any wellbeing platform that doesn't address sleep is leaving a critical variable unaddressed.

8. Wellbeing Personalization Is the Future of Benefits Design

The choose-your-own-journey model — where employees select their own wellness path from a broad menu of options, and can change it as their life changes — is the direction all benefits design is heading. One-size-fits-all packages are already failing on adoption metrics. The

companies that move to personalized, flexible, employee-directed wellbeing will see the utilization numbers that justify the investment.

9. Give Your Teams License to Experiment With AI — Then Share What Works

Wellhub's internal AI journey: give people teams permission to experiment freely, accept that it will be chaotic for a few months, and then create a structured best practices sharing process that surfaces the solutions that are actually working. The companies that are winning with AI internally right now aren't the ones with the most sophisticated strategy — they're the ones who started experimenting earliest and created feedback loops fastest.

10. The Best Conference Connections Are Unscheduled

Lívia's first Transform validated something this series has heard repeatedly: the most valuable moments at conferences like this aren't the sessions — they're the conversations that happen between them. The person who sits down mid-introduction, the hallway exchange that turns into a 30-minute deep dive on AI adoption and change management. Conferences that create more space for that serendipity deliver more value than those packed with content.

These episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams.

Learn more and check out a demo:  https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner

Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast

For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com

TAKEAWAYS: 

1. Full Disconnection on Leave Is a Culture Signal, Not a Personal Choice

Ariana's ability to fully disconnect during five months of maternity leave wasn't just personal discipline — it was enabled by a company culture that explicitly supports and expects it. Greenhouse has a caregiver community, respects the whole person, and understands that genuine recovery and presence during leave leads to a better return. Companies that say they support leave but create implicit pressure to stay connected are signaling something important about how they see their employees.

2. Institutional Knowledge Is the Best Return-to-Work Advantage

What made Ariana's return from leave smooth wasn't a structured onboarding plan — it was nearly 11 years of context. She knew the Q4 rhythms, the relationships, the unwritten rules. For companies managing returning employees, this is a reminder that the investment in long tenure pays dividends at the most vulnerable moments.

3. The Candidate Experience Has to Be Half the Product

Greenhouse's mission — make hiring work for everyone — isn't just a brand statement. It's a product design imperative that extends to the job seeker experience, not just the recruiter experience. In a market that is genuinely brutal for candidates right now, companies and platforms that design for both sides of the hiring equation will win trust from both.

4. Dream Job Signals Cut Through AI-Generated Noise

Greenhouse's My Greenhouse platform — which lets candidates designate companies as dream job targets and signal genuine intent once a month — is a direct response to the noise problem created by AI mass-application tools. In a world where volume no longer equals signal, deliberate intent becomes the most valuable data point in the funnel.

5. The Market Is Shifting Toward Behavioral Hiring Over Background Matching

Greenhouse is redesigning its own interview architecture around specific defined behaviors — 'make good decisions fast,' 'invent the future,' 'be entrepreneurial' — rather than experience checkboxes. The implication for candidates: the ability to demonstrate how you think and decide is becoming more important than where you've worked. Portfolio career holders take note.

6. The STAR Method Is Fully Gameable — and Everyone Knows It

Traditional structured behavioral interviewing was built for a world where candidates had to recall and articulate their own experiences. AI second-screen tools have made that world obsolete. Real-time answer coaching during live interviews is happening right now, at scale, and the recruiting teams that haven't redesigned their interview approach for this reality are operating on outdated assumptions.

7. AI Offense and AI Defense Is the Most Useful Interview Framework in This Series

Ariana's team ran a workshop that split into two tracks: AI defense (how do we design questions that are more AI-resistant and require genuine human judgment to answer?) and AI offense (how do we explicitly screen for AI mindset, curiosity, and capability as a positive qualification?). Both are necessary. Neither alone is sufficient. This framework is immediately replicable.

8. 'How Do You Use AI Personally?' Is One of the Most Revealing Interview Questions Right Now

Asking candidates how they use AI in their personal or professional lives — not to catch them using it wrong, but to surface genuine curiosity and self-direction — is becoming one of the sharpest signals available in an interview. The candidates who have been experimenting,

iterating, and developing their own AI workflows are showing you something important about how they'll operate in roles that don't yet have defined playbooks.

9. Portfolio Careers Need Behavioral Framing to Land

Adam's candid share about feeling 'unhirable' after 10 years running his own business is a common experience for independent professionals re-entering corporate environments. Ariana's coaching: the shift toward behavioral hiring is actually an advantage for portfolio career holders — because the behaviors that make someone successful in an entrepreneurial context (making decisions fast, inventing solutions, operating without consensus) are exactly the behaviors companies are now explicitly hiring for.

10. The Best Conference Value Is the Hallway Conversation, Not the Session

Ariana didn't attend a single formal session at Transform and still left with more actionable intelligence than most attendees. The real value — for her and for the industry — is in the one- to-one conversations between practitioners comparing notes on what they're actually building and experimenting with. Conference organizers should design more space for that. Attendees should prioritize it.

CHAPTERS: 

00:00 – Welcome Back: Motherhood & the Return Adam reunites with Ariana Moon — last seen 8 months pregnant — and gets the update on baby Leo, sleep training, and how a strong support village made the first year survivable.

02:30 – Taking 5 Months of Leave — Fully Disconnected What it looks like to actually step away: Greenhouse's culture of respecting leave, why full disconnection is both supported and expected, and why Ariana has zero guilt about it.

05:30 – The Timing Was Right: Checking Out During the AI Gold Rush Her leave coincided with peak AI hype saturation. Stepping away while the market worked itself out turned out to be exactly the right call.

07:30 – Coming Back After Leave: The Real Reimmersion Story How 11 years of institutional knowledge, strong internal relationships, and knowing exactly what Q4 looks like made the return smoother than it would have been for anyone else.

10:00 – What It Means to Recruit at a Recruiting Platform The unusual dual role: running a great recruiting team while also serving as a live feedback loop for the product and staying connected to how the market is evolving.

13:00 – The Candidate Experience Nobody Talks About Enough Greenhouse's mission — make hiring work for everyone — and why it has to extend beyond the recruiter to the candidate side. The market is brutal for job seekers right now.

15:30 – My Greenhouse: The Dream Job Feature How Greenhouse's B2C platform lets candidates designate dream job companies, signal genuine intent once a month, and give recruiters a quality signal in a market flooded with AI-generated noise.

18:30 – Portfolio Careers & How to Position Them Adam gets personal about feeling 'unhirable' after 10 years of entrepreneurship — and Ariana's coaching on positioning portfolio skills in a behavioral hiring market.

21:30 – Behavioral Hiring: The Shift Toward Interpersonal Skills How Greenhouse designs interviews around defined behaviors — 'make good decisions fast,' 'invent the future' — and why the shift toward behaviors over background may be the biggest structural change in recruiting right now.

24:30 – AI Killed the STAR Method. Now What? Traditional structured interviewing is fully gameable by AI second-screen tools. Ariana's team ran a workshop to directly confront this — and built something new.

27:00 – AI Offense and AI Defense: The Framework The two-part workshop: AI defense (questions that require genuine human judgment) and AI offense (explicitly testing for AI mindset and capability as a positive qualification).

30:00 – Testing for Curiosity as a Hiring Signal Why "how do you use AI personally?" is becoming one of the most revealing interview questions — surfacing genuine curiosity and self-direction rather than catching people out.

32:30 – What's Lighting Ariana Up at Transform 2026 Ariana didn't attend a single session — and that's the point. The value of Transform is the one-to-one conversations about what people are actually doing, building, and experimenting with right now.

35:00 – Connect With Ariana & the Vegas Advocate Where to find Ariana on LinkedIn — and her unexpectedly enthusiastic case for why Las Vegas is actually a great place to live.

These episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams.

Learn more and check out a demo:  https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner

Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast

For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com

TAKEAWAYS:

1. The Industry Shifted From Doing More to Doing Better

Kyle's State of the Union in a single sentence: a year ago, AI was being applied to do more things faster. In 2026, the question has become whether those things are being done better. Volume was the first wave. Quality is the second. The vendors who survive the next cycle will be the ones who can demonstrate genuine outcome improvement, not just efficiency gains.

2. The Consolidation Bloodbath Is Over — and the Race Is Back On

The expected wave of vendor exits didn't fully materialize, but AI gave surviving vendors the ability to ship value to customers faster than ever before. The competitive dynamics haven't eased — they've intensified. The companies still standing are moving faster, not slower.

3. Build vs. Buy Is Now a Real Strategic Question for TA Teams

Enterprise talent acquisition teams are building their own AI workflows in-house, and that's changing the calculus for every vendor on the floor. Kyle's framework for go-to-market leaders: track how much building culture exists in your target accounts before burning sales calories. If a prospect is already building, that's not necessarily a lost sale — but it's a fundamentally different conversation.

4. Recruiting Fraud Has Become a National Security Issue

The convergence of application agents, high job-seeker volume, and organized bad actors has turned recruiting fraud from an edge case into a genuine organizational risk. Kyle knows first- degree connections who have had the FBI in their office after hiring agents of foreign states. This is not hypothetical. Every company with any sensitive data or infrastructure is a target.

5. Fraud Detection Isn't One Problem — It's a Stack Problem

Interview fraud doesn't have a single point of intervention. It needs to be addressed at the ATS, at the top of the funnel, and through identity verification across multiple interview stages. Kyle's benchmark of 12 AI interviewers found screen analysis capabilities — matching visual identity from interview to interview — becoming a standard feature. Manual workflows are a bridge, not a solution.

6. AI Is Finally Making Benefits Personal at Scale

Benefits has always been complicated, jargon-heavy, and delivered as a one-size-fits-all package that employees don't understand. AI chat interfaces that know an employee's profile — single, two dogs, no kids — and can explain in plain language which plan makes sense for their specific life are making personalized benefits navigation possible without requiring an HRBP to sit with every employee. That's a meaningful change in how benefits gets delivered.

7. Candidates Are Getting Smarter About Total Comp — And Recruiters Need to Keep Up

Kyle's observation from the market matches what Adam hears in the trenches: candidates are increasingly asking about the full picture of compensation, including employer contributions to healthcare, equity, and benefits value. Recruiters who can't articulate total comp in real numbers are at a disadvantage — and companies that can are converting more offers.

8. The Trust Gap Between Candidates and AI Is a Communication Failure, Not a Technology Failure

The friction candidates are experiencing with AI in the hiring process isn't primarily a product problem — it's a communication problem. Employers are deploying AI interviewing, screening, and assessment tools without telling candidates how to use AI, what to expect, or why these tools actually benefit them. That vacuum is being filled by Reddit misinformation and candidate frustration. Simple, proactive communication could close most of that gap.

9. AI Interviewers Eliminate Ghosting — and That Matters More Than People Admit

Kyle's case for AI interviewers directed at frustrated candidates: no ghosting (every candidate gets an interview option), 24/7 scheduling flexibility, the ability to self-select out of a bad fit, and a genuine touchpoint with a company that otherwise might never respond. The value proposition is real. The problem is nobody is communicating it clearly to the people who most need to hear it.

10. Practitioners Build Better Best Practices Than Vendors Do

Kyle's Human-Centric AI Council — an independent group of HR and talent leaders producing free, practitioner-led resources for navigating AI — is a direct response to the gap between what vendors say about AI and what people actually in the trenches need to know. The best guidance on using AI in HR isn't coming from conference keynotes. It's coming from the people doing the work.

11. Data Labeling Is the Final Mile of AI — and Almost Nobody Is Talking About It

Kyle's standout product observation from the conference: Findem's data labeling capability gives AI the contextual grounding it needs to move from generic outputs to genuinely useful ones. The last mile of AI isn't the model — it's how well the data feeding the model is understood and labeled. That's an unsexy insight with enormous downstream impact.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 – Introduction: The Analyst With the Best Swag Game Adam welcomes Kyle Lagunas — industry analyst, founder, and proud owner of a Peppa Pig cardigan — and sets up a State of the Union on AI in HR tech.

02:30 – State of the Union: From More to Better Kyle's one-line summary: a year ago the industry was doing more stuff. Now it's trying to do better work. What that shift actually means.

05:00 – The Consolidation Question: Is the Bloodbath Over? The expected vendor consolidation didn't fully materialize — but AI unlocked a new level of innovation speed for those who survived, putting the race back on.

07:30 – The Build-vs-Buy Threat: When Clients Become Competitors Enterprise TA teams are building their own AI tools — and what that means for vendors without genuine defensibility beyond workflow automation.

10:00 – Fraud: From Edge Case to FBI in the Office First-degree connections who've had the FBI show up after hiring agents of foreign states. How application agents, volume, and bad actors have converged into a national security problem.

13:00 – Where Fraud Detection Lives in the Stack Fraud isn't one problem with one solution — it needs to be addressed at multiple points from ATS intake through interview identity verification.

16:00 – AI as the Great Equalizer in Benefits How AI chat interfaces are finally making personalized benefits navigation possible at scale — without requiring an HRBP to sit with every employee one-on-one.

19:30 – The Smart Candidate Who Asks About Total Comp Candidates are getting more sophisticated about total compensation — and recruiters need to be ready to explain the full picture in real numbers.

22:00 – The Trust Gap: Candidates, AI, and No One Telling the Rules Employers are deploying AI throughout hiring but issuing no guidance to candidates. The result: friction, mistrust, and a PR problem that doesn't have to exist.

25:00 – The Case for AI Interviewers — Told to the Frustrated Candidate Kyle's win-win reframe: no ghosting, 24/7 scheduling, self-selection out of bad fits, and a real company touchpoint. The value is real; the communication isn't.

28:00 – The Human-Centric AI Council: Practitioners Building the Playbook An independent council of HR and talent leaders producing practitioner-led best practices for navigating AI — free, no vendor influence.

31:00 – Love It: Findem's Data Labeling Capabilities The quiet feature Kyle called the final mile of AI: contextual data labeling that gives models the grounding they need to actually deliver value.

33:30 – Love It: CodeSignal's Persona-Based AI Interviewer The demo that impressed him most — an AI interviewer that adopts the persona of the actual hiring manager, not a generic interviewer.

35:30 – Leave It: Generic Vendors Running the Same Playbook Booths full of AEs, cheap water bottles, same motions. Kyle's prescription: bring your solutions people, bring your product people, bring something worth the conversation.

37:30 – Where to Find Kyle & Transformation Realness kyleandco.com for research, Transformation Realness for the podcast, and LinkedIn where he checks in every morning and afternoon.