Up Next @ Work

How are workplace culture and financial innovation shaping the future of inclusion and opportunity? On this week's episode of Up Next @ Work, Michele Bodda, President of Employer Services, Verification Solutions and Housing at Experian, joined host Jeanne Achille for an engaging discussion on Experian’s culture, innovation and the evolving role of credit in promoting financial inclusion. With 26 years at Experian, Michele shared insights from her journey, starting in a call center to becoming a senior leader driving transformative initiatives.

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Hear Michele’s unique perspective on leadership, innovation, and creating a workplace where everyone can thrive. Find her on LinkedIn and learn more about Experian at http://www.experian.com.

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Ben Eubanks, Chief Research Officer at Lighthouse Research & Advisory, joins Up Next @ Work host Jeanne Achille for an insightful conversation on the evolving HR landscape, the challenges professionals face, and innovative solutions for the future of work. With a passion for empowering HR leaders, Ben shares practical advice from his research, books, and transformative HR Summer School initiative.

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Connect with Ben on LinkedIn, explore his research at LHRA.io, and find updates about HR Summer School at HRSummerSchool.org. Don’t miss the next event in June 2025!

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What if the secret to solving today’s hiring challenges lies not in resumes but in uncovering hidden skills and innate behaviors? In this episode, host Kate Achille sits down with Caitlin MacGregor, CEO and co-founder of Plum, to discuss how organizations can rethink their talent acquisition strategies. Caitlin introduces the concept of “gap-closers,” individuals driven to identify and fix inefficiencies in pursuit of better outcomes, and explains how adopting a skills-based hiring approach can unlock the potential of these transformative candidates.

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Visit plum.io to complete your free Plum profile and learn how skills-based hiring can transform your organization. Be sure to listen to the full podcast episode for more insights and inspiration from Caitlin MacGregor.

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High-quality, accurate candidate-matching software is considered the "silver bullet" of the HR Tech world. Bridging the gap between the language of the recruiter and the language of the applicant to build the best possible candidate pool has been a puzzle the industry has been trying to crack since the mid-90s. Still, solutions are falling short of expectations. Our guest this week, Bennett Sung, draws on his nearly two decades of experience as a Product Marketing Manager and CMO in the HR/Recruiting Tech industry to discuss how solutions providers can make their products more effective for the end user. Bennett and Kate discuss a wide range of topics, including:

Learn more about the state of the candidate matching software landscape by listening to our conversation with Bennett. Thanks for sharing Up Next @ Work with your community.

Old-school go-to-market tactics simply don’t work anymore, says our guest, Josh Schwede of Aventura Growth Labs. In this episode of Up Next @ Work, he talks about why bombarding prospects with unwanted emails, day in and day out, won’t result in a sales order. Given the extreme pressures on CEOs and founders, he recommends abandoning the harsh “grow or die” mentality and redirecting sales and marketing energy towards building loyal followings. This community-building GTM approach generates better engagement and brand awareness. Jeanne and Josh discuss:

Learn more by listening to our conversation with Josh. Thanks for sharing Up Next @ Work with your community.

This week on Up Next @ Work, Jeanne Achille meets the future of venture capital and HR tech as she welcomes Acadian Ventures founder and general partner Jason Corsello and his summer intern Jackson Malary. Jeanne and Jason discuss the importance of building strong connections early in your career and how he draws on his network to find exciting investment opportunities for his firm. Jackson also shares how valuable his experience interning at a smaller VC and working directly with its principals has been compared to his colleagues' internships at much larger firms. Jason also shares what trends he sees emerging in the future of HR Tech as the industry begins shifting towards a full embrace of AI.

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At a time when organizations are trying to "do more with less," how can HR and talent teams make the most of their technology investments? In this episode, Kate Achille talks to Evelyn McMullen, Research Manager, and Trevor White, Vice President, Advisory and Consulting at Nucleus Research, about the return on investment for HR tech. From the basic equation needed to determine ROI to making the business case with finance and procurement, Evelyn and Trevor share what HR professionals need to know about the changing nature of this market and how to ensure they're getting the most out of their existing solutions.

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How does Tim Sackett, SPHR, SCP get up every morning and get the job done? By his own admission, talent acquisition has never been harder. While it’s easier to find talent – thanks to technology – it’s getting tougher to cut through the noise and forge personal connections that matter. He shares his own career journey with us, which includes staffing, corporate and blogging stints. Today, he’s a successful entrepreneur running HRU Technical Resources, a $40M IT and Engineering contract staffing firm and RPO. Every conversation with Tim is educational. Listen in to learn from this talent acquisition master.

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Pay Equity That Works With Heather Bussing and Kent Plunkett

It sounds simple, but pay is far more than money. Our compensation feels like a reflection of our worth, our status, and our power. In this spirited discussion, the authors of “Get Pay Right,” employment attorney Heather Bussing and Salary.com CEO Kent Plunkett, demystify pay equity and offer a practical framework to put pay at the core of the employee experience. Not only can you order their book on Amazon, but they’ve also generously shared their recent presentation from the SHRM Conference on this same topic. Thanks for listening to and liking Up Next @ Work.

In this episode, Up Next @ Work host Kate Achille sits down with Dylan Teggart, Principal Analyst at 3Sixty Insights, to discuss the state of the employee experience in 2024. Taking a socio-political lens to what's most often seen as an HR issue, Kate and Dylan consider what factors most influence engagement rates in today's workplaces and what employers can do to understand and improve the connection to their workforce. This conversation also serves as a preview of Dylan's forthcoming research on building the employee experience from a workforce management perspective.