Work Tech Weekly

For a long time, the only way to keep growing your career was to manage people, so plenty of great individual contributors took a job they never wanted and got almost no help doing it. Rising Team founder and CEO Jennifer Dulski thinks companies can now fix both problems, and end up with fewer managers who chose the role.

She also talks about why cohort-based manager training only lands for about a third of the room, and how “super managers” are leading 10 or 20 direct reports with AI handling the administrative work.

JD Peterson thinks survey fatigue is a myth, and that employees will keep answering every employee engagement survey you send as long as they see something happen afterward.

The Chief Marketing Officer at Perceptyx explains why his company shifted from running surveys to helping companies act on the results, and what happened when Perceptyx tested how well AI understands employee comments. He also talks about why everyone slapping AI on their marketing has him toning down his own, and where AI sales outreach tools go wrong when nobody checks what they’re sending.

Ben Brooks will bet you that no mid-market executive would call their manager bench “pretty strong.” The founder and CEO of PILOT joins Steve Smith to explain why leadership only multiplies the management underneath it, and why AI is turning decision making into the biggest bottleneck middle managers face.

When a candidate asks to have their data deleted, Somen Mondal says the typical company has no idea what to do. The Co-Founder and CEO of Amp explains why compliance separates the AI hiring tools that hold up from the ones that only look good in a demo. He also gets into how AI regulation now varies by state and country, and why bias testing has to change for LLMs.

Heidi Barnett builds tools that cut time to hire. She still wants employers to wait 24 hours before sending an automated rejection. The President of isolved Talent Acquisition and founder of ApplicantPro explains why quality of hire deserves the same attention as speed, and where AI should and shouldn’t speed up recruiting. She also shares how she kept ApplicantPro on the Inc. 5000 for 11 straight years while raising four kids.

An international payroll payment can lose 5 to 7% of its value and days of time as it hops from bank to bank on its way to a remote worker, according to Albert Owusu-Asare.

The co-founder and CEO of Cadana explains why calculating pay is only half the job, and how local payment rails get workers paid on time and in full. He also makes the case that stablecoins are on track to become a requirement for global payroll providers.

David Wilson has tracked the HR tech market for almost 30 years. He calls the SaaSpocalypse "overblown significantly," but he thinks it's already changing who gets to win.

David is the founder and CEO of Fosway Group, a UK-based HR technology analyst firm. He explains why AI can rebuild features faster than it can rebuild the process data inside HR systems, and why some of the biggest platforms may come to treat HR as a disposable part of the business. For vendors, profitability has stopped being a dirty word.

The conversation covers how buyers are deciding which vendors anchor their AI strategy, and why the new capability keeps coming from specialists. On AI hype, David points to a market where "every vendor is now an AI-first vendor. But the reality, of course, is this is just not true." He also shares what Fosway's research shows about how much AI capability is actually live, and how far behind customers are in using it.

James Lord has spent more than a decade in reference checking. Increasingly, he says, the person giving the reference is sometimes the candidate.

James leads expansion in the Americas for Refapp, a Swedish reference checking platform. He explains what a reference check tells you that a background check never will, and why the answers often end up shaping onboarding more than the hiring decision. He also pushes back on talent leaders chasing every shiny new HR tech tool.

The conversation covers candidates posing as their own references and why a hiring team needs an audit trail it can defend. On AI, James draws the line at the decision. "We are the science, we're not the art." He also takes on the workforce of 2030, when reference checking may extend to AI agents.

HubSpot wants AI agents running your whole go-to-market workflow, and Alec Cherrin came back from UNBOUND with a short list of features he'd turn on tomorrow and plenty he wouldn't. In a live AMA, Steve Smith and Rep Cap's resident HubSpot specialist take audience questions on Agent Hub, AI credit costs, and the new loop framework. They also get into whether HubSpot is becoming a work tech company.

Kevin Andrews has spent three decades watching HR tech vendors promise to serve small business and then drift upmarket. Now Board Advisor and Chief AI and Transformation Officer at PrismHR and Vensure Employer Solutions, he argues PEO software has held its ground because PEOs sell service plus expertise, with the technology there to back it up.

AI has made it cheap for customers to build their own tools around HR systems, which Kevin welcomes at the edges and worries about anywhere near payroll or benefits. He also looks at where small business HR tech goes next, with benefits guidance that runs year-round instead of "this 30-minute kind of panic every November."