SoundCloud’s VP of people and culture on the hidden skills gap that’s quietly breaking your culture

Allie Shulman is the vice president of people and culture at SoundCloud, where she’s focused on building trust and engagement at scale, and keeping DEI central to how organizations show up. She’s set to speak at HR Brew’s upcoming summit, Talent 2030 Collective: Recruit, Retain, Repeat, on April 21 about the balance between culture and compensation. Before then, we had a chance to talk about how she thinks about the soft skills gap, and why AI and human connection aren’t separate workstreams.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

If you zoom out, what’s the biggest shift happening in the talent landscape right now that HR leaders can’t afford to ignore?

For the first time, your most tech-native employees are also your most human-hungry ones. Gen Z is coming in fully aware that AI is reshaping org charts. And they're not scared of it, they expect it. But what they’re also telling us loudly is that they want mentorship, real relationships, and development in the skills that AI can't replicate.

So the mistake I see HR leaders making is treating AI upskilling and human connection as two separate workstreams. They’re not, they’re the same investment. The companies that will win the talent game are the ones building onboarding and development programs that do both at once, because that’s actually what this generation is asking for.

Where do you see organizations falling short today when it comes to hiring, development, or retention?

The biggest gap I see is in the soft stuff. Companies will spend real money on AI tools, new org structures, performance frameworks and then wonder why nothing sticks. The answer is almost always the same: people don’t know how to process change, conflict, or uncertainty in a healthy way. And nobody taught them!

When you don’t invest in that, you get gossip, blame, resentment, and bias baked into your culture. Sometimes those are seen as personality problems, but they’re actually just skill gaps.

What I’d love to see more organizations do is treat emotional self-awareness as a core leadership competency and I mean that for everyone, not just people with manager titles. The ability to recognize what you’re feeling, understand where it’s coming from, and channel it productively is what separates teams that scale from teams that stall. That’s a trainable skill. We just have to decide it’s worth training.

AI is showing up everywhere in the employee journey right now. Where do you think it’s actually adding value, and where is it being overhyped or misused?

One place I’m genuinely excited about is AI as a thought partner for managers. Picture a manager about to have a hard performance conversation. They can feed in context, their prepared talking points, the employee’s role, and ask AI to pressure-test their approach and sharpen their delivery. That’s AI making human interaction better. That’s the good stuff.

Where I get nervous is when we use AI to remove the human entirely—like fully automated candidate interviews. I understand the appeal: it saves time, scales screening, reduces scheduling chaos. But we haven’t resolved the real risks yet…algorithmic bias, the inability to read character, the signal you send to candidates about what your culture actually values.

First impressions go both ways.

What’s one thing HR leaders can start doing differently tomorrow to build stronger, more resilient teams?

Stop going into executive conversations with anecdotes and go in with data. That’s the shift.

HR leaders often have the right instincts. They can feel when engagement is slipping, when a team is burning out, when a retention problem is brewing. But instincts don’t unlock budget. What unlocks budget is walking into a room and saying: “Here’s what our engagement data showed last quarter, here’s where it’s trending, and here’s what it’ll cost us if we don’t act now.”

Teams get resourced from the top. And executives respond to urgency they can see. So if you want buy-in on the initiatives that actually move the needle, make the invisible visible. Bring the numbers. Tell the story the data is already telling you.

When you think about talent in 2030, what do you hope organizations have finally figured out?

That talent has no zip code. The organizations still tethered to geography in 2030 will have already lost—lost the best candidates, lost diversity of thought, lost the argument. I hope we’ve fully let go of the idea that proximity equals commitment or capability. It never did.