From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

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Paige McGlauflin

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 and companies pull back on external hiring, more are considering how to best develop and leverage their existing workforce.

Caroline Bethune, manager of internal mobility at the conglomerate Cox Enterprises, says most companies take one of two routes when developing existing talent: They either dedicate part of their talent acquisition team to internal mobility and requisitions, or create a team focused on developing strategy around and creating (but not overseeing) initiatives like a talent marketplace or mentoring program.

Her team is trying to strike a balance between the two—an approach, she says, she hasn’t seen at many other companies.

“Our team is sort of in the middle of both of those,” Bethune told HR Brew. “So we’re uniquely setting a trend, I feel like, for what internal mobility could be outside of those two predominant spaces.”

This approach was informed by employee feedback and a desire to ensure the company’s internal mobility program was based on workers’ needs. Bethune saw an opportunity for a team that employees could turn to for feedback on their applications, interviews, or thank-you letters.

“I think being able to solve [those issues] is probably most critical for an HR partner or a business that’s looking to deepen their exposure in the internal mobility space,” Bethune said. “They first have to really understand: Where are your people today at? What are the pain points today? What do they think about the experience? What are the challenges they have moving in the organization? Because if you don’t have a really good pulse there, then everything you’re building doesn’t resonate with actual employees.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?

We have four advisors that are on the team today. One of the things I felt where there was a gap was, there isn’t a centralized place for employees to go one-to-one to get career guidance. They can go to the HRBPs and they can give them some feedback, they certainly can go to their leader to help develop and build them. But there isn’t a team that actually sits closest to talent in the hiring practices giving them coaching and guidance and strategic advice, planning their career journey and having those conversations.

So my first thought was, well, let’s build one. If we’re going to focus on internal mobility, let’s have a team that is specifically there to empower and guide our employees through connecting to the right roles and opportunities. That’s the framing of where we created the team, and then we moved into: How do we actually build a scalable consult program? And so that’s what we do today. We meet employees where they are, but we offer one-to-one guidance for employees around coaching and development in their career journey.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

That internal mobility advisors don’t participate in recruiting. Meaning that there is a distinction between traditional recruiters, and what our teams are doing from a talent delivery perspective, and then what we’re doing.

We’re still recruiting. Internal mobility is still an aspect of recruiting. It looks very different because, we don’t have specific

[requisitions] for you to then apply to, for us to go through the process with, and then for us to end up hiring someone. It’s not an end-to-end service. But what we are doing is we are helping to build awareness for our leaders around talent that otherwise they wouldn’t have known, which is a part of recruiting.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

Helping people discover new possibilities within the company. Empowering them to grow, stay, and thrive. It’s incredibly rewarding to see someone go from feeling uncertain about their next step to landing a role that reenergizes their career, all while staying in a place they already know and value.

What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?

Internal mobility—focusing on “build vs. buy” talent strategies—developing existing employees rather than constantly hiring externally.

What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?

Erosion of trust in DEI efforts. Not because the work itself isn’t valuable, but because progress has stalled or even regressed in many organizations.

Cutout of a woman, Caroline Bethune, manager of internal mobility at Cox Enterprises, displayed on a templated background.

Want to build an internal mobility program? Start with this advice from one expert

It’s always good to stop and listen.

This internal mobility manager shares what employers should do first when developing their existing talent

Have you ever gotten into a Soho House? Neither have we.

This week, though, Lauren Goodman, regional director of people and development at Soho House, gave us an inside look at her job at the 

Goodman handles HR for two of the private club’s largest operations: California and New York. She joined in 2022, about a year after the company went public during a period of transition, she said. (Last month, it reached 

 after a multi-year streak of poor stock performance.)

While the company still thinks of itself as a “30-year-old startup,” its public offering necessitated establishing structured HR processes, which were either non-existent or inconsistent, according to Goodman. She was tasked with formalizing processes and policies for background checks, employee form storage, interview guidelines, performance management, and terminations.

Another focus was ensuring that frontline staffers understood the culture and history of Soho House and its importance for long-tenured members.

“Our frontline hourly employees, they make or break our culture. So we have to take so much care of them and listen to them, but also make sure we’re setting them up for success and saying on the first day, ‘These are our values. This is why these are our values,’” she said. “Because, if not, we’re walking them in and we’re setting them to fail, which isn’t fair for anybody.”

Changing the perception of HR from being purely administrative to being a partner.

That HR just hires and fires people and is there for admin support.

It’s way more than that. Employee engagement, to me, is a big piece…especially knowing that our servers don’t want to be career servers…We know this is a job, and they’re working at Soho House to, hopefully, meet the right connection…[However,] how do we keep them as engaged as possible when they’re at work?

Taking care of my team and the employees.

At the beginning of the year in LA, we had the wildfires, and it was a really hard time for a lot of our team…We have Soho Home, which is our retail space, and our head of Soho Home reached out and said, “Hey, we’re able to provide $10,000 to each employee who lost a home once they’re ready to purchase new furniture, and we’ll do it at an employee discount.”

Also, we worked closely with the team on furloughing. We had to do some furloughs for several months for our Malibu location, because there was no way in or out, and a lot of our members lost their homes, too…Just being there and listening and offering our employee assistance programs and our mental health resources through Aetna. And then we also protected our employee hours, so we made sure that everyone would stay at a full-time status for those months, even if their hours weren’t there, so with our ACA audit, so that way it wouldn’t become a detriment to them to lose benefits.

I am most optimistic for HR to be a strategic player, have a seat at the table and be part of key decisions. I think HR is integral in an organization and provides an insight on how to motivate the team while minimizing legal risk.

I am currently least optimistic about the increasing complexity and pace of employment law changes. In states like California, we’ve been trained to continuously keep an eye out for changes. However, there seems to be pace increasing for local jurisdictions and it can be tough to access the information. In tandem with the employment law changes, the growing polarization in workplace culture—including political, social, and generational divides—is putting a lot of pressure on human resources and the employee’s manager to be culturally sensitive and legally sound. Leading with integrity, empathy, and innovation is going to be key, coupled with understanding how different groups define and will respond to this type of leadership.

A portrait of Lauren Goodman, an HR Director at Soho House, an international private members' club.

How this Soho House HR director created processes while staying true to the company’s culture

The members-only club is still thought of as a “30-year-old startup,” but its public offering in 2021 necessitated structured HR processes.

The HR director who established culture-friendly policies for the exclusive Soho House

When Jaylene Gonzalez joined online learning platform Skillshare as its people operations manager in November 2024, the company was in the midst of yet another reorganization.

So, while she was acclimating to her new role, Gonzalez embarked on a listening tour. Over the course of a few weeks, she scheduled 30-minute, one-on-one conversations with employees across different levels and functions. She asked about their roles, satisfaction, goals, priorities, and thoughts on what the company was and wasn’t doing well. From their feedback, she shared insights with Skillshare’s executive team and devised a strategy for improving the employee experience.

“With that listening tour, we were able to make some really positive changes for the employees and take their feedback and turn it into action,” she told HR Brew.

For other HR pros who may join a company during a similar period of change, Gonzalez recommends taking the time to listen to employees—all employees.

“Speak to people at all levels of the business. Don’t just start from the top or speak to middle management. Talk to any level of employee, because everyone has a different experience,” she said. “There’s so much information that you can get from the team, especially the team who has been there for a solid amount of time [and] understand the business through and through.”

One of the most impactful changes was reimagining our company-wide engagement strategy post-reorg. I led a full pulse survey and listening tour initiative that gave employees a real voice, then turned that feedback into actionable programming around transparency, well-being, and culture-building. It was a moment that really shifted how we think about engagement—less as an HR “check-the-box” and more as an ongoing, two-way conversation.

That it’s all policies, hiring/firing, and paperwork. People ops is just as much about strategy and storytelling as it is about compliance. There’s a real human side to this work—whether you’re coaching a manager through a tough conversation, building a program to recognize employee contributions, or rolling out change in a way that actually lands. Every system or policy we create touches someone’s day-to-day, and I take that seriously.

Knowing that the work I do has a direct impact on how people feel about coming to work. When someone feels seen, supported, or excited to be part of something—we’ve done our job. That, and I genuinely love creating experiences that bring some levity, creativity, or connection into the workplace. The little wins (like a great intern kickoff or a team shoutout in Slack) really add up.

I’m really excited about the shift toward employee experience being treated as a strategic function. It’s no longer just about engagement surveys—it’s about thoughtfully designing the full lifecycle experience with purpose, from onboarding to offboarding, and being more human-centered in how we lead. Especially in creative and mission-driven orgs like ours, there’s so much opportunity to build people strategies that energize teams and reflect the culture we want to nurture.

I’m a little wary of the overreliance on AI in people decisions. Don’t get me wrong—tech should absolutely make our jobs easier (and it does!), but I think we have to be careful about where we automate versus where we need that human nuance. People ops work is deeply relational, and we can’t afford to let efficiency override empathy or context.

A portrait of Jaylene Gonzalez, people operations manager at the online learning platform SkillShare.

One HR leader’s advice for joining a company during a big transition

“Speak to people at all levels of the business.”

One HR leader shares her advice for joining a company undergoing big changes

The worst hiring practice Kasey Harboe Guentert has witnessed is lacking a clear hiring plan.

Harboe Guentert is an executive consultant at HR consultancy APTMetrics, where she helps employers make “smart, fair, and data-driven decisions when building their teams.” She is also the co-author of 

, which helps employers better recruit, assess, and select candidates.

“Every new requisition shows up and the hiring manager just does it all by themselves, without any support necessarily,” Harboe Guentert said. “The way they actually conduct the interview and the questions they ask and how they evaluate the capabilities of the candidate, it's just completely random.”

It’s a practice she says is “unfortunately still common,” and one that ultimately hurts hiring managers and their teams. Inarticulate hiring processes can be time consuming, Harboe Guentert said. Even if hiring managers ask good questions, without objective criteria to evaluate candidates, they can end up choosing candidates based on personal feelings (aka, 

Hiring managers typically have a good understanding of what success looks like in the job they’re hiring for, even if they haven’t formally communicated that. But encouraging them to focus on that “will get them away from the: “Can you sell me this pen?” or, “do I have a beer with this person?” of question,” Harboe Guentert said.

One of the most meaningful changes I led at Airbnb was building out structured, role-specific definitions of what success looks like for jobs like software engineers, machine learning engineers, customer support, or members of our trust team. These definitions, called competencies, helped us create a shared language for evaluating talent, making hiring and promotion decisions fairer, more transparent, and more consistent. It aligned teams around expectations and gave people a clearer path to grow.

That my work is just about writing job descriptions or checking boxes in the hiring process. In reality, it’s about shaping how companies define success, grow talent, and make decisions that affect real people’s careers. I use research, data, and deep collaboration to build systems that help organizations hire and develop fairly and strategically. It’s not just HR—it’s business-critical design.

I’m deeply curious about what people actually do at work. Not just their job titles or high-level responsibilities, but how they think, solve problems, and create value every day. When I’m learning about a role, I go deep below the surface. I ask about the moments that make someone’s work satisfying or frustrating, what decisions they have to make, who they rely on, and what great performance looks like in their context.

I’ve sat with software engineers walking me through code reviews, listened to customer service reps explain how they balance empathy with policy, and talked with trust and safety team members about the ethical choices baked into their daily work. I ask questions until I can picture myself in the role, not to do it, but to understand it well enough to build systems that reflect its complexity and value.

This kind of deep listening and analysis helps me design fairer, clearer talent practices. But more than that, it reflects what drives me: I care about people’s work. I think what people do every day matters. And I believe that understanding those details—really understanding them—is the first step to making work better.

The growing recognition that how we define, hire, and develop talent really matters, not just to companies, but to people’s lives. There’s a shift happening toward more intentional, evidence-based, and human-centered approaches to work. We’re seeing more organizations invest in clarity, fairness, and transparency—not as afterthoughts, but as core to good business.

I’m especially hopeful about the increasing collaboration between researchers, practitioners, and technologists. When we bring together data, design, and deep understanding of jobs, we can build systems that work better. That gives me hope for a future where people are seen more fully for what they bring, and where career paths are clearer and more inclusive.

I’m least optimistic about the decline in thoughtful, open discussion around diversity, equity, and inclusion. These conversations have become more politicized and, in some cases, more performative—making it harder to engage with the real, nuanced work that DEI requires. What concerns me most is the risk of losing momentum on efforts that are essential to building fair and effective workplaces. When we stop talking honestly about equity, we stop understanding how to create a better workforce.

A portrait of Kasey Harboe Guentert against a green background with dark green star graphics

The worst hiring practice employers follow, according to an expert

It’s a practice one consultant says is “unfortunately still common.”

The worst hiring practice employers follow

For HR pros inspired to author a book for fellow practitioners, Joey Price has some advice not too far off from Nora Ephron’s belief that everything is copy.

“Journal your wins and journal your losses, because they will help shape your story,” said Price, whose book, The Power of HR: How to Make an Organizational Impact as a People Professional, was published in March 2025. “The way that you write your book, and the stories that you tell in your book, should be based on experience and not just theory. That’s what’s going to help your book stand out from others.”

Price is president and CEO of Jumpstart HR, an HR outsourcing and consulting firm focused on supporting small businesses and startups. He founded Jumpstart HR at age 24 when he decided that he wanted to pursue outsourcing and have a “multiplier effect” working with multiple companies, versus pursuing HR leadership at one company internally. Today, the firm has grown to 15 employees (soon to be 16), after acquiring research firm Aspect43 in January.

His book focuses on demonstrating the importance of HR pros showing up as strategic partners to peers in other parts of the business. According to Price, the book has three audiences: mid-level HR professionals who aspire to leadership ranks but lack the mentor or network to help them learn how to get a seat at the table, HR leaders who may feel rusty in certain parts of their job and are looking for guidance, and for current students who aspire to HR leadership positions. It includes Price’s own learnings across a whole range of HR functions, from people analytics to DEI to recruitment.

“I always felt I had a book in me, but I didn’t know if it was the right time based on the experience that I had at that time,” Price said. “You have to go through some things before you write the book, so that you’re not just like a talking head, but you can say, ‘I’ve been there, I’ve done it. I got the T-shirt. Now I’m writing the book about it.’”

The best change I’ve made at a place I’ve worked is changing the norms and expectations of what people think it’s like to work with HR. People are used to HR being adversarial, risk-adverse and anti-employee. I believe that HR should be an empathetic diplomat who understands organizational culture well enough to know when to innovate and when to play it safe. As a consulting firm, our biggest compliments are referrals and repeat business. That happens often for us.

The biggest misconception about HR consultants is that we exist to come into organizations and fire people at scale. I understand that media and big box consulting firms may have a lot to do with that, but it’s not true for all of us!

The most fulfilling aspect of my job is seeing a business leader go from careful to confident when we strategize about key next steps. In my book, The Power of HR, I talk about how HR should be part-coach and part-cheerleader. It’s rewarding to develop leaders who become strategic analysts but also courageous executors. Sometimes they just need a little help and outside counsel.

I’m most optimistic about HR’s role in strategic governance of an organization. I say this because technology is forcing business leaders to reimagine—very quickly—what it means to “buy, borrow, or bot” their workforce. Meaning, workforce planning isn’t just about hiring employees and contractors. It now means incorporating AI agents and technology that can augment core tasks.

Also, I’m optimistic because the winds of legal compliance are as volatile as ever and no one is poised to lead in this arena like HR. From immigration to diversity to compensation, it’s important for businesses to respond to what the courts and legislators are saying. I’m confident we can do that!

I’m least optimistic about mass adoption of AI for HR leaders who refuse to acknowledge how important it is. The pace of AI innovation is far outpacing the pace of acceptance and awareness of what to do with it. For every HR leader at Big Tech, we can’t forget about the HR leaders who buy technology in rural areas and less tech savvy industries.

Joey Price for HR Brew's Coworking series

Read this HR leader’s advice for aspiring authors

“Journal your wins and journal your losses because they will help shape your story.”

HR leader and book author shares his advice for those with book-writing ambitions

 for working parents. And while some employers 

So, it’s probably no surprise that Denise Reeb, an HR generalist at Sauder Manufacturing, considers securing funding for a childcare subsidy pilot program to be one of her most rewarding achievements.

Reeb is the HR rep for some 150 employees at an Indiana-based plant for the company, which has 500 workers total. The subsidy perk, created in partnership with the Northeast Indiana Early Childhood Coalition, is similar to Michigan’s Tri-Care program, where the organization, Sauder Manufacturing, and the employee each pay one-third of the costs of childcare.

Reeb notes there are some restrictions to the program, like limits on earnings. But despite that, she’s already confirmed interest from at least five employees at her plant alone. If the pilot succeeds, she says the company may be able to roll out the program to more workers.

“We’re one of the first companies that can offer this to our employees. So we’re trying it out, getting funding and budgeting,” she said. “We’re really excited about it. There’s a lot of buzz in the whole area. That’s one of my proudest accomplishments here so far.”

When I started my current job in 2022, we had sky-high turnover and very low morale. They were using temp workers that had no intention of building a good product or staying with the company. When I raised awareness of our employee referral program and started hiring only direct employees, we quickly saw a major improvement in stability, quality, and morale. We are currently at around 2% monthly turnover and employee stay interviews have almost no action items that haven't already been addressed.

That my job is to hire, discipline, and fire people. That is only a small portion of a generalist's role.

There’s a lot more. [There’s] the strategic part, working alongside the executives and the other managers here to make sure they're making the right decisions and being there for advice. [And] taking on these pet projects and making sure that we have a nice, safe, comfortable workplace here. I’m not just here to be a cop, good or bad. There’s just so many things that HR touches, and a lot of people just don’t understand that.

Getting positive feedback from employees about a project or program I’ve set in place. When I see employees that use resources, either here or in their personal lives, that I’ve given them, I get warm and fuzzy. Is that a normal HR feeling? :-)

The trend towards more strategic roles. When I started (a long time ago), HR was seen as administrative party planners. Now I get a seat at the table and am asked for input on business and operations matters.

AI. Although I use AI frequently as a helper, using it as a replacement for tasks without human oversight is very risky. I look forward to a future where AI has boundaries and is more functional. But until then, its use should be kept to a minimum.

Denise Reeb for HR Brew's Coworking series

One HR pro shares how she launched a childcare subsidy at her manufacturing company

Childcare benefits can be out of reach for many employers. This HR pro landed funding for a pilot program at a manufacturing facility.

How one HR pro at a manufacturing company landed funding for a childcare benefit

Navigating benefits strategy is tough for any HR pro in today’s business environment.

 and niche, organizations must juggle providing a competitive total rewards package while managing challenges like 

. For Kate Phillips, Bank of America’s global head of benefits, one key part of her team’s multi-pronged approach to crafting offerings for the bank’s over 200,000 employees is simply through feedback.

“An important part of my job is making sure I’m staying connected to: What are our teammates’ needs? What do they want? How are those needs and priorities evolving for them?” Phillips told HR Brew.

For example, her team sources feedback via an enterprise-wide employee survey. They parse through the comments to gauge what workers’ needs or wants are, how priorities are changing, and incorporate that into their strategy planning. Last year, employees responded with more than 40,000 benefits-related comments on the survey.

One example of a successful offering coming from this approach is the firm’s sabbatical program, launched in 2023, which is eligible to employees after 15 years of service.

“We were listening to our teammates, looking for a way to recognize them,” Phillips said. “It’s been incredibly rewarding to hear and see the feedback from our teammates. I get letters, notes, emails all the time from teammates who go on sabbaticals, talking about what a really life-changing experience, for some of them, it has been to take time away really focused on whatever it is that they want to do.”

In 2023, we launched our sabbatical program which has become one of our most popular benefits. The program provides four-to-six weeks away from work after 15 or more years of service. By the end of 2024, more than 21,000 employees had taken a sabbatical, including me! We expect an additional 14,000 teammates to take their sabbatical by the end of 2025.

People may think of HR as a department that’s siloed off from the rest of the organization, but our team can’t and doesn’t work that way. We’re embedded across the company with an ear to the ground and a seat at the table because being a great place to work isn’t just something we like to say, it is core to our business strategy.

The most fulfilling part of my job is the ability to speak daily with teammates about their experiences working here. I love being able to connect with them individually and understand what their needs are, while gathering feedback on programs that are working well. That is extremely rewarding.

One of the best parts of my job is receiving notes from people when they come back from a sabbatical telling me about the amazing things they were able to do with their time off. It ranges from “I went on the trip of a lifetime” to “I paved my driveway and reorganized my closets” or “I got to spend more time with my grandchildren.” It’s pretty special to lead a program that’s enabling wonderful experiences and creating lifelong memories for tens of thousands of people at the company.

We’re at an interesting inflection point in the industry right now, but I think one trend that I’m excited about is more personalization for teammates. As consumers, we’re used to having incredibly personalized experiences. We’ve been trained to want things to look good, to feel good, to be easy to navigate—and our teammates want the same things from their benefits. Figuring out how we can personalize our offerings and adapt to what our teammates need is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. Another trend I would be remiss not to mention is AI and HR automation. Evaluating ways in which AI can enhance and support us as HR professionals— see a lot of opportunity here, and that is exciting.

I wouldn’t say there’s any one thing right now that leaves me lacking a sense of optimism. In fact, I view a core part of my role as being intellectually curious and ensuring I understand what is happening in the marketplace. But like some things in life, there are times when trends or focus areas can feel like a phase—or everyone is just using the same buzzword.

I try to look at each phase or trend and find the opportunity to learn something and hopefully grow or be better. Whether that’s skills-based hiring, people analytics, holistic wellbeing, workplace flexibility, or AI, I am always optimistic about potential opportunities.

Kate Phillips, Bank of America's global head of benefits