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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An illustration of a photo of HR Brew reporter Paige McGlauflin.

Paige McGlauflin

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When trying to make big changes, is it better to start from inside or outside?

When it comes to hiring, Jackye Clayton is trying the latter. In January, she launched PeoplePuzzles, an HR consultancy-slash-neurodiversity career support service, focused on improving hiring, and offering productivity tools to executives with ADHD. (Clayton herself has ADHD.) She previously worked at several HR tech startups, most recently as VP of talent and DEI at Seattle-based Textio, an AI firm that aims to remove bias from feedback.

Her motivation stems from watching recruiting teams struggle to make top hires amid strict timelines and high volume.

“I’ve worked at several startups in the HR tech space, and my role has always been really helping people navigate through talent acquisition,” Clayton told HR Brew. “I realized that through the years, people have kind of lost the strategy piece, and misunderstand the lessons.”

When it comes to culture fit vs. culture add, for example, recruiters might downplay the importance of organizational alignment to business success. And, with AI increasingly at the forefront of hiring, these nuances could become even more overlooked.

While she is still in the early stages of her new venture, Clayton spoke with HR Brew about her top goals.

“I’m still kind of finding my feet of exactly how we’re going to put all these things together,” she said. “But my core interest is being able to find exactly what kind of people are going to be the right fit at the right company at the right time.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What motivated you to launch your new business?

I worked at all of these various startups and people [would] say, “I need to talk about career trajectory.” I’d always say, “Your career trajectory is out…this is a startup.” If you want a career, you need to go to a company where they have things like training and employee days and ERGs…we are going to work 12 hours a day, and that’s going to mean the weekend, and there is no life balance, and there is no place for you to go. That’s what startups are like.

You would lose lots of good people [at startups] because they wanted to go somewhere else in their career, but there’s lots of people who are at these other companies that would thrive from these types of environments. [I’m] trying to help people look past just the algorithm to make sure, once they’ve done all this matching, that the person is going to be somebody there for the long haul that understands the business.

Hiring is tough right now. If you’re getting thousands of résumés as a recruiter, how do you quickly turn those around and decide: Is this person a good fit?

And the [résumés] all look the same. I don’t think people realize that the algorithm that we’re working with is not like Netflix’s.

When you ask AI to enhance your résumé for the job description, [some of those] are gonna rise to the top, but they’re all gonna look the same. How do you know who to bring into the organization? You have to be able to break it down, but you can’t hint to the algorithm the things that you’re looking for. You have to be more specific.

Would you say that the algorithms aren’t capable of that nuance at this time, or recruiters are not good at that kind of prompt engineering?

I think it’s a mixture. I think [recruiters] have learned so much software before learning people…and [it’s] because of not understanding necessarily how [AI] bias works and how they’re already programmed. So an example is, most people will say, we want to hire people like our top performers…[but] all your top performers look the same, act the same, have the same background. So it kicks out [overlooked talent]… People don’t recognize the environment that they have, so it’s very difficult to know what you’re missing, and what would be a good fit and a culture add at the same time.

Your new venture has a couple focuses—which are you most passionate about?

Helping people understand where they can find the talent, even just from a technology standpoint…Simple tweaks to job descriptions, simple tweaks to the type of work that we’re looking at can help us find better candidates. And just taking the time. We try to slap a job description together, [post] it anywhere and just wait for people to come. But there’s so many applicants.

This is strategic. They’re not taking strategic goals. And now it’s being left to these systems to try to come up with the answer. You just have to dig just a little bit deeper. If you could just take it two more notches, you will have a better chance of hiring the right talent and explaining to the whole team why you’re doing this.

HR Brew coworking series featuring Jackye Clayton. Credit: Jackye Clayton

This former HR tech exec wants to help companies rethink hiring

“I’m trying to help people look past just the algorithm to make sure…that the person is going to be somebody there for the long haul.”

This former HR tech exec thinks companies are losing sight of hiring top talent. She wants to help.

These last few years have been a doozy for HR pros. A parade of personnel crises caused by the 

 pay more attention to workforce issues than ever before.

David Reed, global head of talent acquisition at claims administrator Sedgwick, told HR Brew that his background as a Certified Public Accountant and MBA in finance helped him navigate these significant changes.

“The vast majority of my career has been within HR. But anyone who’s ever worked with me or for me has always noticed that there’s an emphasis on the commercial side and the data and the profitability,” he said. “Because you can take the accountant out of accounting, but you can’t take the accountant out of me.”

Reed oversees a recruiting team that hires some 10,000 candidates around the world annually. He joined Sedgwick, which employs more than 33,000 workers globally, in June 2021, a few months after the firm appointed Michelle Hay as its new chief people officer. Reed was drawn to Sedgwick by Hay’s vision to elevate the HR function to one that tackles strategic people initiatives.

“We didn’t really have a strategy around our talent and what our value proposition was, what our employment brand was, what our internal mobility strategy was, all of those things,” he said. “So, that’s what we, across Michelle’s collective leadership team, have been focused on the last three years.”

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

The ability to deploy and redeploy resources to the highest priorities. Within Sedgwick, we have a number of unique business units that serve different clients, and they have different profiles that they need to recruit for. But my team, the talent acquisition team, is capable of recruiting anywhere. Let’s say your specialty is recruiting property adjusters, you can still go recruit for workers’ comp adjusters or even nurses, because we’ve trained our team members and we’ve built processes and systems that enable that fluidity. We build standard processes, we implement single systems, and then we train people across the business so that we can move them around.

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

That I hire all 10,000 people myself. A lot of my job is leading the team that does the hiring, ensuring that they have what they need, and working with business leaders to understand their needs. It sounds like what I do is recruit because what I oversee is the recruiting function, but actually I do much different things than recruiting.

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

I’m optimistic about a couple of things. I would start with AI…It’s a little bit scary, but there’s huge potential here. We’re only starting to scratch the surface. We’re taking a measured approach, but trying to recognize the potential that it presents.

Here’s an example. Someone internal to Sedgwick sent me her résumé saying, “I’m interested in a next assignment, what do you think?” We have a proprietary instance of a generative AI engine that is only Sedgwick-based. I input her résumé, and I said, “Match this résumé against open positions here at Sedgwick.” And voila. I could have done a lot of research, and maybe even off the top of my head I would have some ideas, but I let the engine provide me with some options that I was able to get back to the individual [and] say, “Here’s some things for you to consider.”

I’m also optimistic about transparency...Whether it’s through social media or other cultural influences, we’re becoming more transparent, and no function has more opportunity to capitalize on that than the HR function. We can train our people leaders on how to be more honest with people in a caring, kind, helpful way. We can be more transparent about our pay. We can be more transparent about opportunities elsewhere in the organization.

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

People’s ability and willingness to operate in the context of change. I think many people are programmed to resist change. I think this is an emerging area for HR in general to enable our leaders, their leaders, and our people to all be a lot more comfortable with change. Change is hard, but it’s good. Even if it means your job is changing or your job is going away, that presents opportunity. We’ve got a long, long, long, long ways to go on helping people adapt to change. But I think the most successful companies [and] the most successful leaders embrace change.

A headshot of David Reed, global head of talent acquisition at Sedgwick

How one TA leader is using his finance background for recruiting

“You can take the accountant out of accounting, but you can’t take the accountant out of me.”

This TA leader says his finance background helps him align recruiting and business priorities

Mikaela Cohen

Do you consider your pets part of your family?

Nearly all pet owners (97%) say their furry companions are family, according to 

. As such, the grief associated with losing them 

. And this can affect how employees show up to work, according to Erika Sinner, founder and CEO of marketing agency Directorie, and author of 

Sinner shared advice with HR Brew for people pros whose employees are grieving the loss of a pet.

I’ve always had pet bereavement leave in my company policies…But actually taking the leave last year when I lost my dog, Kingston, made me realize the stigma around it. I was worried my colleagues wouldn’t understand, or they would think it’s just a dog.

Compassionate policies, like pet bereavement leave, that shows your employee…we recognize your family structure includes your furry family members. You’re [not] leaving it up to chance that your frontline managers aren’t going to know what to do or what to say. Or your employees are going to feel like they have to go back to work the next day, or maybe they can’t talk about it, and they’re going to be miserable.

What resources does your book offer HR pros?

Losing a dog or a cat, or any type of animal…is actually as painful as losing human beings…I have that as the very first part of [the book], to just say, here’s why this matters, and what HR could be using to talk to their executive team…There’s also FAQs…around like, “How long do I give the bereavement leave for?...Do we count a bird?”...I have some answers in there too to help guide the HR team.

The third piece is manager training, or, how do you support your employees at work?...So that your managers don’t have that [response] of, “Well, it’s just a dog. Can’t you get back to work?”...Also, how do you think about reintegrating your employee back? Like, how do you help them reprioritize their tasks to keep their head above water?…I was talking to a company, and they’re like…“We have hourly people who work at a cash register”...So, maybe go to that employee once an hour and just say, “Hey, do you need to take a walk around the store, and I’ll cover the register?” It’s really just about acknowledging that the pain is real, and helping them manage through this initial shock period.

How can HR help managers be compassionate or empathetic?

It has to start from the top down, in terms of really pushing for an empathy-driven culture…then compassion is having compassionate policies, like pet bereavement…Even if the manager can’t understand all the way, there is a black-and-white policy that’s going to decide how your employee is going to be received when something like this happens. And that’s where I just feel like HR has such a beautiful role in being the safety net. That an employee can point to a policy and say…“My dog died, and I’m really upset. I’m going to go ahead and take that bereavement time off.”

Within my own company….we don’t just have meetings, we talk about moments that matter…checking in with [employees]. How are you building trust?...Also, not comparing grief…I’m not here to say whose grief is worse…It’s more about taking it back again to the empathy piece, and that you’ve normalized in your organization for an employee to say, “I’m not okay”...Because if somebody’s hiding it from you, they’re going to make mistakes, they’re going to miss things like the client deliverable…It really is your company’s brand reputation on the line.

An interview with Erika Sinner, author of ‘Pets Are Family’

“It’s really just about acknowledging that the pain is real, and helping them manage through this initial shock period,” says Erika Sinner, author of ‘Pets Are Family.’

HR’s role in helping employees grieve the loss of a pet

We chat 1:1 with HR pros about their career journeys. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? 

If you shopped at Comics To Astonish in Columbia, Maryland, between 1999 and 2002, you might’ve been rung up at the register by Michael Wiles.

That assistant manager gig was Wiles’ first foray into the workforce, and an experience that would remain relevant throughout his career in HR. Today, he’s an employee relations business partner at edtech company 2U.

“Working with the public, you’re meeting different people all the time. Working in a shop, you’re meeting, also, the same people over and over. You’re working with your regular customers, which is very analogous to working in human resources,” Wiles told HR Brew.

He reminiscenced with HR Brew about the people lessons he picked up managing a comic-book store.

It really gave me that initial experience on how to see things from another person’s perspective, and how to see what they need, and how to understand their frustrations, and also the things that they enjoy the most and how to cater to that. And that initial experience, looking back, has been very critical to my work in HR, and specifically, in employee relations.

Did you learn lessons while working at the comic bookstore that you apply in your current role?

So much of what I do in employee relations and in human resources is operating in the moment, and I think working that initial first job was always just me operating at the moment. It was me alone in the shop…So, being able to operate in the moment, being able to think quickly, to think through things quickly and make the right decision, that was critical…Every day in employee relations, it’s a lot of the same. You’re in that moment thinking, “What is the correct path? What is the equitable path? What does this person need, and how do I balance that with the needs of the business?”

It sounds like customer-service roles can help train HR pros.

You’re constantly navigating the psychology of people…navigating people and how people interact, and that experience of human interaction is what makes every day a little different. And that’s, to me, what is most engaging about what I do—knowing that that challenge is always there, and that opportunity, similarly, is also always there. And again, it comes back to customer service.

I graduated with an undergraduate degree in English and technical writing, and I worked for several years as an editor in publishing, and then I worked as a marketer, writing copy. I was a journalist for a while…But then I had an epiphany that in the roles that I had, the things I liked the most about them weren’t necessarily the tactical, execution aspects of it. It was the supporting colleagues, providing training, providing development…I thought to myself, “What do I really want to be doing with my career? Where do I think I’ll always be compelled to rise to the challenge?”

Human resources was that answer. So, I made that decision to transition away from working in that technical writing and publishing space, and return to school, get a graduate degree, and transition into human resources. And then, as I navigated that entry into HR, I really found myself drawn to the employee relations aspect of the field...If you enjoy these parts of the job, the people development, the training, those types of things, that should be what you do. That should be your focus. It shouldn’t just be part of what you enjoy. That should be what you do…and after thinking it over, there was no doubt in my mind, “This is what I should be doing with the remaining time I have in the workforce.”

Employees working different types of jobs

An interview with Michael Wiles, an employee relations professional at edtech company 2U

“It comes back to customer service,” says Michael Wiles, employee relations pro at 2U.

A customer-service job helped this people pro develop critical HR skills

We know we’re preaching to the choir when we say that the job of an HR professional hasn’t gotten any easier.

 have created headaches for most HR professionals in recent years—and they’ve had to get creative to address these challenges.

That rings particularly true for Kat Gerig, vice president of human resources at Indiana-based telecommunications company Telamon. She leads an HR team of eight, serving hundreds of employees in the US, India, and Europe.

Currently, Gerig said her biggest challenge is managing all of the demands of the HR function, like keeping employees engaged, minimizing turnover, and staying on top of workforce development planning. She has launched several initiatives to tackle that, including an apprenticeship training program for high-turnover roles and employee career development benefits.

“What I try to do is make sure that we’re moving things forward, and that we are not just supporting the business,” she told HR Brew. “I don’t want to just be a support, I want to enable our business to grow, and to hit its goals. That’s really what I charge our HR team to do.”

We created an Installer Academy training program where we grow and develop inexperienced telecommunications installers. We had a business problem—[we] couldn’t find the talent we needed in the market—so we got creative.

We then spent quite a bit of time—many, many months—just trying to build out a program where we can bring in inexperienced talent. So, we looked more for competencies than we did experience. We were looking for people who [were] obviously hardworking, high learning agility, very detail-oriented, don’t mind working with [their] hands.

If they had a desire to be in the telecommunications business, we would take them, hire them, train them. And then along the way, they could move from an apprentice to a [senior role] over a three-year period, if they had the right learning agility. Not everybody was going to get there on that pace. But if you have the right learning agility, and you’re a hard worker, we can make that happen. And of course, with that comes pay increases along the way.

That HR is generally “negative.” That’s not the case.

When [people] see me coming their way, I don’t want them to panic, right? I want them to think, “Oh, Kat’s coming over to be a partner,” which is really what we want to be. I think it’s about trust. Building trust and building relationships. If I can build trusting, strong relationships with people, it shouldn’t be that we’re a feared entity.

Unfortunately, we have to do some hard things. And that is just the reality of our job. But if we’re doing our jobs well, in a lot of ways we can prevent a lot of those things. If we’re hiring well, if we’re engaging our workforce, if we’re building those trusting relationships, if we’re coaching and guiding our managers through challenging employee situations, if we’re doing all those things well, I feel like we can get through that reputation that sometimes is there for HR departments.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

For me, it is “cultivating growth,” which is one pillar of our employee value proposition, throughout the company. How can we continue to grow and develop our employees so they are ready for the next opportunity and they want to stay with Telamon?

We do a variety of different things [to support that]. We have your standard tuition reimbursement where we will pay for people to go back to school. We also—I really love this program—we allow people to apply for dollars. We have a certain number of dollars each year or people can apply for up to $2,000 each in our fiscal year. It can be [for] a certification, continuing education of some sort. Whatever will benefit them personally and for their job, we want to support that.

The other thing is…if somebody has an interest in something we will get them on a project. A lot of times, on-the-job training is really the best way to learn. We will help people get those opportunities, even if it’s like, “Hey, you still have to do your job, but we’re going to let you get involved in this project over here.” A lot of people thrive on that kind of growth and development.

A headshot of Kat Gerig, vice president of human resources at Telamon

How one HR pro tackled her company’s frontline talent shortage

“We had a business problem—[we] couldn’t find the talent we needed in the market—so we got creative.”

Why one HR pro turned to talent development to address her company’s shortage of telecoms professionals

How many times have you wished a crystal ball could give you a glimpse into the future of work? Oh, what a breeze HR would be…

In lieu of a fortune-telling orb, many companies seek out workplace consultants to help guide their HR strategies. One of those experts is Peter Miscovich, executive managing director at consultancy JLL. He’s helped C-suite executives at companies including Accenture, AT&T, and IBM design and implement hybrid workplaces since the 1990s.

Miscovich, along with Sanjay Rishi and Benjamin Breslau, published 

The Workplace You Need Now: Shaping Spaces for the Future of Work

 in 2021 to help companies create future-oriented workspaces. He shared with HR Brew the lessons people pros can learn from the book.

It focuses on the personalized workplace, the responsible workplace, and the experiential workplace…it focuses on the four Cs of value from our perspective, and that includes culture, collaboration, creativity, and community. The book is organized to be both conceptual to provide background on the future of work, and where work has been and where work is going…

It has over 30 client case studies, including our work with the likes of Microsoft and other leading clients on the how of hybrid. So, from an HR perspective, having worked and still working with a number of CHROs, if we look at the employee value proposal for 2024, 2027, 2030, the how of hybrid is important, the how of talent attraction is important, the how of digital upskilling, AI enablement, human-to-machine collaborative eco-systems, how all of this comes together was the focus of our book in 2021 and 2022…We’re now in 2024, and the book still has relevance.

How has hybrid work changed since the ’90s?

We had a very long hybrid winter until the pandemic hit. And, then in a matter of three weeks, 3 billion people went remote, which is really remarkable when you think about the scale and scope, volume, and velocity of hybrid and remote adoption that occurred in March–April 2020. But, as we fast forward now to 2024, the challenges are both an investment challenge, an infrastructure and technology challenge, a workforce and change management challenge, and a leadership challenge. And, all the CHROs that I work with closely, they’re trying to navigate their future of work and future of hybrid strategies, and their varying degrees of success.

One reason I’ve been doing this for 25 years is that it’s continuously changing…And, I cannot keep up with the volume and velocity of both talent and workforce change, workplace change, technology change…Clients require a lot of navigational support to navigate all the challenges I just mentioned…The challenges are actually increasing, and they are accelerating in terms of intensity. And, then you can layer on that geopolitical challenge, you can layer upon that climate risk and resiliency challenges…So, it’s a very rich and complex environment, especially for the CHROs and CEO leadership teams to navigate their future work strategies in a successful manner.

What makes a hybrid workplace successful?

It doesn’t happen overnight, and the more successful clients that we’ve been working with for 10 years or 15 years, are successful because they’ve embedded hybrid into their DNA as an organization. They have a leadership cohort, a leadership vision, and an employee value proposal that is cogent, visionary, and comprehensive.

An interview Peter Miscovich, co-author of ‘The Workplace You Need Now: Shaping Spaces for the Future of Work’

“We had a very long hybrid winter until the pandemic hit,” Peter Miscovich, consultant and author, tells HR Brew.

How HR leaders can design a successful hybrid workspace strategy

Adam DeRose

Here’s this week’s edition of our Coworking series. Each week, we chat 1:1 with an HR Brew reader. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? 

Marissa Morrison jokes she’s experienced HR from every angle. The VP of people at ZipRecruiter told HR Brew she got her start in the function as a management consultant for Big Four consulting firm PwC; she’s also served Big Tech at LinkedIn and has led HR at startups at various stages, sizes, and levels of funding.

For Morrison, the HR-adjacent, midsize public company with its mission to connect people to their next great opportunity was a perfect Goldilocks situation: just right.

“I have worked in a variety of different kinds of companies,” she said of her fit at ZipRecruiter. “Getting to step into a leadership role at a people tech company, I think it raises the bar for the people team.”

Morrison said the ZipRecruiter product inspires her and her team to “be leaders on pushing the limits and trying new things when it comes to recruiting,” but it also gives her team a “strategic advantage” when it comes to succeeding in the business.

“There’s no excuse that we shouldn’t be understanding the metrics of our business because we live and breathe that much in our own lives,” she said. “We should be able to be more competent in the drivers of a successful business which makes us better at our people jobs…and that’s such a non-negotiable.”

What’s the best change you’ve made at work?

The change I am most proud of was launching a robust and meaningful leadership development training program at ZipRecruiter.

Leaders are the core of a successful company. Ensuring they’re equipped with the skills, support, knowledge, community, and encouragement to do a stellar job makes a huge impact on how an organization operates.

Because we know that strong people leaders impact every part of an organization, we built programs for managers at every stage of their leadership journey—from those who are new to the company or new to people management to a formal multi-week VP+ executive development program.

Growth is a lifelong process, and investing in the personal and professional skills of our people leaders is a core part of our business strategy, and a focus that I’m very proud to be a part of.

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

That it’s subjective and driven by feelings, when in fact there is both an art and a science to people leadership.

I’m a big believer in systems and setting up fair, consistent, and scalable processes that set the team up for success. Some parts of our job are creative and innovative. And many parts thrive with the same structured approach as engineers and product developers—relying on a hypothesis, business case, consistent measurement, and strong cross-functional relationships. Our people team works in sprints, measures the return on investment of our work, tracks metrics, and holds ourselves accountable to being innovative in our approach.

Coaching leaders and helping them break down what may feel like a really complex, difficult situation into a simple, straightforward plan.

I feel most fulfilled when a leader comes to me feeling like there’s no good solution to a people or organizational problem they’re facing, and through our conversation, they get the clarity they’ve been struggling to find and see the path forward clearly. That feels great!

People teams adopting AI and technology in new and exciting ways. There’s so much opportunity for people teams to focus on truly strategic work when regular, administrative tasks are automated. With AI, people teams also have access to complex data sets that may have taken much longer to analyze before. I believe the accelerated impact people teams have made over the past years will only continue as they adopt new technologies and lean on AI.

Single-point HR tech solutions. I’m always thinking about the employee and how to make their life easier. HR professionals are inundated with pitches for single-point technology solutions. This has gotten a lot of traction over the past few years and in the coming years, companies will try to consolidate their tech stack or find products that solve more than one problem in an integrated and sophisticated way. For busy employees, logging into multiple systems for multiple purposes is not efficient and these products aren’t used as a result.

image of Marissa Morrison in HR Brew Coworking graphis

Q&A