Work Tech Weekly Podcast

Why a Reference Check Only Works If You Can Verify It

Steve Smith — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:55:52 GMT

Sometimes the reference is the candidate.

James Lord says it happens a lot. The reference has a Gmail address and a LinkedIn profile that holds up at a glance, but the answers come from the candidate's own basement.

What gives it away is a device and a WiFi network that match the candidate's.

That's a problem, because the reference check is usually the last thing standing between a candidate and an offer. It's supposed to deliver "the benefit of hindsight, someone else's lived experience." Hindsight only helps if it comes from a real person.

James leads expansion in the Americas forRefapp, a Swedish platform that runs evidence-based, role-specific reference checks inside the applicant tracking system. In more than a decade of doing this, he's watched the share of suspicious references nearly triple.

I expected a conversation about paperwork. I got one about the least-verified step in hiring.

HubSpot's Next Act Looks a Lot Like Work Tech

Steve Smith — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:46:31 GMT

"It's not all bullshit. There's a lot of bullshit, but it's not all bullshit."

That's Alec Cherrin's verdict on HubSpot UNBOUND, and it's about as fair a review as HubSpot is going to get.

HubSpot spent the week in Boston pitching agents for everything. Alec was there for it. The subtext: it wants to be where your team works all day. That's a work tech play, whether HubSpot calls it one or not.

For a special live edition of Work Tech Weekly, I sat down with Alec, Rep Cap's Marketing Ops Practice Lead, to take audience questions on what's worth your time.

Why PEO Software Wins the SMB Market Others Abandon

Steve Smith — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:35:48 GMT

Every few years, some HR Tech company swears it's finally here for small business. Two funding rounds later it's chasing enterprise logos, and the customers who got it off the ground are stuck on hold.

PEOs (Professional Employer Organizations) have been taking those calls the whole time.

A professional employer organization handles HR, payroll, benefits, and compliance for small companies that can't staff those functions themselves. Kevin Andrews has watched the market circle small business for three decades. He's Board Advisor and Chief AI and Transformation Officer at PrismHR and Vensure Employer Solutions, which build the software PEOs run on. Before that, he co-founded SmartBen and later ran technology at a public company serving 30 million people.

He arrived on the PEO side right as AI made it cheap for anyone to build tools around HR systems, including PEOs' own customers. That shift raises the stakes on the parts of PEO software that can't afford a bad day. It also settles an old argument about whether PEOs were ever really tech companies.

The Best Recruitment Marketing Strategies Start With the Career Site

Steve Smith — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 02:32:21 GMT

Neil Costaspent decades getting people to click on job ads. He's also the guy telling you the click was never the hard part.

A career site isn't just a page with job listings on it. It's the last thing standing between an ad campaign and an actual application, and most companies still treat it like a filing cabinet nobody's opened in years.

Neil is the founder and CEO of HireClix. He started it as a straight media-buying shop. Three years ago, chasing the same campaigns straight into the career site, it turned into something bigger — the shop that also builds the career sites and quick-apply tech on the other side of the click.

He still tracks every campaign to the cent. That's not the part he lost sleep over.

Why AI Can't Replace Human Judgment in Employer of Record

Steve Smith — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 06:38:42 GMT

Bjorn Reynolds runs a company built on AI-powered HR tools. He's also the guy telling you not to trust them with the questions that matter most.

Bjorn is the founder and Chief Guardian (his actual title) of Safeguard Global, a global payroll and employer of record (EOR) company he built years before EOR became a thing. An employer of record doesn't just process payroll. It becomes the legal employer, compliance and liability included, in every country it operates. It’s also exactly the kind of business where "AI is usually right" doesn't cut it.

Make no mistake. He loves AI. He just doesn’t let it answer the employment law questions his own company is legally on the hook for.

Why Interim Leadership Runs on Emotional Intelligence

Steve Smith — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:42:25 GMT

"We know you for executive search and the golf tour, right?"

That's what Scott Maguire hears, more or less daily, when he tells people what he actually does at Korn Ferry. He's not calling about a spot on the PGA Tour. He's calling because your ERP go-live is slipping, your CFO is having a very bad quarter, and you need someone with the emotional intelligence to walk into that mess with zero institutional memory and somehow still fix it on an aggressive deadline.

Scott has lots of perspective on this. He leads Korn Ferry's Technology interim and project consulting practice, after a decade-plus running similar plays at RGP. It's a "differentiated solution inside a multi-billion-dollar company," as he puts it — and his team takes pride in educating enterprises that "interim" doesn't mean diminished.

It’s less of a tough sell than it used to be. Private equity firms now specifically request interim executives for their highest-stakes transformations. Cross-functional "AI tiger teams" get assembled, deployed, and dissolved in a matter of months, on purpose.

Why the switch?

Well, skill may get you the assignment. Once you're in the room, it's all about EQ.

The Resume Is Dead. Skills-Based Hiring Is Replacing It.

Steve Smith — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:22:54 GMT

An HR manager somewhere is 700 resumes deep into filling a single position. Every resume is well-written. Everyone looks qualified. AI wrote most of them, and AI is very good at making the writer sound like a hero.

For the person doing the hiring, that's the whole problem. "They all look identical now," says Josh Millet. "They all look good."

Our guest this week is Josh Millet, founder and CEO of Criteria Corp, which builds science-based talent assessments designed to give employers a real signal about a candidate instead of a resume. Josh has spent nearly 20 years arguing the resume was never a reliable predictor of job performance. Now that AI has made resumes even less trustworthy and infinitely easier to mass-produce, the rest of the hiring world is finally catching up to an argument he's been making since before "skills-based hiring" was a phrase anyone used in a keynote.

AI Took the Easy Part of Leadership. Here's What's Left.

Steve Smith — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:55:45 GMT

Dean Carter spent years turning down the CEO job. "That's for crazy people," he'd say, watching leaders he respected get chewed up by it. So instead, he spent years reinventing the CHRO role he already had, and put it out there that this was the direction he wanted his career to go next. The job came to him anyway.

He's not a technologist who wandered into HR. He's an HR leader who now argues that AI is stripping the technical scaffolding out of every C-suite job. What's left over is the one thing leadership development has never actually been able to measure: judgment.

Dean is CEO of Instill, a culture-tech platform, and before that he spent 25 years as Chief People Officer, including a long run at Patagonia. He thinks leadership development has been measuring the wrong thing for decades, and that the tools built to fix it were never actually built to catch it.

How to Build a Coaching Culture People Actually Want to Work In

Steve Smith — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:17:23 GMT

NewDay USA is a mortgage lender that serves veterans exclusively, and it just hired a 22-year-old with zero industry experience who has no idea what a VA loan even is. Most lenders would show that person the door. NewDay handed them a job offer instead.

That's not an accident. It's the whole model. They've built a coaching culture disciplined enough to turn total novices into top performers, and, weirdly enough, into homeowners themselves.

Our guest is Jenn Harrold, SVP of Human Resources at NewDay USA. Jenn came up through recruiting, not the C-suite, and over the last two years she's scaled NewDay's hiring engine at a pace most HR departments would find alarming: roughly 200 hires two years ago, 50% more last year, and a larger number on deck for this one.

We get into why NewDay bets on coachability over credentials, what a real monthly feedback cadence looks like inside a commission-driven, highly regulated business, and the stat that made me want to book this episode in the first place: 60% of employees who stay two years become homeowners, at an average age of 26.

The bigger question is whether a model this specific to one company's mission can actually travel.

Why Self-Awareness in Leadership Doesn't Come Easy

Steve Smith — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:36:17 GMT

Over 70% of American CEOs have privately felt like imposters in their own job. That’s according to a 2024 study by Korn Ferry that Eric Nitzberg keeps citing to clients.

These are executives running companies with hundreds of thousands of employees. By any measure, they’re killing it. But Eric says that seniority never bought anyone confidence. It just offers better cover for the days it disappears.

Eric is the founder of Sierra Leadership, and before he ever coached an executive, he spent 15-plus years in the ministry, listening to people work through their hardest problems long before he moved to the private sector. That background still shapes how he runs a session. His argument is that the real blind spot in leadership isn't a lack of talent or effort. It's that self-awareness depends on people telling a leader things the leader cannot see for themselves. The more senior someone gets, the fewer people are willing to do that.