Episodes

First Aired: 5/14/21 Lindsey Pollak is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the world’s leading career and workplace experts. She specializes in early career success, which stems back to her time back in college, where she worked as an RA who fell in love with helping provide guidance and brainstorm solutions with her peers. Lindsay is great at unpacking the people problems that come with the career journey, and her recently published book "Recalculating: Navigate Your Career Through the Changing World of Work" takes on the many problems that have arisen as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This Episode’s Heavy-Hitters: - Lindsay and I each have the same Peanut M&M obsession that friends & family judge us for - Each of her books is a direct reflection of the book that she wishes had been available to her five years earlier - Millennials in the workforce are more focused on increasing the size of the pie as opposed to beating the competition; and this shift might be ca…

First Aired: 11/06/25 My guest on episode 474 of #thePOZcast is Jay Williams, the Founder—and as he proudly calls himself, the “Big Bird”—behind Free Bird Southern Spring Water. After a 25-year run in real estate, where he developed over a billion dollars’ worth of housing projects, Jay traded boardrooms for bottling lines. With zero industry connections but a whole lot of hustle, he built Free Bird from the ground up to deliver one simple promise: real water, for real people. Sourced from the Blue Ridge Mountains, Free Bird is more than just a beverage—it’s a salute to the backbone of America. No buzzwords, no gimmicks, just damn good water that resonates with those who work hard and live harder. Jay’s story is about reinvention, authenticity, and proving that sometimes the boldest move is starting over. Learn more & connect: https://drinkfreebird.com/ https://www.instagram.com/drinkfreebird/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jay-williams-a47939159/

What if the most overlooked jobs had the most interesting stories? In E532 of #thePOZcast, Adam sits down with content creator, filmmaker, and Staj co-founder Gabriel DeSanti to explore his unconventional path from trade school and physical labor to becoming one of the internet's fastest-growing career storytellers. Gabriel shares how a single comment from his mother fueled his relentless work ethic, why years of experimenting behind the camera mattered more than overnight success, and how documenting real people doing real work became the foundation of his platform reaching millions. The conversation dives into creativity, resilience, storytelling, social media psychology, and why every career deserves to be seen. Gabriel DeSanti — award-winning content creator, storyteller, and Co-Founder of Staj. But honestly, what makes Gabriel stand out is that he’s built a platform to celebrate the jobs and people that most of the world overlooks. He’s known as the creator of the world’s…

First Aired 6/21/24 In this conversation, Torin Ellis, a human capital strategist focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), shares his personal journey and insights. He discusses his upbringing, experiences with racism, and the importance of creating a workplace culture that is promising and not punitive. Torin defines DEIB as follows: diversity is all that a person is and is not, inclusion is being in the same space and providing necessary resources, equity is providing accommodations for individuals to excel, and belonging is making individuals feel welcomed and wanted. He emphasizes the need for DEIB to be integrated into all aspects of an organization, not just recruitment. Torin Ellis discusses the importance of diversity and inclusion in organizations. He emphasizes the need for intentionality in the hiring process and the importance of building new relationships and sourcing efforts to ensure representation. Torin also shares his personal experience…

First Aired 6/14/24 Tom Conrad’s childhood heroes didn’t wear capes — they signed their names inside the first Macintosh. Inspired by those pioneering the future of tech, teenage Tom set his eyes on a career at Apple — and not only did he achieve that dream, but he also helped build key features that remain in iOS today. He went on to play a pivotal role in taking Pandora public, excelled as the VP of Product at Snapchat, and continues to serve on the board of Sonos. Not one to shy away from challenges, he navigated notorious flops, including Pets.com and Quibi. Now, as CEO of Zero — a digital intermittent fasting coach that improves metabolic health — he’s applying his 30+ years of leadership and product experience to drive innovation and user engagement. With 13.9M users and $12.5M raised, Zero is just scratching the surface of the wellness revolution to come. He discusses his time at Pandora and the importance of working with people you respect and admire. Conrad emphasizes the val…

This week's guest is Leah Solivan — entrepreneur, investor, and one of the pioneers of the modern gig economy. Leah founded TaskRabbit in 2008, scaling it into a global marketplace operating in more than 40 cities before its acquisition by IKEA in 2017. Since then, she’s become a leading voice in venture capital as Managing Director of Precedent.vc and General Partner at Fuel Capital, backing more than 150 companies across consumer tech, marketplaces, retail, and AI. A former IBM software engineer and passionate advocate for diversity in tech and entrepreneurship, Leah brings a rare perspective from both sides of the founder-investor journey. Leah shares her journey from founding TaskRabbit to investing in innovative startups. Discover insights on building marketplaces, managing growth, and redefining the future of work. Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahsolivan/ Check out her podcast https://www.breakingprecedent.com/

This week's guest is Tracey Parsons. She is a longtime innovator at the intersection of talent, marketing, and technology. She is the co-founder of Flockity, a company redefining how influencer marketing and recruitment marketing come together to help brands attract talent in more authentic and engaging ways. Throughout her career, Tracey has consistently been ahead of the curve — embracing change, challenging conventional thinking, and helping organizations navigate the evolving world of work. Known as both a strategist and a change agent, she has spent years driving innovation across the talent ecosystem and exploring how storytelling, community, and digital influence shape the future of recruiting and employer brand. Today, we’re diving into her journey, the evolution of recruitment marketing, and where she sees the talent revolution headed next. In this insightful interview, Tracey Parsons shares her journey from immigrant coal miner roots to a leader in talent, marketing,…

First Aired 5/10/24 Anton Nootenboom, also known as the Barefoot Dutchman, shares his journey from the Dutch army to walking barefoot across the United States to raise awareness for mental health. He discusses his military background and 3 tours of Afganistan in the Dutch Army, the challenges of mental health in the military, and the importance of seeking help. Anton also talks about his decision to walk barefoot and break world records, including reaching Everest Base Camp barefoot. He emphasizes the need for mental health awareness and the support of organizations like Movember. The conversation highlights the power of perseverance and finding purpose in helping others. For mental health resources, visit Movember.com If you or someone you love is struggling, help is available. Call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for 24/7 free and confidential help. To learn more about Anton’s barefoot journey across the U.S. and donate to the cause, visit BraveMenTalk.com Thanks for li…

In this insightful interview, Torrance Hampton shares his journey from a unique upbringing in the DMV with a Secret Service agent father to becoming a thought leader in workforce development, AI, and career fulfillment. Discover how self-awareness, passion, and innovative use of AI can transform careers and organizations. Torrence Hampton has spent his career helping people find the intersection between what they’re great at, what they love, and where the future of work is headed. He’s the Founder and CEO of Genius Factor Academy — a leading workforce consulting and agentic AI platform helping companies unlock employee potential, improve retention, and rethink career alignment from the inside out. Before building Genius Factor Academy, Torrance was an Executive Producer and Director creating content and storytelling for powerhouse brands like Disney, the NFL, Lego, and Nickelodeon. But eventually, he made a pivot of his own — turning his focus toward purpose, passion, and career f…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/eFkbbdIHZ7c Recorded at the witching hour of Transform 2026's final day — luggage in the halls, energy on fumes, puppies being deployed as booth activations — this impromptu stop-and-chat with Mike Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Onboarded, turned into one of the most substantive conversations of the conference. Mike wasn't prepped, didn't have talking points, and delivered some of the sharpest thinking in the series precisely because of it. Onboarded solves what Mike calls the messy middle of HR technology: the gap between recruiter tech and the back-office HRIS where all the compliance chaos lives — federal, state, and local obligations, background checks, integrations, I-9s, and every other onboarding requirement that has to be met before a new hire can actually start work. Built by a team that came largely from Checkr (the background check infrastructure behind Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash), Onboarded was designed from day one for high-volume hirers …

WATCH: https://youtu.be/owtKqQiHiFY This episode was born from pure conference serendipity — a mutual connection made an intro, caffeine was needed, and Lívia de Bastos Martini, Chief People Officer at Wellhub, ended up on the podcast for one of the most data-rich and practical conversations in the series. Wellhub is a 16-year-old global employee wellbeing platform serving companies with 10 to 100,000+ employees, connecting users to more than 100,000 wellness partners across fitness, nutrition, sleep, mental health, and physical health through a single personalized app experience. The conversation opens with one of the most striking stats in the series: 86% of employees say they would consider switching jobs if their company did not offer wellbeing benefits — a number that continues to rise year over year. That stat alone reframes wellness from a nice-to-have perk to a core retention and talent-attraction strategy. Lívia backs it up with adoption data: traditional gym-only bene…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/aUVZ3OMBDuM Recorded live at Transform 2026, this is a reunion episode — Ariana Moon was 8 months pregnant at her last appearance on the show, and she returns as a new mom, a nearly 11-year Greenhouse veteran, and one of the most operationally sharp recruiting leaders in the business. The warmth of this conversation is matched by the depth of its content: it covers everything from maternity leave culture and the politics of fully disconnecting, to Greenhouse's B2C product innovation, to one of the most practically useful interviewing frameworks in the series. Ariana is VP, People Transformation at Greenhouse — the ATS platform that has made hiring great for everyone, its stated mission. What makes her role unusual is that Greenhouse recruiters are essentially internal product testers and feedback loops for the platform they use every day, giving Ariana a dual lens that most TA leaders simply don't have. She talks about the candidate-first thinking behin…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/x26pDyl5bl0 Recorded live at Transform 2026 on Day 3, this episode brings together Adam and Kyle Lagunas — one of the sharpest, most unfiltered voices in HR tech and Founder of Kyle & Co. Kyle studies innovation cycles in HR technology for a living, giving him a uniquely calibrated perspective on what's real innovation versus old ideas repackaged with an AI label. The conversation opens with his pithy State of the Union on recruiting AI: a year ago, the industry was focused on doing more. Now it's trying to do better. From there, they dig into vendor consolidation (the bloodbath is over, and AI sparked a new wave of innovation among the survivors), the growing threat of companies building AI solutions in-house, and the fraud crisis escalating from edge case to serious business risk — including stories of FBI involvement after companies unknowingly hired agents of foreign states. The discussion of benefits is one of the most forward-looking in the series.…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/LqqkvpJM1wA Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode features Teddy Chestnut, co-founder of BrightHire — the leading interview intelligence platform — which has recently been acquired by Zoom. Teddy is one of the rare founders who was genuinely born into the recruiting industry: both of his parents spent 30 years in HR, his dad met his mom as a recruiter, and he grew up with dinner table conversations about comp plans and campus recruiting. That origin story is the foundation for a company built on a deceptively simple insight: hiring is the most important thing we do in business, but the least rigorous — and you can't improve what you can't see. The conversation covers BrightHire's full arc, from the 2019 founding conviction that interview conversations should be captured and analyzed, through the early beta customer who asked if they were charging enough, to the current state of a platform that has processed over 930,000 interviews and is buildin…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/h0moU300i-w Episode 500 of the POZcast is unlike any other in the series. It’s the conversation Adam Posner has been building toward for seven years — without realizing it until his own diagnosis. Guest Geoffrey Rogow is a two-decade veteran of financial journalism at The Wall Street Journal and now the BBC, founder of After Treatment — a platform serving more than 20 million cancer survivors — and author of the forthcoming book I'm Alive: Now What?. Diagnosed with primary mediastinal non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at 30, Geoffrey underwent months of chemotherapy and has been in remission for more than a decade. Adam was diagnosed with Stage 3A Hodgkin’s lymphoma at 45 after a routine cardiac scan prompted by a family tragedy. He completed treatment in September 2025 and is now two scans post-remission. What follows is one of the most honest and human conversations about cancer survivorship anywhere. They unpack diagnosis, chemotherapy, fatigue, steroids, hair l…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/ZJCK-R5w4yg Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode features Alessandra (Ale) Pegnim, Head of Talent Acquisition and Employer Brand at Udemy, the public online learning platform with nearly 1,400 employees globally. Ale spent 16 years on the agency side before making the move in-house, giving her a perspective on recruiting that flips the typical career narrative and brings a closer, more urgent mindset to every search she runs. The conversation covers the full recruiting stack at Udemy: how they manage a 50% inbound hire rate (unusually high for a company of their size), why they eliminated referral bonuses and watched referral quality improve, how they build skills-based hiring rubrics in partnership with hiring managers, and what it looks like to realign a search when the role evolves mid-process. Ale also talks through their outbound sourcing tools, the balance between inbound and outbound, and how internal mobility factors into their talent s…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/Y7kyUznrLHg Recorded Day 3 at Transform 2026, this episode features Steven Lu, co-founder and CEO of Pin, an AI-powered recruiting search platform that Steven built with a team of veterans from his first company, Interstellar (acquired by Greenhouse). It's a conversation between a founder and one of his most enthusiastic power users, which gives it an energy and specificity that's hard to manufacture. The core thesis of Pin is deceptively simple: if you give AI the same Boolean search tools that recruiters use, you get the same mediocre results. The answer isn't smarter prompts — it's a rebuilt search engine designed from the ground up for AI to navigate. The result: the best candidate for a role shows up in slot number one, not buried on page seven of search results. Steven walks through what makes Pin's architecture different, how its natural-language question feature answers the make-or-break details that used to take hours of resume scanning, and ho…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/d6QiD--qcgw Recorded live on Day 3 of Transform 2026, this may be the most human episode in the series. Angel Cruzado, founder of Respiris — a career transition and outplacement company — joined the conversation while living with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. What unfolds is part job search masterclass, part reflection on resilience, community, and what it means to keep moving forward when the odds are against you. Angel and Adam share a deeply personal connection through their experiences with pancreatic cancer, and that humanity is felt throughout the episode. Angel opens up about how a diagnosis changes your relationship with community — from your emotional inner circle to strangers online offering support, prayers, and generosity — and the challenge of learning how to receive that help. Professionally, he shares a powerful job-search framework that starts not with a resume, but with self-empathy: understanding who you are and what you truly need before …

WATCH: https://youtu.be/vItZ88XY_yI Recorded live at Transform 2026 as the 10th and final interview of day one, this episode features Natalie Breece, Chief People and Diversity Officer at thredUP — one of the world's largest online resale platforms for women's and kids' apparel. Natalie has been with thredUP for nearly 10 years, watching the company grow from 500 to 2,500 employees, go public, acquire and divest companies, and continuously reinvent how it shows up for its people. Natalie is one of the rare HR leaders who came into the field intentionally — studying organizational psychology, growing up in talent acquisition, then making the leap to the full HR suite. That foundation gives her a grounded, no-nonsense perspective on what actually moves candidates and retains employees. And her answer to what's changed most in the post-COVID world is sharp: compensation is still important, but candidates now want life satisfaction, well-being, and flexibility just as much. Compan…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/QDBe3Td7Sls Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode features John Cove, Vice President at The Alterity Group — a third-party benefits and HR technology advisory firm that helps large and jumbo employers find, evaluate, and maximize their vendor relationships across benefits administration, HRIS, payroll, 401(k), and more. John spent 20 years on the in-house side — running benefits, payroll, and HRIS programs — before moving to the advisory world, giving him a perspective that's both deeply operational and genuinely independent. The conversation opens with a moment of real humanity: two working dads at the end of a long conference day, talking about presence, FaceTime, and what it means to be there for your kids when your career takes you on the road. That tone carries through an episode that's unusually personal for a benefits-focused conversation, with John sharing two stories that hit hard — a 2 AM telemedicine call that kept his croup-prone inf…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/gddkPTnNtlQ Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode features David Hanrahan, SVP of People and de facto Chief People Officer at SolarWinds, a global B2B IT observability and management software company with approximately 2,100 employees across the US, India, the Philippines, Poland, Ireland, and beyond. Dave joined SolarWinds about a year and a half ago, two weeks before the company was acquired — giving him a front-row seat to one of the more complex people leadership environments you can walk into. The conversation opens up territory that hasn't been covered anywhere else in this series: what benefits actually look like when your workforce spans six countries and four continents. Dave shares how his team is working through transportation benefits for employees in Bangalore and Manila — cities where commuting isn't a minor inconvenience; it's a daily ordeal — and how something as seemingly simple as a commuter subsidy can be more meaningful than …

WATCH: https://youtu.be/jbrhdi4ra9Q Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode features Nancy Hauge, Chief People Experience Officer at Automation Anywhere — an AI agent platform company helping enterprises manage agentic solutions at scale. Nancy brings 45 years of people leadership experience to the conversation, and she arrives with a book on the way: The 5-Year Century, co-authored with her CEO and published by Wiley, releasing May 19th. Nancy is one of the most energetic and quotable guests in the series. Her core belief — that people are the least predictable thing in the world, and that's exactly what makes HR the most creative function in any business — sets the tone for an episode packed with sharp frameworks, vivid examples, and a few genuinely surprising benefit ideas. She talks about how AI agents are transforming recruiting and HR operations at Automation Anywhere, from a referral agent that maps new job descriptions to existing and needed AI tools, to agents t…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/0F17Slgg3Tc Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode features Lucia Guillory, Chief People Officer at Virta Health — a company on a mission to reverse metabolic disease, starting with diabetes and now extending into groundbreaking pancreatic cancer treatment research. Lucia brings a uniquely rigorous perspective to the people function: she holds a PhD in organizational behavior, has studied human connection since childhood, and entered HR with a clear mandate to drive organizational change. Lucia's backstory is one of the most compelling in the series. She is dyslexic and has ADHD, and traces her lifelong fascination with people — and her drive to understand belonging — directly to the experience of feeling isolated as a kid. That foundation shapes everything about how she thinks about culture, transparency, and what employees actually need from their organizations. Her answer to what's most broken in bad cultures is simple and sharp: a lack of hon…

In this engaging interview, Dave Meltzer discusses his new book 'Don't Do Business with Dicks,' sharing insights on toxicity, self-awareness, and building positive relationships. He emphasizes the importance of self-care, recognizing toxic patterns early, and aligning with your divine direction to achieve success and happiness. They say the third time is a charm. Actually, I think it’s his 4th if you count live stream shows. Please welcome back my friend and yours Dave Meltzer! David Meltzer is the Chairman of the Napoleon Hill Institute and former CEO of Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment, the legendary agency that inspired the film Jerry Maguire. He is a globally recognized entrepreneur, investor, executive producer, and one of the world’s top business coaches, honored by Variety as Sports Humanitarian of the Year and awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. David has executive-produced hit shows, including Apple TV’s 2 Minute Drill and Office Hours and Entrepreneur’s #1 dig…