Episodes

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…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/d8Jj4TvFiys Recorded live at Transform 2026, this is Kyle Forrest's third appearance on the show — and the conversation has never been more timely. Kyle is a consultant at Deloitte with a finger on the pulse of workforce trends, HR transformation, and the evolving relationship between benefits, talent, and business outcomes across industries. A year ago at Transform, the room was buzzing about AI products and features. This year, Kyle observes, the conversation has fundamentally shifted: everyone is now asking what work should be done by humans, and how organizations can invest in the uniquely human capabilities that AI simply cannot replicate. That reframe sets the tone for a wide-ranging discussion on what it means to build a workforce strategy in 2026. Kyle brings hard data from Deloitte's generational research to make the case that pay alone is no longer the primary driver for any of the four generations currently in the workforce — and that purpose…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/8xBOpw_eMyw Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode features a candid sit-down between host Adam Poser and Tanya Moore, Chief People Officer at West Monroe — a business and technology consulting firm known for its differentiated culture, client NPS scores, and the fact that nearly 75% of its employees hold equity in the company. Tanya brings a remarkable depth of experience to the conversation: 20 years at IBM leading career and skills transformation on a global scale, followed by a CPO role at a design and engineering firm, and now three years at West Monroe, where she's been systematically modernizing the company's people function from the ground up. She walked into an organization with no succession planning, no workforce planning, and a recruiting function built almost entirely on human effort with minimal automation — and she's been rebuilding it all with speed, intention, and a clear eye on candidate and manager experience. The conversation c…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/aFQKlkz3BMo Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode is a candid, high-energy conversation between host Adam Posner and Allie Shulman, VP of People & Culture at SoundCloud — the iconic music streaming platform that's been a launchpad for artists, DJs, and creators for over a decade. Adam and Allie share a unique origin story: they both started their careers at Onward Search, a recruiting firm where they discovered their love for the people business. That shared foundation sets the tone for a conversation that's as personal as it is professional. Allie opens up about leaving a workplace where she didn't feel safe as a newly out queer person, finding belonging at Onward Search, and ultimately following her passion for music into an in-house HR career that led her to SoundCloud. As VP of People & Culture, Allie is currently leading one of her biggest initiatives: building authentic, lived-in company values from scratch — not the kind that end up as a poste…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/_wvfaqw7v68 Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode brings together host Adam Poser and Angela Briggs-Paige — Chief People Officer, founder of People Power, and one of the most candid voices in the HR world on what it actually takes to build workplaces where people thrive. Angela's path into HR was anything but planned. She went to college intending to become a doctor, majored in biology, minored in classical languages, and stumbled into HR through a work-study job for a dean. What started as an accident became a calling — and eventually a mission to push organizations past the compliance-and-process version of HR toward something far more human and business-driven. In this conversation, Angela gets genuinely vulnerable — sharing a story from early in her career when she followed policy over people and terminated an employee who needed more support, and the lasting lesson that taught her. She lays out her three-layer framework for thinking about e…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/U3OGGyoxAdM In this episode of the podcast, recorded live on the floor of Transform 2026, host Adam Poser sits down with Katya Laviolette, Chief People Officer at 1Password — the identity security company protecting individuals and enterprises across 6 countries with nearly 1,500 employees. Katya brings over 30 years of HR leadership across manufacturing, e-commerce, and tech to one of the most critical conversations in today's talent market: how do you build and sustain a world-class people strategy when your company is fully remote, hyper-growth, and operating in a complex, AI-driven security landscape? The conversation covers the full spectrum of the employee experience — from how 1Password structures its total compensation and benefits packages (including the often-overlooked employer contribution to healthcare costs), to its distinctive Wednesday start date for new hires, to how it's tackling AI-generated fraudulent job applications. Katya also opens up ab…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/O17Rbnnc0DE Live from Fountain's private event at Transform 2026, Delilah’s After Dark: The Human + AI Experience, Adam Posner sits down with Pete Eisenman of Fountain to break down what’s really happening in frontline, high-volume hiring—and how AI is quietly rewriting the entire playbook. This isn’t theory. It’s happening now. Pete explains how hiring has evolved from manual, recruiter-driven workflows to highly automated, agentic systems that can take candidates from application to conditional offer in minutes—not days. But speed isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about winning talent. In a world where candidates are applying to 20+ jobs at once, the fastest company often gets the best hire. And increasingly, candidates are choosing instant, AI-driven interviews over waiting for a recruiter’s availability. Still, this isn’t about removing humans from the process. It’s about repositioning them—focusing recruiters and hiring managers on the moments that…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/YXiPoBskers Recorded live at Transform 2026, Adam Posner sits down with workplace culture expert Abi Adamson for a candid, no-filter conversation on what it really means to build culture that works—for everyone. This isn’t a conversation about perks, policies, or performative inclusion. It’s about the invisible systems shaping behavior every day—who gets heard in meetings, who gets opportunities, and how leadership behaviors quietly define what’s actually safe inside an organization. Abi introduces her SERN framework (Soil, Exposure, Roots, Nutrients), challenging the idea that people can be managed the same way. Instead, she reframes organizations as living ecosystems—where culture problems aren’t surface-level issues, but deeply embedded in the roots. Together, Adam and Abi unpack why psychological safety isn’t about being nice, why “confidence” is often misdiagnosed, and how most organizations unintentionally reward the loudest voices while silencing…

WATCH: https://youtu.be/MwTk4g91WLY Live from UNLEASH 2026, Adam sits down with Maribel Diz, SVP of People at Visa, to explore how leadership, culture, and career development are evolving in a multi-generational workforce. With nearly 30 years at Visa, Maribel has seen the company—and the world of work—reinvent itself multiple times. Her perspective blends real-world leadership with academic research, offering a grounded yet forward-looking view on what today’s workforce needs. At the center of the conversation is the shifting dynamic between generations—particularly the rise of Gen Z. Maribel challenges common misconceptions, arguing that Gen Z is not entitled or disengaged, but instead highly capable, digitally native, and deeply motivated. What they need isn’t hand-holding—it’s guidance, structure, and leadership that meets them halfway. She shares insights from her doctoral research, including how Gen Z processes information, what drives their engagement, and why traditional le…

My guest on episode #498 of #thePOZcast is Jay Delsing, and he’s someone who has literally lived the dream that most golfers only fantasize about. Jay grew up on the public courses of St. Louis, fell in love with the game early, and that obsession took him all the way to UCLA, where he was a two-time All-American on a full golf scholarship and earned a degree in economics. In 1984, Jay earned his PGA Tour card and went on to compete professionally for over 25 years, lining up alongside some of the biggest legends the game has ever seen. He’s now a Life Member of both the PGA Tour and the PGA of America, which is basically golf’s version of having a lifetime backstage pass. After hanging up the clubs, Jay made a seamless transition into broadcasting. Today, he hosts the nationally syndicated radio show Golf With Jay Delsing, airing in over 50 markets across 64 affiliates, and it’s built a loyal, affluent audience that keeps growing. Each week, Jay brings listeners inside the world of g…