LISTEN: https://www.thepozcast.com/528

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 who need that complexity orchestrated elegantly, not just managed manually.

The conversation covers the white space Onboarded identified, how AI is re-architecting enterprise software faster than most people realize (not over five years — over five months), and why compliance specifically is the one category that cannot be vibe-coded away. Mike is direct: the federal, state, and local obligations that govern W-2 hiring are black and white. There's no creative interpretation. That's the domain expertise moat. But on top of that foundation, Onboarded is enabling entrepreneurs and partners to build — and that's where the creativity lives. Mike also opens up about what it means to build with people you know and trust, why family is always first, and the counterintuitive founder philosophy that the best ideas often emerge from teams that can say stupid things to each other without consequence.

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelrobertjohnson/
Learn More: www.onboarded.com

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