Work Tech Weekly
by Rep Cap
Latest episode
Why Great ICs Become Struggling First-Time Managers
Why Great ICs Become Struggling First-Time Managers
About this podcast
Host Steve Smith, Managing Director of Growth at Rep Cap and author of the Work Tech Weekly e-newsletter, offers a weekly inside look at what’s really going on in the Work Tech industry. Steve talks with tech company founders, executives, investors, influencers, and analysts about the whole messy gamut of AI, HR tech, funding, acquisitions, and the strange little signals that say more than the headlines.
The WTW Podcast is built for people who want context fast and don’t need everything sanded down to sound polite. The conversations are candid, sometimes messy, and usually useful. If you’ve ever thought, “That’s not the part they should be focusing on,” you’ll feel right at home here.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 41 episodes
- Why Great ICs Become Struggling First-Time Managers · 31 minFor a long time, the only way to keep growing your career was to manage people, so plenty of great individual contributors took a job they never wanted and got almost no help…
- Employee Engagement Surveys and the Survey Fatigue Myth · 31 minJD Peterson thinks survey fatigue is a myth, and that employees will keep answering every employee engagement survey you send as long as they see something happen afterward. The…
- How AI Is Reshaping the Leader vs Manager Debate · 33 minBen Brooks will bet you that no mid-market executive would call their manager bench “pretty strong.” The founder and CEO of PILOT joins Steve Smith to explain why leadership only…
- Why Compliance Matters When Choosing AI Hiring Tools · 31 minWhen a candidate asks to have their data deleted, Somen Mondal says the typical company has no idea what to do. The Co-Founder and CEO of Amp explains why compliance separates…
- How to Balance Time to Hire and Quality of Hire · 38 minHeidi Barnett builds tools that cut time to hire. She still wants employers to wait 24 hours before sending an automated rejection. The President of isolved Talent Acquisition…
- How International Payroll Can Solve the Last Mile Problem · 40 minAn international payroll payment can lose 5 to 7% of its value and days of time as it hops from bank to bank on its way to a remote worker, according to Albert Owusu-Asare. The…
- Why the SaaSpocalypse Is Overblown for HR Tech · 27 minDavid Wilson has tracked the HR tech market for almost 30 years. He calls the SaaSpocalypse "overblown significantly," but he thinks it's already changing who gets to win. David…
- Why a Reference Check Only Works If You Can Verify It · 27 minJames Lord has spent more than a decade in reference checking. Increasingly, he says, the person giving the reference is sometimes the candidate. James leads expansion in the…
- UNBOUND Recap: HubSpot's Next Act Looks a Lot Like Work Tech · 47 minHubSpot wants AI agents running your whole go-to-market workflow, and Alec Cherrin came back from UNBOUND with a short list of features he'd turn on tomorrow and plenty he…
- Why PEO Software Wins the SMB Market Others Abandon · 33 minKevin Andrews has spent three decades watching HR tech vendors promise to serve small business and then drift upmarket. Now Board Advisor and Chief AI and Transformation Officer…
- The Best Recruitment Marketing Strategies Start With the Career Site · 35 minNeil Costa started his career in e-commerce in 1996, well before "candidate experience" was a phrase anyone in HR used. Decades later, running HireClix, he's convinced almost…
- Why AI Can't Replace Human Judgment in Employer of Record · 38 minBjorn Reynolds started Safeguard Global in 2008, running what looked like a global employer of record business years before anyone had a name for the category. Almost two decades…
- The Interim Executive Used to Be Plan B. Now It's Plan EQ. · 31 minScott Maguire spent a decade at RGP before joining Korn Ferry, where he now leads the firm's interim and project consulting practice. A year in, he's convinced the job comes down…
- The Resume Is Dead. Skills-Based Hiring Is Replacing It. · 33 minOne of Josh Millet's customers watched their applicant volume nearly double in a year, even while posting fewer jobs, because candidates are now sending AI agents to apply on…
- What AI Means for the Future of Leadership Development · 37 minFor years, Dean Carter turned down every opportunity to become a CEO, watching the job chew up leaders he respected. He spent that time reinventing the Chief People Officer role…
- How to Build a Coaching Culture People Actually Want to Work In · 44 minJenn Harrold's hiring model at NewDay USA runs on a bet most of the mortgage industry won't make: skip the résumé filter that rewards prior experience, and screen for…
- The Blind Spot That's Blocking Self-Awareness in Leadership · 42 minEric Nitzberg has delivered 360-degree feedback to executives, built from 20 stakeholders, then watched them privately negotiate with their own data before deciding what to…
- Rewards and Recognition Is a Strategy Signal, Not Just a Morale Program · 37 minKeyAnna Schmiedl points to a Workhuman initiative where recognition messages quietly shifted from celebrating progress to describing the work as "disentangling a ball of wires,"…
- How AI Can Catch the Medical Billing Errors Your Employees Never Will · 36 minNataly Youssef points to a bill for a true medical emergency that got miscoded as a minor symptom, and cost someone thousands of dollars before anyone caught it. The Founder and…
- Why Decision Fatigue Is an Organizational Performance Problem · 42 minJason Bodin says the average person makes 35,000 decisions a day. Somewhere in that pile, the judgment calls that actually require a leader are getting buried. Paycom's EVP of…
