The HR Infrastructure Gap No One Is Talking About with Jessie Schofer, Founder at Stakkd

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to the foundation series. Your deep dive into startup compensation with industry leaders from across the startup world. Join ME Matt M. McFarlane, a people operations leader turned compensation specialist, as we uncover the strategies and practices driving success in tech startups around the world. Hear insights from heads of people, founders and experts as we explore how to build robust compensation frameworks that not only fuel growth and retention, but do so in the dynam startup environment that we

Speaker A: all know and love.

Speaker B: Let's get into it.

Speaker A: Before we dive into this episode, I have some really exciting news. Startup People Summit is returning for 2026. This is an event where we bring together the sharpest minds from people professionals across the APAC region. If you want to stay in the know about programming and tickets, sign up to the waitlist by visiting startuppeople summit. There's a link in the show notes. Welcome to today's episode where I'm speaking to Jesse Shofer, founder of Stacked and the leading voice in HR tech. We're going to dive into strategic HR tech deployment, including how to build a scalable HR tech stack that aligns with business outcomes and prepares for AI, uh, transformation. Let's get into it, Jesse, we're kicking things off. Welcome to the pod.

Speaker C: Thanks for having me. I'm excited for this, Matt.

Speaker A: Me too. Me too. All right, let's dive right in. Um, you've obviously got a really interesting background around not just hr, but the HR tech side of things. I think something that always comes to mind for me when I think about HR tech is like, how few number of tools we get in the HR team. Like, I think sometimes because every employee uses the, you know, we talk about like context switching and answer stuff. I'm really conscious of not having too many platforms to like make employees have to use. But in reality, when you kind of stack us up against like sales or ops or some of these other functions, we're pretty, we're pretty light on some of the tools that we have. So I guess what I'm trying to get to is like, we really only get to deploy a little bit of budget compared to our peers. And something I'm really keen to start, uh, off with, with this conversation is like, where do we start with in terms of making sure that it's the right tool, the best tool? Like, where do we, where do we kick off from?

Speaker C: So, great question. And I think it's something that comes up, it does come up a lot in teams is working out, you know, where do you put the money, especially in hr. Like you said, we get less budget, um, comparatively also to other teams. I think that's the first mistake actually. I think we actually do need more budget and I think with the changes coming around the technology we have accessible now, um, and the fact that we want to have, potentially we're going to try to optimize the people we have. They're going to need better tools. And so the existing tools I don't think are all going to be able to serve the needs of future business and the way we want to operate. So I uh, do think that that will slowly start to change and potentially the cost, structures and flexibility of how SaaS products actually come to the market and how we buy them and the cost of those will also change. But if we think about if you've only got. I don't like this concept that well, we don't want people to log into too many tools. I think that is bs honestly. Look at your phone. How many apps do you have and how many things do you log into? And why do you log into all of those different apps, Remember all those different passwords? Because they bring you value. Because they give you something. They give you something that you want to do. They log in, they're good to use, you like it, right? So there's a value add to that effort of logging in. And then if you think about sales, marketing, whatever, they have all these tools and they use them for a purpose. They need them to get their job done and they're done and they're useful, right? They bring a value. So when we talk about HR tech, well, people don't want to log into the performance tools. Like why, why didn't they want to log in? They log into thousands of other tools. They've got single sign on click of a button that to me says that the tools we have are not serving the needs of the business and they're not bringing enough value. So that for me is the issue. The tech we have had traditionally stepped us up from admin paperwork, HR teams to maybe more modern people teams. It gave us more tools, but I don't think it's the endpoint. I think the next step is where we need to go, which is more value adding tech infrastructure. Um, uh, yeah. If you go from how do you like deal with less budget and choosing less tools or how do you choose the right stack. I think first off is working out where can you actually really add value? And that doesn't mean just for the employees, it actually means for HR. How can you free up HR's time? How do you make sure all the admin is completely like almost 100% automated out of the way because then you can actually have the human connection and do things. And that's where you will probably add more value than a tool. Right. Because if you're putting all your tooling in employee facing stuff and you've got all your people in admin facing stuff, which is currently how it is, kind of doesn't make a lot of sense.

Speaker A: Yeah. So if I'm hearing you right, it's like pushing back on this kind of notion that actually having too many tools is an issue. And actually it's like, let's make sure they're the right tools. And they're actually like people see the value in them and they actually want to log into them because they get something from it or it solves some kind of need for them. Um, that makes a lot of sense, especially when you use, uh, the app comparison. I know my phone's riddled with them. Um, what's the starting point then for companies to go, okay, well we need a bit of tech. Um, where to from here? Ah, so you mentioned, what's the actual problem that's solving first? Where through from there? Yeah.

Speaker C: So I think this is probably, you kind of have to step back a little bit and think about HR as we do it now and how HR in my version, in my opinion should be done. Um, I think what we do now is we go, oh, well, there's a, you know, there's a fire or we traditionally need, we need, uh, someone pushes in the business, we need to automate compensation cycles or whatever for an instance. Right. So you go look at a comp tool and you're like, oh my God. But actually that's kind of like there's a lot of push in hr. It's like, this is what we need, we need you to do that. And then you end up like jumping on all these things and you don't really think about it strategically. That's how I've witnessed it in the past. I think what we need to move more towards, which I think is where we're trying to go in the function is actually going, okay, again, like, what do we actually need? What's going to drive the business? Setting the expectations and showing that roadmap. Because of course with a product, customer's like, I need this, I need that, I need this. But of course product teams go, okay, well let's prioritize, let's set expectations. That's going to come in Q1 or Q H2 or uh, next year or this is the roadmap and you setting expectations. So people are actually okay with a no. And you're not going to get that as long as they know that you've been heard and that they know when it's coming and why. So if you're not going to do comp tech right now, why are we not doing comptech? What is more important for the business and why and translating that so everyone understands. So I think that is the failure that we've had so far. We don't think strategically, we don't work with the C level, that we don't have a seat at the table all the time. But we also don't actively plan out and prioritize our work. We tend to stack it all on top of each other, rush it through, do it poorly, set poor expectations. So I always start with prioritization. What the hell are we actually working on? Why are we working on it? And let's communicate it because that in itself, if you don't skip that step then you actually build respect because people go, the reason we're not doing that is because we've got all the, this is why the business needs X right now. Great, I can wait for my comp tech and I can accept that that's not going to be perfect because we're going to get all these other important things first. So that's where the prioritization matters. And then you step into being able to justify budget more for that tech for whatever it is that you need to support because you've already got the buy in from the leadership that that's the most important thing, that the business needs it, it's on the roadmap, it's communicated and then you find the best solution and that usually involves some form of tech and then it's like an easier pathway. Right. So you're already setting yourself up for success, so to speak. And I think that's where a lot of teams fall over. They're quite isolated. You know, your tech, your TA team's kind of doing their own thing. Of course in bigger businesses it's harder uh, to align. But in general setting yourself up for success in that regard and actually thinking about your infrastructure makes a lot of sense. Your infrastructure in context of that business. Right. It'll always be different. There's core stuff but there is a difference in what businesses need when. So yeah, that's kind of how I like to encourage people to think about where to start with technology is and then the other side, um, is then Your process design, which we can get into if you want to, but that's a big topic.

Speaker A: Then why don't have time for that. We'll see how we go. I hear what you're saying though about like I think sometimes like we talk about this like this invisible work or you know I've heard the term department plus one be used and I think we're definitely, I think that businesses can take advantage of that by all means. I think they can throw things at uh, a people team that maybe don't. It's unclear where else in the business it could go or something like that or whatever it might be. But I wonder or I certainly feel it and my experience has been that sometimes we let that happen to us as well where we do poorly. Define what we do and we're here for and the service we're here to fundamentally deliver to the business. Um, I often talk about this when I guess people who are trying to do a lot of the things you talked about get buy in with the business. It's got to start from a place of stepping out from this back office function that we've been traditionally and saying hey, here are the verticals or whatever, the things that we're responsible for and being clear about it. I'm a big fan. I think I've platformed in a bit here, product led thinking, like having a roadmap, being clear about the things you're trying to accomplish as a team. I just think there's so much to be said for being able to share that sort of data with um, with your business and actually give them a sense of like what are you here for and what are you accomplishing? Um, but I really like how you're talking about that as almost a lever uh, towards stepping into like a HR tech solution because you know the best. I uh, guess defense or offense depending on which way you look at it against like being thrown something other business is being able to say, well here look at all the things that we're doing at the moment and that's occupying 100 or 110% of our time. So like what do you want me to stop doing? Or how are we going to like make that easier through HR tech and like what's the priority? What needs to human touch? Those sorts of things. Yeah. How did you.

Speaker C: No, I was just going to say on that I think that's really great that you said what do we stop doing? That's the question. We don't.

Speaker A: We don't. Do we?

Speaker C: Yeah, no, we don't. Ask what should we, what should we stop? You know, because a lot of people don't have that visibility of their roadmap either. So it's very hard to justify that. What do we add, what do we drop kind of situation if you don't have that groundwork done.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And so you ought to say, you know, you've built a business around discoverability. So once a business is or uh, a HR team has decided, okay, yeah, we've got, you know, buy in from the business they want us to get, I don't know, Comtech or whatever it is to try and help take either some load off our plate or create some kind of um, capability within the business and you know, allow us to do something more efficiently. What in your opinion are like the best next steps towards going how do we actually know what we need? We know generally we need something that solves for this problem, but how do we start to get specific and actually start to find a solution for our problem?

Speaker C: I mean it's the age old question. It is very hard to do, I have to say and get it right, um, to know exactly the right tech. There's so many products and there's so many ways you can solve a problem as well. I think understanding what is your idea of success. So defining what actually what does the successful rollout look like? What would it solve for the business and what are the key things that this project has to do versus what would it be nice that it does? So it's like nice to haves versus you know, um, you know, mandatory things, right, that, that it has to achieve. I think a lot of people don't look at that vision and say at the end of this, this is what success looks like. This is what our new, this is what our new day to day process will look like. This is how if in an ideal world this is what we want the outcome to be. Because once you know that, you have to also really think about like, oh well, the ideal process is that all of our data's moved across and whatever. Well, okay, step back from that. How do you get the data out of the current system? How do you get the data into the new system? Is there issues with those exports or imports? Is there ways to upload data that becomes a requirement. So if you think through steps and I think a lot of people rush into tech, they're like, we need this and we're going to rush it out because there's pressure from the business and they fail to plan. And it's like we already Know the saying, like, failing to plan is planning to fail. Like, that whole upfront piece sets you up for so much more success. And it's, you know, a, uh, proven change strategy that you plan up front and your projects, you know, you have a whole planning phase for a reason, you know, um, so for me it's like really defining what does that look like and really what actually will move the needle for that business. Because you can be in lots of businesses and they will need a H R E S, but you'll need to do different things. It'll be like, well, there's 19 countries in this, you know, that we're serving, whereas versus we have, we're only in Germany or only in Australia. Like, it's going to be a different requirement for those two different HR systems. Right. And you're going to have different products that serve those needs. So the planning and requirements mapping is extremely important and take time. Ask questions, start from where you want to go, step backwards and ask those questions on all the different things. If we, what is the ideal outcome? Build it backwards. Um, that's how I build out requirements, um, mapping. And then from there that helps you understand, okay, what are the base requirements of what I need? Not like finding a way to necessarily achieve that because there's going to be, like I said, different solutions will solve a problem in different ways. Um, so you don't want to define what the solution necessarily is. You want to define what the outcome, which is very difficult.

Speaker A: By beginning with the end in mind.

Speaker C: Exactly. And then like, that's why I built stacked, um, a database to really like, easily and quickly discover technology on the market because it is noisy and there's a lot of products. And what I saw in the past was companies, you know, I worked in companies and we'd be like, we need tech. And it's like, oh, the three biggest names that come to the top of your mind. And that's like your shortlist. Really? That's like how people would choose the shortlist.

Speaker A: I'm like, that's how I've bought stuff in the past as well. It's like, who do I, who do I already know? Or the people in my network know? That was kind of how I procure tech in the past. Yeah.

Speaker C: And that's not necessarily a bad thing to do to ask people. I think that's fine. Just like when you're hiring for someone, you also ask for, you know, referrals and things like that. But you, the bigger your net, like when you're looking at like, I Kind of connect it to the same process of like recruiting someone. If you go out and get like a broad net of people that like, you know, obviously have a job description, your requirements, right? And people apply, they're coming to you because they've looked and they want to match. But like, you've got to kind of do that process yourself. When you're looking for vendors, you go, here's my requirements and let me catch a net of relevant vendors that could suit those needs and then push them through a funnel of assessment. Right. And the first one is that discovery of what is even on the market. That could solve my problem and does maybe the bare minimum of the mandatory requirements. Like, then I'm going to push forward with those shortlist. And that doesn't happen usually. Like I said, it's like a couple of three big names. That's it. Or you go in a forum and you ask people also. Not bad. But it's kind of like starting with a reference before you know if that tool even suits your business. Because you're going to be like, well, xtool worked for me, but X tool works for Germany and only up to like 500 people. And you're a multinational with 7,000 probably more.

Speaker A: It's like using. It's like people who go, oh, well, Google does that, so those sorts of things.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Uh, you're like, please, like we love Google, but like Google know so let's calm down. So I think that's where the whole selection process and that shortlisting, the shortlisting of the shortlist, it's like, uh, the long list to the short list is what you want to get to in that first step. And that's why that's basically what stacked helps with. Like go to the database, you search, you try and find, you know, what, what the market even has to offer in terms of a research. But you know, I think that's important to just see what the market has. Then you can be like, I'm a bit more informed. Then you can go to the next step. No one wants to jump in and see like 4,000 demos. Like, no one's got time for that. So you do want to make sure that the demos you do do are the products that you really feel like you've not missed m anything. And you've also got a match on certain mandatory criteria. And then the first call is always that, you know, working out whether the rest of the mandatory criteria as quickly as possible are met. Right. Um, which is a whole nother podcast. We can go into and how to do, how to do demo, how to do demos for vendors.

Speaker A: I hear what you're saying. I think I've definitely seen, and I've probably come up against that kind of sunk cost fallacy where it's like you keep looking at tools and you're so tired of looking at tools that you kind of just go, let's just pick something because, you know, we haven't found any of the good ones and so we just reluctantly choose like the best of the worst. Something like that. I'm, um, I'm curious about your thoughts like on. So let me start by saying I feel like we're in this like era for the past couple of years where we're seeing a lot of like consolidation of HR tech. We're seeing the big players buy a lot of small players. Um, it seems to be like a bit of a trend for the past couple of years. I'm curious of what your thoughts are around when a company should look at something like one of those bigger, uh, comprehensive players versus something that's more of a point solution, um, that potentially is going to solve for that problem more effectively, even though it may lack some of the integration of a bigger company.

Speaker C: It's a good question. I mean, how long's a piece of string? It's, it's like, it's always depends. Right? It depends. It's hard to know. I think it's very contextual to the business. Um, I think of course there's really, really, there's like conglomerate, like enterprise, like massive multinationals. They probably going to need a more robust system than some of the other like more all in ones that are targeting maybe a smaller market. Right. I think that's, that's understood, but I don't know how long that will last. I think they're also buying up smaller players because they're realizing that they can't deliver on the needs. Um, Right. And that they have tech that is very difficult to adjust. Um, and it worked for a long time and now we're moving at the speed of lightning. So they're not able to move at that speed. I think that's what's driving. I think it's pretty clear that's what's driving acquisition. They're not able to serve the market fast enough. So they're buying the tech. Right. Um, I think that's okay, that's fine. Like the tech's great that they're buying. So, um, that's obviously why they've bought it. Um, and so your question was around whether or not rather like why a pin a point solution. Sorry. Or why an all in one?

Speaker A: Yeah. What are the things that a company might want to weigh up?

Speaker C: It's usually budget and this idea that um, idea that we shouldn't log into one tool that people choose it all in one. I don't believe that all in ones will serve all of the parts of HR well because they just can't. Like you can't. It's like the, you can't focus on 20 things and do them all well. You've got to do like a couple of things and do them great or you're going to have 20 things, they're going to be great. Ish. Uh, you're not sure which parts of that are the great parts.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: And I think that's what we see with all in ones. Like there's stuff that they really, really excel at and then they add on things to make it easier for their clients to just adjust. But then you'll probably. And I think a lot of people end up doing that. And the challenge is I think there's a lot of contractual things around lock ins, procurement and I think that's going to change because the market moves so fast and you can see it, people are like basically vibe coding tools because they're like, well what my current all in one has doesn't do what I need so. Or even point solutions sometimes don't do what I need. So I'm going to vibe code my own thing because I want it to be more flexible or I want lower cost or whatever it might be, which I don't think is the way to go for a lot of things. But anyway, the market's clearly not serving a flexible enough um, procurement and purchase, um, strategy and cycles for people and how fast we move in business and how fast we need to adjust tech at the moment because that's new. The speed at which we move is new. That being said, point solutions, I think um, I prefer personally to work with really good core that maybe has some modules, like some of the all in one modules that are less critical and then for the critical stuff, and that'll be depending on the business taking, um, point solutions that integrate really well. They have to integrate like if they're not integrating and they're not working together and the data's not flowing like, goodbye. Like that's not data infrastructure in the future is number one. So yeah, again that's my opinion. Again it would be the difference of. It would also be the business context. But um, again there's a Place all in one. It just depends on the guardrails you've

Speaker A: been given I hear and I know coming out of like Covid and I mean there's been a few triggers for like you know, cost consciousness and things like that to really be imposed on the business. But I've certainly been in a position a couple of times where uh, you know, we've had to consolidate down or we've had to like let go of a tool for the version that existed in our all in one or something like that. I think you're right. Like there's inevitably some degradation of capability. Um, and I think one of the things people often miss is when they let go of a tool that is a point solution and is really good at what it does and they adopt maybe the module or something from their all in one or their best for breed or whatever it is. Um, they don't realize the work that actually comes back into the team from that and start to think about what is the impact and rather than see them gradually stretched and kind of taken, you know, take it to the extreme there. So I'm obviously giving you a uh, like inverse example. But where I'm trying to get to is like how do you see teams? Or I guess what's your advice to teams who are bringing on this tech to really think about like what the way this does change the, you know, how they work, what their day to day looks like. Because I think that's often a misstep in certainly in procuring technologies we go gosh, this will really solve our problem that they don't really go down to the level of like well what's it mean for you on a like day to day, week to week basis? Curious for your thoughts there.

Speaker C: Well, this is a big topic. I mean it comes down at the end of the day. Tech is infrastructure, right? So uh, it's part of your operating model within your team, within the company context as well. Because you affect not only your own people or uh, ta function but you also affect you know, the broader ah, company and how it operates. So it is a big thing. That's why I think people tech doesn't get enough, doesn't get enough time of day with executives and like strategy. Um, and with that uh, with that you know, thought process behind how we build um, people infrastructure. Um so I um, mean at the. It's always I guess m. I'm trying to think about how I, how I word this right. Like we don't have the right infrastructure. I don't feel like we have the right tools for HR right now that we need and that's why we see the market exploding with more and more stuff because we're still not serving the needs properly. Um, and at the same time the teams are also struggling to articulate what they need to some degree and getting out of their current day to day process habits. Like you said, they don't really think about if I bring in this tech, what does it mean for our new day to day working styles or processes or sharing information or how does that actually work? So I think coming back to you need to kind of think about your design of your operating model. It sounds very scary, but it's not. It's like how do we work, how do we want to work? And I feel like people should clear the slate when they're looking at um, tech at least for that particular part that they're looking at. And to be honest, even parts of the process map like really clear the slate and be like ideal world, this is what we'd like to do and think about how things connect and how the person fits into that, how the humans actually interact within that process. As in like where does information pass hands, you know, what are the. Where, where are the handoff points? Where is it changing into other teams? Where is the cross functionality? Does this change? You know, who has approval? Does it have changed? You know, does Jesse now not do contracts because they're automated? So what does Jesse do with her time? It means that I, whatever. There's so many things that happen when you start to build infrastructure for a people team. So it is complex. I don't know if it's even answering the question. Um, but I think um, going back to really understanding how we work as a people team and how infrastructure affects your process and your day to day tasks is important. And I think it's part of that planning piece that you do at the very beginning, but also part of your strategic piece before it even becomes a project. I think that's part of what a senior leader needs to do in a people team is thinking about your job is actually I'm. They're an operating model master. How do I design an operating model within people team in the context of the broader operating model and you know, org design. How do I design that, that we effectively deliver the business needs with the least amount of, you know, cost resistance with the best outcome of whatever. That's your goal. And then how do you flow through into the team and people, I think forget that whole piece. They're just like again very Reactive, very like short term thinking, not long term, not looking on, knock on. Um, of course there's lots of things that people have to do, but you've got to think of it in the context of how we work and how do we serve the business. And you said earlier something that I liked which was how we serve the business. So we're like a service function and maybe this comes down to operating model a little bit more. But I like to think of it as people. Teams should have a change or transformation or a project function like the bit that does the new stuff. Note the prioritized. We need to do all these new things, prioritize them. That's your change. And on the other side you have your run function which is now it's in play. Now we've done this project, we've delivered the final project output, it goes into the run team to run it and maintain it and deliver it to the business as a service front end. So you've got a front end that is service using the people, products that get built, whatever that might be, whether it's a process or a ah, tool or a combination. And then you have your um, you know, your change function. They've obviously whether, whatever you want to call it, the product fun, whether they use product thinking to deliver uh, that change or come up with that change, it doesn't matter. You need people who are creating the stuff to then use with the business. Right. And I think that what people forget is that that can actually be the same person. You have different hats. So in a small business I will be a run function as I do my day to day and I will be a hat on change and project function as it's needed. And I think that cross functionality of what the HR teams end up being or will end up being, um, more and more is going to really change how we think about, um, how we work, um, think about how we manage people skills. We need all sorts of things. Sorry, I'm going down a rabbit hole.

Speaker A: But no, I mean you speak and you're speaking my language and for those that are only listening to the audio, um, I'm smiling because this, this is pretty much what you described is like pretty much the model that we had in my people. I've seen the last company uh, that I worked in so we literally came in and I was like, yeah, we've got like so much op stuff that it's getting in the way of us being able to actually build the, you know, the things that are going to give value, add either back to ourselves as a team and speed up our processes or it's going to give value back to the business as well. Um, um. And that's literally what we did. I think we had a. We had a team of six or something. So, I mean, sizable team, um, split them into, you know, half of them ran as a, as a product team. They had sprints, they had, you know, deliverables, all those sorts of things. And the other half ran and they worked, you know, quite cohesively because a lot of the running of the products and the tools that we. And the services that we delivered gives you feedback that can then feed into the product side of things and like, uh, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What it is that you're building and how you're prioritizing different things. So I love that. And I love in particular that you talked about, like, small teams or, you know, people who are, uh, standalone in their role don't have to be missing out on this kind of thing either. Like, I mean, look, does it take a little bit more prioritization? Yeah, sure. But I mean, it's, it's really. It could be done with either, I don't know, creating a, you know, siloing off part of your day or part of your week or something like that by just creating the environment where you can actually sit down and focus on, on some of these builds, which, which I like. Seth. I agree. I think to me, like, that's. That's a really modern, like, operating model. I think all companies should embrace. Um, when we talk about, like, companies that are changing their operating model as, as tech's coming in and they're like, doing a great job of kind of doing what you said and thinking with it in your mind those things. What are some, like, great examples that come to mind? Like, are there companies that you've seen that doing this really well, or are examples you've seen where you're like, yeah, this is, this is the benchmark. This is what I wish I saw in other, other companies or maybe even the opposite. What are the misses? You know, when the CEO asks you about retention by manager or where your pay gaps are widening and the answer is sitting across four tools and a spreadsheet you haven't touched in weeks? Me too. Let me tell you about shapes. It's not an hris, it's a people operating system. Not just that, but it's an AI that sits across all of your people data. And you just ask it in plain English. Whatever the exec team throws at you, it hands you a live Answer. Um, backed by your own data. That's shapes and you can check it out the link in the show notes. Let's get back to it.

Speaker C: I don't think, I mean as I'm not in house anymore, I don't. And I don't work in business at the moment. I think it's hard to know. Doing it right. I think we can see what maybe more or less would have a probably more efficient setup when you have small companies that are like, you know, the new modern, let's say lovable or the, you know, the big headlines where they're like really small teams and they've still got to do hr, but they've got tiny teams or small teams, right. But they're earning and their business is like churning crazy amounts of money.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Like they're probably doing it be more right than the older businesses, who knows right. But you can kind of, I think think about um, the way the ways you wouldn't do it is probably how 90% of businesses are doing it, right? Because it's just not working. We know it's just not working. So the bar's kind of low and that's why we have this. And, and you know, I keep coming back to like, why don't we have respect like we always. And I'm gonna kind of circle back, can't complain. Said circle back. I'm gonna circle back to um, what we said earlier about um, noise in HR and what I see is this like self fulfilling like loop of not being able to be strategic. Because to be strategic or to like make change in the business, they're like, well, I need data. It's like okay, I need data. We don't have the infrastructure. Huh. Usually, usually in that back end we don't have a lot of data. It's poor infrastructure. We've got the data, the data is wrong. Um, we don't have any idea how many tickets or emails or questions we're getting. We don't know about what topics they are because we're not recording it. So we actually don't have the data to be like this is what we know we need to work on, right? So it's very hard to get the data input to start the process because there's so much noise, because there's so little being done in the space to actually automate all the admin properly. Think about in a business where like you know, people still do contracts manually, the handover from ATS to HRS isn't always. Is sometimes push data. Uh, but you still Gotta manually go through and do stuff. Sometimes the onboarding emails to get people's payroll data is like literally an email to someone or a form in Google forms that you've got to transfer somewhere to somewhere. You know, like all of this, someone has to do all this work, all this painful stuff that, uh, no one thinks about, no one cares in the business, but it has to be done. And HR using all their energy, all this, like, noise, right? They're too busy. But we don't still don't have the right data to actually get the support we need to change that. So we're like, in this thing where we can't deliver, we're too busy. Everyone's like, we're too busy. We've got fires everywhere. They're like, what fires? We're like, someone asked about payroll. We've got this. There's a million thousand things that are happening. Because I believe the tech infrastructure is not suitable in people ops, especially for what we actually need to do to get rid of admin. So we've added all these people in there to solve that problem instead of tech, because they're just not building for what we need. Um, then we don't have the data. Then we're too busy to actually roll out all the strategic programs for employees because we're too busy doing all the other stuff. And then everyone's like, well, you're not delivering what we need. You can't even answer a ticket within a day. You can't even get my payroll right. You can't even do this. Blah, blah, blah. It's like, yeah, exactly. We can't, because there's all these problems because we haven't set up the operating model right. You know, and so that it's such a problem when it comes to how we think about work and how we think about the value out of hr, that we don't deal with all of these kind of noisy things going on to get the data to be strategic, to then, like, actually change the way we operate, to move into these, like, more strategic, um, team structures where we have the change coming through. Because even if we have that structure, let's say we transform ourselves and we're like, we've got the best setup in the world. We've got, um, you know, we've got the structure of, you know, we prioritize stuff and then it comes into our change team or our product team or whatever, and we've got the build. You know, they're doing new stuff, then it gets into the people products, and then we've got the, you know, the infrastructure team that maintain all the tech and orchestrate it and then we've got a service function where, you know, delivering the services. Great, that's great structure. All of that means thing if you don't have the data to effectively prioritize and justify to stakeholders what we're working on. Because what comes down that pathway of uh, what we're working on and why defines whether or not the outcomes are actually what the business need. And because we don't have any data and because we have so much admin, we cannot basically give them what they need and what we all need as a company to make the decisions because we literally can't capture it properly. So we have this constantly poor cycle of round and round around. We go round the thing. No matter how much we try, we still don't get that uh, seat at the table. We still don't get the respect because we're missing core infrastructure. I believe in the people op space is the most underserved space of people tech. The first thing companies do is like we need a comp tool, we need a performance management, we need this. Like we don't need any of that. You need to get your infrastructure right. We need to get the data about what people are in the business asking for.

Speaker A: Yeah, all the things that are feeding these tools actually need to be get

Speaker C: rid of the noise, capture all the data. That's what you need first, everything else add on later. And I think we, we skipped all of that somehow in the process of setting up HR and we threw people at it and created manual, manual band aids also because the tech wasn't available. But anyway, that's just my little rant there because it just, it bothers me because we're trying so hard to be a function to serve people and to serve the business and we all want that. And we're not really supported to do it, but we're also not supported with the tech options on the market. At least I feel they're coming, coming. There's a lot of stuff coming. Um, historically we didn't have that core done well in my opinion. So.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I hear what you're saying. I've definitely worked in larger companies that have tried to solve problems through manpower and kind of just like brute force it and it just, it ends up becoming this horrible thing. You're right. Like when your data's terrible, your credibility to function is completely shot. Like, you know, if your manager's coming back here saying, you know, this person doesn't report that person anymore. And this is not a job title and the salary's change and all this sort of stuff and it's like, yeah, it just looks terrible. So I guess like sliding doors, a moment like when, you know, when a company is at that kind of inflection point where you're like, actually this is the point to get this thing right. And what's your advice to them? To, you know, actually get to buy and you know, be able to get them run on the board and start to build the foundation.

Speaker C: Okay, so how I've done it in the past because it is a hard thing to do. It's hard to articulate. Guys, we need to slow down, to speed up actually. And people don't like to hear that. They're like, no, I want my thing. And you're like, hang on a minute, here's why we're going to not do it like that. And here's my suggestion. Um, so I used to work, my background before HR was transformation, so change delivery. And there's a lot of things that I took from that into hr. Um, around how to get buy in. One of those is like doing options papers, sounds ridiculous, but basically putting forward options to make someone make the decision. Um, because if you bring, bring forward, like do nothing as an option and the consequence of that and do something like what you would really love to do in the con and like the cost consequence and then something maybe like in between, give them three options. They're usually never going to choose to do nothing. But if they do, at least they've taken on the risk, they've taken on the responsibility and accountability of making that decision. Right. Whereas I think a lot of like I always tell HR teams, you do not need to save the company. You do not. It is not your role to save the company from itself. If the leadership are saying no, they are responsible for the outcome of that. No, not you. And so if you can get that documented, that helps. Firstly because they assume you're basically saying you choose to do nothing about this topic and we're going to proceed anyway, despite what I've recommended. So I think that firstly can really help. But secondly, how to get the buy in is to actually what I did was go, look, guys, you like really candidly talk to the leadership and the executives. Be like, you guys want data, right? You want this? These are all the problems we have. Yes, yes, yes. Okay. The reason I can't give you that is because these processes don't work. This data is wrong, the infrastructure isn't there. So I will never be able to deliver that, no matter what you ask me and no matter how much pressure you put, I cannot deliver that until I put energy and time into solving that first. So the infrastructure topic has to be solved first. Then I can give you what you need and then we can do everything else. If you would like multiple projects happening at once, let's say you want to push out. Oh, but we need, but we need, but we need those. Okay, you do your. You've got to do resource planning. You've got to be like, okay, here's the team, here's how they use his amount of time that they're using on all these things. All the manual stuff, all the projects that we've got going on. There's only so much, you know, time in the day. You've got to like break it down for them. Use the data you have around people, availability and what they're actually working on. Show them how it isn't possible. Show them that, get them to stack rank. This is the whole strategic piece we talked about earlier. You need that roadmap, you need that prioritization and you need as much data as you possibly can. So that's what I did. I literally just went in with like, I cannot give you what you want. I want to. And I just told them I can't do it. And I was like, if you would want that outcome, we work together. Here's how we work together. Here's my plan of how we could attack it. We can do like this or like this. Here's the impact, but here's the future benefit. And if you can come in and have that conversation that is going to get you buy in to be like, you know what, let's slow down and let's actually focus on infrastructure. Let's invest in that because we're going to save X amount of hours. Of course you don't always know, but you can estimate. You can be like, I got four

Speaker A: people use assumptions, right?

Speaker C: Yeah, I've got four people here doing contracts manually. You know, it doesn't really make much sense. We're going to need to hire someone else if we grow. Like, it's just you can do basic assumptions and I think that's where we're lacking that. Firstly that candid saying, we actually can't do that. I'm full on, on board with people teams being like, we can't deliver that. Not saying, yes, yes, we can do it because you want to lie, show that you can do something. It's like, no, be like, I Can't do that. You've not enabled me as a business to do that because you're not giving me the permission to solve the problems or the budget or the time or whatever it is. And so the strategic leader needs to have, needs to be quite strong, I think in that space. When you've got a lot of challenges and needs to be willing to be very candid and be like, here's the challenges, but here's my way forward. Will you come on that journey with me? Let's partner, let's get it done. Let me get you that data, let me fix all your problems. But here's how I think we need to do it. So it is a fun discussion and most people don't want to have it. Um, but if you can do that, a lot of the time the leaders are like, oh, thank God, we're finally going to fix all the problems. Do it. And they'll give you the budget and they'll.

Speaker A: Yeah, but I feel like the alternative is like, is what? Is to take on a thousand things, do all of them badly, probably be overworked, uh, feel like your credibility shot and that the business looks at you as something you can't really deliver because you're trying to do too much at once. And yeah, I mean it's, it's, you know, which reality do you want?

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker A: Like, is it the one where it's like a little bit of short term pain to say, hey, it's actually just physically impossible, like which of these 10 things you want to do in what order once it's done, at least you've got that direction and you've got that guidance around where to focus and potentially even to bother to invest in being able to achieve eight of those things instead of all 10.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. And it's like, exactly what reality do you want? The reality we're in is that we're in the second reality that you said we're in the I can't deliver, I don't have respect, I can't get things done. I've got 4,000 things on my list. I'm burnt out. Like HR is literally burnt out. And they are burnt out because there is poor infrastructure, more or less. Like this stuff does not take away the noise we need to take away to enable us to do strategic work. And everyone knows that, everyone says it, but that's why, right? And we can't keep hiding behind there. Well, we're too busy or we don't get enough support. And I'm like, we need to take it by the reins. This is the perfect moment in history where we go, we have the ability now with tech to absolutely change the way we deliver people functions and design them, deliver the services, support employees, support the business. We can absolutely redesign that and reinvent it. I think we need to, um, and it will be fun, it will be messy, but if you can have those discussions, that's going to get you the buy in, right? And I think every business will be like, please. And they will see them. You can start to see the benefits of all of that. Also the employees. Like when I'm um, like as an employee in a business, I also don't want to go through like you have to write an email to check about your payroll slip. Can you put a ticket in this system that wasn't built for HR and like go through a three week cycle to get a book approved from Learning and Development. And you're like, I don't want to do that. Like, it's a horrible experience for employees. So at the end of the day I think everyone would be on board with actually HR transforming. It's just, it is going to take a lot of different skills than I think we actually have in the function right now. It's going to need a combination of different things in the future. Um, also people don't want to talk about, but we need to help and support the people in those functions to upskill and learn the skills they don't have. But also, or if they have them, enable them to use them, um, in people teams.

Speaker A: Maybe you touched on something earlier that I'm really keen to. And whether we close that on this or not, we'll see. But I wanted to talk about static you sort of mentioned and HR haven't had tech that you know, that you think are uh, sort of meeting their needs. But I know you also mentioned that it's moving in the right direction. So tell me a bit more about that. Like, you know, why you think, you know, tech is falling short at the moment where it's going. Um, yeah, maybe what it needs to do to really hedge our expectations.

Speaker C: Yeah, okay, big topic, but I'll try and condense it as much as I can. Sorry, everyone listening? Um, I'll do my best. No, um, so I think what we're missing is the flexibility firstly of tech. Right now the tech is very rigid. Most of them are quite rigid and AI is enabling that to be a lot more fluid in the way that tools are built and you can adjust, um, as a user, but also as you build them, it's much faster. Um, so I think the flexibility of just having any kind of every business is different, every employee is different. I think the personalization and the flexibility of what AI enables in tooling now is going to really, really change the way we deliver services. Um, if I think about like customer service is the basically exactly what HR does, but internally, right? There's a first level support. First level support's usually like a bot, right? An interface, a chat interface, like hi, I have a problem and it should be able to like solve 90% of the problems and then it escalates to second level support to a human when it needs to. Right. And then that human answers your question and then that human insight in, sorry, in customer service is probably like recording those answers and then feeding that back into their knowledge base. They don't get as many calls. Right. That makes sense. If you're getting calls on whatever it is about your product, you're going to update your documentation so that can be answered and found. And when someone searches the chat, they get an answer. Right? That's not, that's what we're doing. Customer service, a HR doing that? Absolutely not. Is there tech to support that? Absolutely not. Is there going to be tech that does that? Yes. And it's coming. So this space of like being able to interact with your knowledge base and all of that, all of those outputs and invisible work that like it's lost in you know, notion or wherever you have it in, you know, people that's going to like start to be able to be surfaced. People are going to be able to search it. They already can do that. Um, and then you need a way to like capture that data of like what people are asking. So all of that is now suddenly not just a ticket in the system that you have to export and integrate. And it's not just an email or a Slack, it's like actually captured and it's data you can use. Like this kind of future is where we're going, where that whole people ops, um, you know, day to day stuff is going to become largely like a, I believe like a customer service function. Um, it's that smart and it's that good that you basically don't need to. And to be honest, I don't want to wait 10 minutes to talk to someone, uh, or 10 days to talk to someone about my question or get an answer. I want an answer. Um, so that's going to be, I think that's revolutionizing that also around like the whole onboarding process, the personalization, the data capturing the way that that's done is very like, can be very flexible, also personalized. It knows who you are, it can talk, it can send you personalized communication, it can draft the communication. Just the level up of like manually having to do those emails, those welcome emails or having a standard email for everyone. There's just going to be so much more we can do in that space, um, where we can do it faster and better because of the AI infrastructure that we're going to have in our tech. Um, so I don't think we have that done well now. But there are tools available that are working on that and doing that. Um, and then I think in the performance management space it's going to level that up because that's just done badly. Let's just be honest. Like no one likes performance management. Um, so I think performance manager space is going to get a level up. There's lots of tools out there building, building in that space. Um, comp as well. Like comp used to be like this black box. Now it's like okay, a lot happening in that like, you know that space really well. Comps going to be something people analytics revolutionized before it used to be like quick. You need a team of, you need a team of like 10 people and you've got to ask for a dashboard and going to take you 10 days. Now it's like all the data's there. If you have the infrastructure, all the data is available which is the goal. Like make sure there's a central place for data. Then you can just query it, talk to it, uh, ask for stuff. It'll like in the leadership then don't have a middleman anymore. They don't have to be like hey, can you tell me what's going on? It's like I just log in as a leader and I see all the data and I'm like, can you mind blown. That's like what we want. So we are getting to that point very quickly. The tech is going to be available and is available actually. It's how fast we can change the way we work in business that's going to be the harder part. So I don't think anything about the tech transformation of HR is going to be anything to do with tech. It's going to be about the people change that is required, um, and the skill sets we have. So I don't know if that answers the question, but I'm really excited about what's coming in the space.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think I only keep seeing kind of new entrants and it's a lot of. Yeah, like you said, there's so much. I mean I'm sure like most people it's hard to keep up like with the AI tooling that's coming out on a like consumer kind of level. Um, so you know, in 10 years time when Hadrian Tech catches up. No, I'm kidding. But you know I'm really looking forward to, I'm really looking forward to some of that capability being built and just native and everything. And yeah, it's gonna be really interesting to see if that kind of, you know, big company consolidation exercise if that will prevail or what will happen there because I'd imagine there'll be a lot of companies or. Yeah, a lot of companies that are kind of like stuck on this kind of like old school enterprise system that look outside and start to really go, gosh, we could have it so much better. So it's going to be an interesting future, that's for sure.

Speaker C: It is going to be a very interesting future. Very, very, very interesting future. I don't know how the transition is going to happen. I just don't know because I think people are still. I think that the challenge that AI tooling is going to have is the compliance and the trust issues. Like we've seen the lawsuits already. Like I think that's where um, you know we also also the vibe coding stuff. I'm like guys, why are we vibe coding this? Like I don't know about that but I just feel like the standards around um, AI and the compliance around that is going to also slow things down a little bit and I think that's rightly sold. But um, there's a lot that AI can do that isn't going to um, that can be done already. Right. Um, so yeah, I'm looking forward to it and yeah, let's see, let's see how the market goes. And the market is so big that like it uh, is my full time job more or less to understand the market and I'm still discovering stuff. So you know it is really like an exercise to really understand what's there. So no one's, no one's behind in this space. Everyone is behind.

Speaker A: It's constantly evolving. Yes, we're, we're all behind.

Speaker C: It's all out of date tomorrow. It's out of date. So don't worry, just be curious. I think that's the main thing, staying curious.

Speaker A: I think that's a great takeaway. Yeah, that's an excellent tip. I was going to say is there any other, any Other things you want to leave people with from, uh, uh, you know, being someone that needs to cross the entire industry. Is there any interesting insights you're seeing or any other tips you want to share for people that are feeling like they're being left behind? And if you want them, I mean,

Speaker C: uh, the main thing is that firstly, like I said, no one's. No one's behind, everyone's behind. And I feel like there's a lot of noise out there, but the main thing is that you individually take control of your own destiny. You see what's there. There's enough free resources out there. There is so much out there.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's hard to keep up with as well.

Speaker C: It is hard to keep up with, but I think, you know, take the time to reflect on what are your skills? Where do you want to go? Um, what do you. What do you. What do you. What do you think skills are that you don't have, that other people have, where you're like, oh, I'm. I'm not. I'm. That's. That's worrying me. Like, try to identify them. Like, spend the time to reflect on yourself and your skill sets and really be honest and be okay with not knowing something. Being like, I don't know how to do that. Uh, I don't know what that is. I'm worried about these things. Then try and find. You can very easily then, you know, find, like, these podcasts. You know, find podcasts, find communities, find online resources, webinars. Start dipping your toes in, like, really take control and be curious because at the end of the day, you're only. Like, no one else is responsible for your success in life and your progression at work learning other than yourself. Like, no one cares about that. No matter how much anyone says no one actually cares. That's a sad thing. In life, no one really deeply cares as much as you will care. So care about yourself. Take the time. You know, don't scroll socials, scroll chatgpt. Asking for, how do I keep myself relevant? You know, I don't know, but I think there's a lot of, um, a lot of things people can do, and I think that's the way to give yourself, um, the pathway forward is to know yourself and know where you want to go. That sounds a bit philosophical, but I think it's important for everyone to do that in this world.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think it's a great principle to end on. I completely agree. I think, you know, much like I think is the same for employee development is that nobody's responsible for your development but yourself. And so yeah, I think it's a, it's a great parting wisdom to, to leave things there on. So Jesse, where can uh, where can people find you if they want to learn more or follow or any other sort of stuff?

Speaker C: I'm very active on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. Um, you can also reach out. I have a Slack community as well called Humans in the Loop, um, and about, you know, AI and tech transformation and kind of just connecting with people who are interested in that topic. Um, and I've also got, you know, webinars and a whole bunch of, you know, educational content that goes out. So please, if it's interesting, check it out. And otherwise I have the stacked HR tech database I mentioned a few times. Um, you can open source. You can just go there and search stacked tech and that's it really. Hopefully it's helpful. Give me feedback. That's what I would like. And uh, thanks for having me, Matt. I really appreciate it.

Speaker A: It's awesome to have you on. Thank you.

Speaker B: Thanks for joining us on another edition of the foundation series. Make sure to head over to our website to subscribe to the foundation series for monthly editions featuring future interviews on startup compensation. In each edition, we'll explore the different strategies, trends and challenges faced by startups around the world. If you have a burning topic you'd like me to cover or a standout guest that you want to hear from, drop me an email so I can dive deeper into the compensation topics that matter most to you. Join me next time as we continue to uncover the strategies and practices driving success in global tech startups around the world.

Speaker A: World.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening.