Tracy St.Dic is Global Head of Talent at Zapier, where she's spent the last several years rebuilding hiring from the ground up for an AI-native world. "Slope, not snapshot" is her phrase — she's not interested in where a candidate stands today, she's interested in the angle of their learning curve.

In this episode, Tracy makes the case that most of what companies call signal in hiring is actually noise. Resumes have flattened into interchangeable copy. Applications are increasingly fraudulent. And the traditional recruiter screen wasn't built for a world where the tools themselves change every few weeks, not every few years.

We cover:

• Zapier's AI fluency rubric — one of the first of its kind, open-sourced to the community, and rebuilt from scratch as the bar for "capable" has kept moving

• Why raising the bar meant Zapier also had to raise the level of support, building resources for candidates to close the gap rather than just screening them out

• Ezra, the voice AI Zapier uses for first-round interviews — and the surprising discovery that candidates and recruiters both prefer it to a human screen

• Why an AI interviewer that doesn't interrupt, doesn't show impatience, and never runs out of time zone turns out to be the more humane first conversation, not the less

Everything else is noise. Applications are noise. What's left, once you strip that away, is whether someone is actually climbing — and whether the people evaluating them can see it happen in real time.

Better hiring isn't about finding people who already know everything. It's about finding people on the way up. Tracy makes the case.

Recorded live at Running Remote 2026, Austin, Texas.

Guest: Tracy St.Dic, Global Head of Talent, Zapier | zapier.com | linkedin.com/in/tracy-stdic

Work 20XX explores the future of work, distributed teams, and human performance in the age of AI. Hosted by Jeff Frick.

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Sacha Connor has been coming to Running Remote since 2019, when the conference was held in Bali, and this episode marks her third appearance on Work 20XX.

Please join me in welcoming Sacha Connor back to the Work 20XX podcast.

In Austin for the second year running with the team at Running Remote, we sat down with Sacha, founder and CEO of Virtual Work Insider, to trace how the conversation at this conference has evolved since that first trip to Bali, from synchronous versus asynchronous communication debates to what's dominating the room now: AI adoption inside distributed teams.

Sacha admits she was scared of AI at first. She never worked at a tech company, never learned to code, and did not see herself as a technical person. That changed when she took a Lead with AI certification program and realized the skills translated more directly than she expected. Now she has built her own custom GPT trained on the five-piece meeting framework she teaches clients, purpose, product, process, pre-work, and people, and uses it to prep every agenda she runs.

The conversation also digs into her sharpest observation of the day: AI adoption inside a company follows the same spectrum she has spent 15 years mapping for remote and hybrid work. Some organizations are virtual-first and moving fast, some are still figuring out basic policy on which LLMs employees are even allowed to use, and Sacha works both ends of that spectrum at once, from the executive suite down to the team actually trying to get the tools to stick.

Her advice for anyone intimidated by the mandate from on high to "go use AI": experiment in your personal life first. She has used LLMs for her own family scheduling. Once it clicks personally, bringing it to your team gets a lot easier.

We also cover her fifteen-year remote-iversary, the ERG she helped build at Clorox that grew faster than any other in the company, and her hot take on scheduled send.

Lucy Stein just watched Givebutter cross $10 billion in donations raised for nonprofits, ten years after she joined the company as employee number seven.

Please join me in welcoming Lucy Stein to the Work 20XX podcast.

In Austin for the second year collaborating with the team at Running Remote, we sat down with Lucy to learn how she built a People function from a completely blank slate, and what it takes to keep it intact as the company scales past 200 employees.

Givebutter's culture runs on three codified values: radical transparency, no assholes, and wired for fun. Lucy breaks down what each one actually means in practice, from a weekly all hands where finance shares real revenue numbers, to an explicit team-wide push to assume positive intent before reacting to a Slack message. She also talks through the recent integration of We Are For Good, a nonprofit media and community company Givebutter acquired, and why culture fit was the very first thing she checked.

The conversation closes on AI adoption inside a remote-first team, and Lucy draws a direct line between the skills that make distributed work succeed and the skills that make AI adoption succeed. Her advice for managers right now: PR for your team. When someone on your team is doing something sophisticated with a new tool, make sure it gets seen.

Oh, and yes, we talk about Mr. Butter, the company mascot with a butter slice for a head.

Lucy Stein: Clear is Kind, Assume Positive Intent | Work 20XX with Jeff Frick Ep 64 from Running Remote