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WorkTech Podcast

WorkTech Podcast

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The WorkTech Podcast explores the critical trends shaping the future of work and HR tech. George LaRocque of WorkTech, drawing from years of advising top innovators, investors, and enterprises, guides you through market deals, issues, opportunities, and trends—all through a strategic, actionable lens.All rights reserved by WRKdefined マネジメント・リーダーシップ リーダーシップ 出世 就職活動 経済学
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  • When AI Systems, Startups, and Public Policies Collide

    When AI Systems, Startups, and Public Policies Collide
    2026/06/16
    In this high-velocity edition of Up Next @ WorkTech, George LaRocque (WorkTech) and Kate Achille (The Devon Group) reunite for a comprehensive cross-pod. Together, they break down the critical intersection of legal friction, evolving corporate staffing strategies, multi-million-dollar government tech overhauls, and sweeping shifts rewriting the rules of HR management. The IBM Lawsuit: Age Discrimination Meets Automated Rejection The hosts open by dissecting a highly publicized new legal battle targeting IBM. A 48-year-old manager with 24 years of tenure found his position eliminated. Upon immediately applying for similar, relevant roles, he received automated rejection notices. While headlines focus on artificial intelligence, Kate and George reveal that the suit fundamentally alleges deep-rooted age discrimination. The plaintiff is not demanding a technical infrastructure audit; rather, he seeks reinstatement and back pay. The timing is notable, occurring right as IBM's HR division heavily publicized its total transition toward automated systems. The co-hosts note that as legacy applicant systems yield to automation, employers face a mounting wave of legal challenges mapping the boundaries of algorithmic accountability. People as Product: The Fractionalization Debate at New York Tech Week. Shifting to startup culture, Kate highlights a controversial trend from New York Tech Week. Covered by HR Brew, tech entrepreneurs are openly advocating for pairing fractional human employees with AI "agent" workers to scale businesses without the overhead of full-time wages. The panel explicitly suggested viewing an internal corporate team as just another product being built. George and Kate challenge this "people as product" philosophy, tracking how quickly the corporate pendulum has swung from celebrating employees as assets to treating them as commodities. George notes that these pitches overlook the hidden financial realities of computing tokens, high system failure rates, and the questionable efficacy of replacing human leadership with "digital twins" for managerial feedback and performance monitoring. Oracle’s Massive OPM Contract Win In a massive industry shakeup, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) awarded Oracle a staggering $396 million, 10-year contract to unify the federal government under a single cloud-based HR platform. The bold move promises a 90% reduction in government HR tech spending. The immediate casualty was Workday, the losing bidder that had secured the exact same contract just twelve months prior. The transition creates massive ripples across the HR tech ecosystem as numerous vendors risk losing legacy contracts. On a personal note, Kate recalls being a victim of the 2007 OPM data breach, which required 15 years of government-funded identity monitoring. This history highlights the profound security anxieties of centralizing millions of federal worker records onto a single monolithic cloud infrastructure under big tech control. The Department of Education’s Wage Accountability Crackdown The conversation shifts to public policy as the hosts dissect a polarizing proposed rule from the Department of Education that would hold universities financially accountable for low graduate earnings outcomes. Under the rule, programs that fail to meet specific wage thresholds risk losing Title IX funding and Pell Grant eligibility. While holding institutions accountable for soaring education costs sounds logical, George and Kate warn that the rule relies on flawed data models. The American Council on Education (ACE) heavily criticized the policy's math, which dangerously groups 25-year-old entry-level professionals with 34-year-old mid-career veterans. The hosts argue that focusing solely on immediate earnings severely devalues the long-tail returns of a liberal arts education. Ironically, in an era when AI automates hard technical tasks, the very critical-thinking skills fostered by the liberal arts make workers irreplaceable. Finding Ideal Talent: How to Stand Out at Anthropic To wrap up the tech insights, the hosts discuss hiring criteria shared by the creators of Claude Code at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech event. To secure a role at Anthropic, candidates must exhibit three key traits: being generalists, possessing a low ego, and demonstrating the ability to openly admit failure and pivot. George and Kate explore the practical paradox of portraying soft skills like a "low ego" within digital applications, noting that the reality of hyper-scaled tech environments often contrasts with public corporate manifestos. On this episode, Kate and George discuss AI age discrimination lawsuit, IBM automated rejections, fractional employees, AI agent workers, Oracle OPM contract, single cloud-based HR platform, a Department of Education proposed rule, graduate earning outcomes, Anthropic hiring criteria, and the HR Tech market shift. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    37 分
  • Phenom Acquires Plum to Unlock Behavioral Science in HR

    Phenom Acquires Plum to Unlock Behavioral Science in HR
    2026/05/30
    In this episode of the WorkTech Podcast, host George LaRocque sits down with Mahe Bayireddi, Co-Founder and CEO of Phenom, to unpack the strategy behind the company's recent acquisition of Plum. Marking Phenom's second assessment-focused deal in ten weeks following their acquisition of BeApplied, this conversation explores how behavioral science is rewriting the future of talent acquisition and talent management. Beyond Commodity Intelligence Bayireddi explains that as generalized AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) become heavily commoditized, simply generating answers is no longer a corporate differentiator. True technological value now lies in an engine's ability to establish context, context-driven understanding, and human judgment. While technical skills are easily cataloged in traditional resumes and job descriptions, deep psychometric and behavioral data sets have historically been missing from automated HR ecosystems. Phenom is bridging this gap by leaning into cognitive science, combining computer science, neuroscience, linguistics, and psychology, to unlock data that traditional AI models cannot provide. Historically, psychometrics were siloed into high-volume hourly roles or C-suite executive hiring. Phenom’s vision is to democratize this data across all talent workflows. By connecting Plum’s role-modeling technology, which maps behavioral blueprints across 40,000 real-world jobs with four times greater predictive success, to Phenom's skill ontology, enterprise buyers can accurately forecast candidate and employee performance on a global scale. Delivering Insights in the Flow of Work A primary historical challenge of assessments was user friction, but Phenom’s agentic AI framework solves this by embedding these insights directly into the daily flow of work. Rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach, Phenom applies a "five-dimensional context" matrix that evaluates organizational needs by industry, role, location, business unit trajectory, and workflow automation level. This ensures behavioral insights are served exactly when needed—whether that means instant screening in high-volume retail or post-screening evaluations in healthcare. The Single Code Base Advantage Unlike legacy vendors that run acquisitions as siloed business units, Phenom buys strictly for product velocity and acceleration. Every acquired tool is completely rebuilt into Phenom's native, single code base and single data integration flow. For enterprise customers, this eliminates fragmented databases and clumsy integrations. A psychometric marker captured during automated screening remains natively active throughout the entire employee lifecycle, seamlessly powering internal career pathing, retention, and workforce development. Key Takeaways The Shift to Contextual AI: As general AI becomes a commodity, the ultimate value lies in creating context and human judgment via psychometric data Democratizing Behavioral Science: Integrating Plum allows Phenom to scale validated behavioral blueprints across 40,000 jobs, elevating hiring accuracy globally. The Single Code Base Mandate: Natively rebuilding acquisitions into one code base ensures that candidate data flows seamlessly into long-term employee retention and growth workflows Hyper-Targeted Workflows: Using a five-dimensional context matrix, businesses can deploy assessments precisely where they make sense based on specific industry and role dynamics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    23 分
  • Up Next @ WorkTech: Reading the Room on AI: Graduation Boos to Enterprise Disruptions

    Up Next @ WorkTech: Reading the Room on AI: Graduation Boos to Enterprise Disruptions
    2026/05/18
    Welcome to a packed episode of Up Next @ WorkTech, the premier crossover podcast featuring George LaRocque (founder of WorkTech) and Kate Achille (host of The Devon Group’s Up Next at Work podcast). In this edition, George and Kate break down the rapidly shifting intersections of AI, employer leverage, and the major technological shakeups redefining the modern workplace. The Gen Z Dilemma: The hosts dissect a viral UCF commencement speech where graduates booed a corporate narrative praising AI and billionaires. With Gallup showing young Americans losing confidence in the labor market, George explains how entry-level hiring is fracturing: companies are increasingly bypassing foundational roles by equipping seasoned workers with AI. Forced Tech Adaptations: AI is reshaping academia. Princeton University has phased out its 133-year-old unproctored honor code to combat AI cheating, while a massive Instructure Canvas outage recently derailed finals week at Rutgers and LA schools. The Benefits Scale-Back: Major employers like Zoom and Deloitte are cutting 401(k) matches and parental leave. The hosts warn that leveraging current employer market power to slash benefits is short-sighted and risks major cultural backlash when the talent market swings back. The Solopreneur Illusion: Reviewing the new Workday, Anthropic, and LISC accelerator, Kate and George argue that giving 15 solopreneurs just $10,000 and limited Claude AI credits is more of a corporate goodwill exercise than a structural business accelerator. Big Tech Infiltrates HCM: Intuit is making an aggressive move into the SMB payroll and HCM space with QuickBooks Workforce, posing a direct threat to legacy players like ADP and Paylocity. Meanwhile, AWS is entering high-volume recruiting with an agentic platform, though George warns they may underestimate the complex 12-to-18-month enterprise sales cycle. Voice AI & Funding Wins: Following a key acquisition by Greenhouse and an acquihire by Ashby, asynchronous Voice AI is overcoming historical candidate pushback to become a core recruiting interface. Finally, the hosts celebrate Kashable’s $60 million Series C round as a massive win for employee financial wellness. On this episode Kate and George discuss Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI layoffs, job market pessimism, Gen Z employment, QuickBooks Workforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) hiring platform, Voice AI recruiting, employee benefits scaling back, tech-driven workplace shift, Human Capital Management (HCM). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 分
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