Author
Best of HR
342pieces on file
Essay
How We Built Hiring Discipline Into a Team Spread Across Three CountriesGrowing a marketing team across Morocco, Dubai and the US without a single physical office forced us to replace gut-feel hiring with a repeatable process. The two changes that mattered most were a paid trial task before any offer and a written scorecard that separated skill from culture fit instead of blending them into one impression. Running a digital marketing agency with people on three continents means…RHILLANE Ayoub
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We Run AI Detectors On Our Own Writing. That Is Why We Will Not Screen Candidates With Them.A press release sat in our pipeline because a number on a dashboard would not come down. The copy was accurate. The client had already approved the quote inside it. Our own workflow kept pushing it back because an AI-detection score said a machine had written it. One of our writers reworked the same paragraphs again and again. What finally moved the score was not a…Ankush Gupta
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Write the Job Description After You Fix the JobMost small companies hire the same way. Something hurts. Orders ship late, the inbox overflows, the owner works Sundays. Someone says, “We need to hire.” Then the job description gets written from the pain. Every annoying task that lands on the desk of the person who is drowning goes onto the list of duties. The result is not a job. It is a pile. The pile…Orkan Arat
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The DEI Question Nobody Asks When Your Team Spans Three CountriesDiversity, equity, and inclusion policy written for a single-country office does not survive contact with a team split across Morocco, Dubai, and California. Real inclusion across borders means rebuilding meeting times, holidays, feedback norms, and promotion criteria around the actual people on the roster, not around a template. The first time I tried to run a company-wide all-hands, I picked 3pm. It felt neutral enough. Then…RHILLANE Ayoub
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Our Calendar Was Rejecting People Before Our Interviews DidAnkush Gupta
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How to Hire Without an HR Department: A Small Business Owner’s ProcessMost small business owners hire the same way. They post something vague, get buried in résumés, answer three people a week late, and hire whoever is still around. Then turnover feels random. It isn’t random. It is a process problem, and you can fix a process without an HR department or a big budget. I am not an HR professional or an employment lawyer, and none…Victor Smushkevich
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The Best Development Plan Is a Decision Someone Is Ready to OwnA development plan often begins with a familiar list: courses to attend, skills to practice, books to read, and milestones to complete. Those activities can be useful, but they do not answer the question that matters most: What is this person preparing to decide and own? A stronger development plan starts with the next important decision an employee should be able to handle independently. The decision…Ming-Yuan Xie
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The first hire is a decision about what you refuse to hand overI run a legal document business with no employees and one contracted developer. That arrangement has forced me to be far more deliberate about delegation than I ever was when I managed a team, because every handover costs money I can see. The decision that shaped everything was not who to bring in. It was what I would not give up. I kept the drafting. At…Daria Turanska
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How to Give Feedback on AI-Generated Work Your Team Hands InThe most useful feedback on AI-generated work usually isn’t about accuracy, and it isn’t about whether the person should have used AI at all. It’s about what the tool couldn’t see. A lot of AI-assisted work that goes wrong reads fine on its own and only goes wrong next to the things it has to sit beside. So review the piece against its neighbors, find where…Nick Baudoin
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How Leaders Can Make Feedback More Frequent and UsefulWhen an employee misses a deadline, their manager may soften the response when providing feedback because they want to preserve the relationship. As a result, the employee leaves with an incomplete understanding of the problem and repeats the same behavior. Both people become frustrated, and the employee first hears the full concern in a performance review. Managers often reach for a better delivery framework at this…Christina Simanella
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Offboarding Is Not Paperwork. It Is an Access Problem HR Owns.A site in the publishing network we run started serving pages nobody on our team had written. Not many. They sat deep in the structure, the sort of thing you find only because you happened to be reading a sitemap for an unrelated reason. We traced the entry point to an administrator account belonging to someone who had finished working with us months before. Their exit…Ankush Gupta
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How a Small Team Adopts AI Without a Training ProgramWe have never run an AI training course, and we use AI in almost every recurring part of the business. Those two facts are connected, and the connection is the opposite of what most rollout advice assumes. The standard approach starts with the tool. Pick a platform, buy seats, run a session, measure adoption, worry about the people who never log in. What we do starts…Nick Baudoin
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What Hiring Across Three Countries Actually Taught Me About DEIOur team splits across Morocco, Dubai and California, and every “best practice” DEI framework I had read assumed one labor code, one set of public holidays and one working week. Building a team across three legal systems forced a more honest version of inclusion, one built on named tradeoffs instead of a values statement. The policies that actually held up were the ones written for the…RHILLANE Ayoub
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What it takes to hire for a job nobody supervisesI hire the people who clean vacation rentals across the Los Angeles area between guests, and every one of them gets into a home when nobody from the household is standing there watching. There is no front desk, no manager walking the floor, no camera rolling. Whatever happens in that home, good or bad, happens because the person we sent chose to do it right. That…Carolyn Vasquez
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HR Owns the Burnout Number. HR Didn’t Build the Machine That Produces It.Every HR leader knows the number. It shows up in the retention dashboard, the exit interview summary, the engagement survey nobody fills out honestly. Burnout. Turnover. Disengagement. Whatever the label, HR is the department that reports it, explains it in the leadership meeting, and is expected to fix it. There’s a structural problem embedded in that expectation, because the number HR is asked to move is…Ashley Gibson
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The First 30 Days of a Remote Hire: Two Onboardings That Failed and the One That Finally WorkedHiring across time zones was never our real problem. The first 30 days after the offer were, and we got them wrong twice: once with a folder of documents nobody could ask a question about, and once with a buddy system that fell apart on a nine-hour gap. The version that works has three parts: a real task shipped in the first week, a written decision…RHILLANE Ayoub
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How AI Is Transforming the Hiring ProcessArtificial intelligence is changing the way organizations find, evaluate, and hire employees. What once required hours of manual resume screening, candidate communication, and interview scheduling can now be supported by AI-powered tools. As companies receive hundreds or even thousands of applications for a single position, AI is becoming an increasingly useful part of modern recruitment. However, AI is not simply about automating hiring tasks. When used…Javeria Tahir
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Your Exit Interviews and Your Review Page Disagree. The Public One Is Usually Closer to the Truth.Most companies I work with have two records of why people leave. One is the exit interview file, which is calm, procedural, and full of phrases like “seeking new challenges.” The other is the public review page, which is specific, occasionally furious, and names a manager. When those two documents contradict each other, HR tends to treat the exit interview as the reliable one because it…Ankush Gupta
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The 3 S’s you need to know to be a leader, not just a managerMost people think that being a manager automatically equates to being a leader. While that may be true if we’re merely looking at positions and organizational charts, there’s a huge difference between the two when we consider how they operate. The truth is, not all managers can be leaders. Aside from the very obvious difference in semantics, managers and leaders vary in how they communicate with…Gabriel Shaoolian
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How HR Teams Can Improve the Recruiting ProcessRecruiting teams face an unusual problem. Many employers still struggle to fill open positions, yet recruiters are also dealing with far more applications than they handled a few years ago. More applicants do not automatically create better hiring outcomes. When screening, communication, interviews, approvals, and follow-up are poorly organized, extra volume can make an already slow process harder to manage. That puts the recruiting process itself…Ihor Lavrenenko
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Why Your AI Rollout Did Not Change Anyone’s BehaviorMost companies buy the licenses, run the training day, and then wonder why nothing changed. I have watched this from the inside more than a hundred times. The tools work. The people are willing. And three months later the usage reports look the same as they did before anyone signed anything. The reason is simple. Adoption is a habit problem. You cannot buy a habit. The…Tim Cakir
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Vehicle Reimbursement Is an HR Issue, Not Just an Expense ReportWhen employees use personal vehicles for work, the cost goes well beyond gas. Insurance, maintenance, tires, registration, depreciation, and repairs add up, whether someone drives 500 business miles a month or 2,000. For companies, these expenses may look like another line on a report. For employees, they can feel like money coming directly out of their pockets. That’s why vehicle reimbursement is more than a Finance…Will Hanson
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Four Screening Questions That Cut Bad Marketing Hires In HalfThree small businesses, two hires, fourteen months I have watched three separate small businesses hire one marketing generalist and expect that person to cover strategy, content, paid ads, email and analytics like a full department. All three burned through two hires in fourteen months. Nobody wrote the job description wrong on purpose. They just priced one salary and hoped it would stretch across five job titles.Lilach Bullock
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How to connect hiring onboarding and the first payrollAn accepted offer starts a chain of responsibilities. HR confirms the employee record, IT prepares access, the manager explains the work, and payroll prepares the first payment. Each team can finish its own checklist while an important change still fails to reach the next person. Consider a hypothetical new hire whose start date moves by a week. The recruiter updates the hiring record, but the onboarding…Naresh Chauhan
