Hi There,

Just joined from Toronto excited to expand my HR community.

Happy Friday to everyone and for those in Toronto, it's almost November and we have 15 degree weather woohoo! 😀

Harry Uffindell once watched a hiring manager interview 49 candidates for a junior designer role.

They hired the 50th.

When she signed, the manager’s reaction was “thank God we waited.”

Harry spent five and a half years building the team at Partly and is now CPO at Manifest.

On the next episode of the FNDN Series (coming out Sunday) we talked about how he finds great people and then keeps the bar high once they’re in the door.

He calls it Talent Cultivation.

Here are some of the tactics he says make the biggest difference:

1. Launch the role before you post it. The hiring manager and recruiter spend 30 to 45 minutes agreeing on a few things: the role’s “one thing”, the problem it solves, what success looks like at 90 days and at 12 months, and how they’ll test for it. (His team built a Claude skill so busy managers can talk their answers through on the drive home.)

2. Give someone the job of saying no. A bar raiser runs the debrief after the interviews. It starts with everyone silently reading the feedback, then skips the positives and goes straight to the concerns. It always ends with “what are we excited about?” If every score is a 3 out of 4, you’re probably settling.

3. Hire for care, then test for ownership. Ask candidates why they made each call and what they traded off to get there. Shallow claims fall apart quickly.

4. Ask who they’d follow. Harry ends interviews by asking which former colleague the candidate would join if that person started a company tomorrow. The same few names keep coming up, and become targets for hiring.

5. Play the long game. Keep a bench of great people who aren’t ready to move yet. Some of his best hires joined 12 to 24 months after the first conversation.

6. Win the top two or three in each year group. Partner with the leading student societies at the universities you recruit from. Once you land those students, the rest of their cohort tends to follow.

The full episode and write-up land in the FNDN Series on Sunday 1 November.

Subscribe here so it’s in your inbox when it goes live: https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/

Yesterday on The Glass House, Stacy Winsett, Chief People Officer and author of From Ashes to Influence: Leadership Forged by Fire and Faith, joined Daisy Watkins and me for an honest conversation about the leader everyone counts on, and what it costs to always look steady. 🎙️

Two moments worth the hour:

🔷 The early signals Stacy watches for: emails at 4 a.m., vacations spent working, a leader a little less steady than usual

🔷 The sentence her team is allowed to say to her: "Which priority do you want first?"

Full replay on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/RbKKc9pDjcY

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-glass-house-aligning-whats-embedded-with-whats-seen/id1896931104

A question for this group: what permission does your team have to tell a leader the load is too much? 💬

At LinkedIn's Talent Connect a few weeks ago, Brené Brown said she won't work with a company unless its CEO and CHRO are in lockstep.

I've sat on both sides of that table, as a founder and as a Chief People Officer. She's right. And from where I sit now, I'd add one thing: "lockstep" is something you have to build toward, usually in the moments of disagreement.

One CPO I coach was handed her company's AI transformation. Before anyone bought a tool or rewrote a role, she built a framework to map how AI would ripple through the organization and asked for a leadership workshop to align first.

Her CEO questioned the framework's value. He pressured her to move faster.

Her instinct was to defend the work harder. I suggested she name her biggest fear instead: that the executive team charges ahead on AI without real buy-in. Then ask for the alignment directly.

A framework is easy for a CEO to dismiss as "process." A clearly named business risk is much harder to wave off. It puts the CPO beside the CEO, looking at the same problem.

What's one conversation that helped you move from order-taker to true performance partner with your CEO?

Hi, Raleigh/RTP HR Community! 👋

Elina and I are excited to begin planning our next In Good Company Raleigh Chapter event, and we'd love YOUR input!

Our goal is to continue building a welcoming, engaging community where local HR and People professionals can connect, exchange ideas, share experiences, and support one another.

But we don't want to just plan events for our community. We want to plan them with you!

We've put together a short survey to better understand what you'd like to see from our future gatherings.

📝 Share your thoughts here: https://forms.gle/TWh2tg8yNsWnvbvq6

Whether you attended our first meetup or haven't had a chance to join us yet, we'd love to hear from you!

Your feedback will help us create events that are meaningful, accessible, and worth making time for.

We're looking forward to growing this community together and connecting with more of you soon! 💙

— Kirsten & Elina

Hey all. We have created a role in our organisation that requires:
1. Hibob expertise
2. Data and Tablaeu expertise.
3. AI agents experience an advantage
It seems to be a unicorn to find. We work remote and have hubs in Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal. If you know of any candidate that meets these requirements, please DM me.