Hey New Yorkers!

We had a nice gathering re: AI workflows 2 weeks ago... what would you all like to do in Q4?

A four-part leadership programme for CHROs, HR leaders and people teams.

Grounded in the bio-social model of disability and intersectionality, the programme helps organisations move from reactive support towards an Anticipatory Welcome, where human difference is expected and planned for from the beginning.

As Atif Choudhury, CEO of Calling All Minds, says:

“We are all neurodiverse, but we are not all marginalised by it.”

This distinction sits at the heart of the programme, connecting neurodiversity with disability, intersectionality and the workplace systems that shape who is supported, believed and able to thrive.

The four sessions

1. From Awareness to Anticipatory Welcome

2. Confident Conversations, Disclosure and Trust

3. Designing Inclusive Talent Systems

4. Psychological Safety and Sustainable Performance

Contact Calling All Minds to discuss pricing, cohort sizes and delivery options.

[email protected]
www.callingallminds.com

A few months ago I stopped trying to describe what I needed and started noticing the shape of the gap instead.

I knew exactly what I wanted to build. An AI-enabled People function — agents handling the repetition, managers getting what they need without chasing me, the whole thing running on a system instead of on my own effort. I could see it clearly.

And I kept getting stuck in the same place. Not on the vision. On the build.

Someone had to actually make it. Connect the systems. Turn the idea into something a manager could open on a Monday and use. And that someone — the person who does that specific job — didn’t exist on my team, and didn’t have a name in our org chart.

That gap has a name now. I’ve started calling it the People Technologist, and I’ve come to think it’s about to become one of the most important roles in modern People teams.

What the role actually is

The People Technologist is the person who builds what the People function designs.

Not a data analyst. Not an HRIS admin. Not “the person who’s good with the system.” Those roles keep the existing tools running. The People Technologist builds new capability — the agents, the workflows, the connections between systems that let a small team do what a much bigger one used to.

They sit at a seam almost nobody staffs for: fluent enough in People to understand the work, technical enough to build the solution. Most HR people can design a process but can’t build the thing that runs it. Most engineers can build the thing but don’t understand the people problem well enough to know what to build. The People Technologist lives in the overlap.

Give them a design and they turn it into something real. Give them a manual, repetitive process and they turn it into a workflow. Give them a policy and they build the system that applies it consistently, at scale, with the guardrails baked in.

The People Architect decides what should be built. The People Technologist is why it actually gets built.

That distinction is the whole point. Designing an AI-enabled People function and building one are two completely different disciplines — and we’ve spent years pretending they’re the same job.

Three signs you’re missing this role

You don’t need a strategy review to spot the gap. You can feel it in how AI actually plays out in your function.

• Your AI efforts are all individual, never institutional. People use ChatGPT to draft their own emails, and that’s it. Nothing gets built that the function owns and everyone relies on. The value stays personal and never compounds.

• Every good idea dies at “who’s going to build it?” You have the vision. You’ve even scoped it. But there’s no one whose actual job is to make it real, so it goes on a list, and the list doesn’t move.

• You’re the bottleneck for the thing meant to remove bottlenecks. The automation exists because you built it on a weekend. Only you understand it. It breaks when you’re away. You’ve become a single point of failure for the system that was supposed to create leverage.

If you recognise all three, it isn’t a motivation problem or a talent problem. It’s a missing role problem — and no amount of effort from the people you already have will close it, because none of them were hired for this.

Why this role doesn’t emerge on its own

Here’s the trap. This gap almost never gets filled, and there’s a structural reason.

When a People team feels the strain, it hires the roles it already knows: another Business Partner, another recruiter, a coordinator. Sensible hires — but each one adds hands, not capability. They help you do more of the same work. None of them builds the system that would mean you didn’t need to do so much of it in the first place.

So the function grows the way it always has: linearly, with headcount, most of the growth going into repetition. The very thing that would break that cycle — someone who builds capability instead of absorbing volume — never gets hired, because it isn’t on the list of roles People teams know to hire for.

It’s a blind spot, not a failing. You can’t recruit for a role you don’t have language for. Which is exactly why naming it matters: the moment the People Technologist becomes a role you can name, it becomes a role you can hire, develop, and build a team around.

And the timing isn’t neutral. Every quarter you wait, the gap between functions that build and functions that only buy gets wider — because the ones building are compounding, and the ones buying are still adding hands.

Where this goes

I don’t think the People Technologist is a nice-to-have for large teams. I think it’s one of three roles at the centre of how modern People functions will be structured: the Architect who designs it, the Technologist who builds it, and the Partner who makes it land. Three disciplines, one system.

Most teams have some version of the Architect and the Partner already. It’s the Technologist that’s missing — and it’s the one that turns a good People strategy into something that actually runs.

I’ve been building this out into a full methodology — how the three roles fit, what the Technologist builds first, how you’d hire or grow one, and how the whole thing becomes an operating system rather than a pile of tools. I’ll be unpacking it here piece by piece over the coming weeks.

If you’re building an AI-enabled People function — or you’ve felt exactly the stuck I described at the top — I’ll be writing more.

Because the question isn’t really whether AI belongs in your People function. It’s who’s going to build it when it does.

Hey there Philly peeps! You all have been so amazing, and I wanted to share some great news my company just received.

🥂 Career Candor has been awarded the top outplacement firm by Manage HR Magazine!

❓What is outplacement?

For those of you who don’t know what outplacement is - it’s employer-paid career coaching, resume reviews, and interview prep for laid off employees. This means, when the company lays off an employee, the company pays for all of this to help the employee. Normally, this is only offered in the Fortune 500, but Career Candor makes it accessible for companies of all sizes.

💚 Our clients choose to work with us for a few reasons:

• We help companies of any size (including organizations letting go of one person)

• We are true empathetic partners for HR & leadership (supporting with communication planning, and customizing our services for the individual)

• We offer human-first career coaching (when most firms are switching to AI advising, we lean on our network of certified career coaches)

🆘 If you or your organization has to consider letting go someone on your team, we’re here to help make that transition easier for everyone.

www.careercandor.co/outplacement-services

Early in my move to HR, I inherited a direct report who had been a professor of HR for a decade.

I had just spent 10 years in sales.

In the sales seat, I led through expertise.

With her, I had nothing to fall back on. She knew everything. I knew nothing.

So I had to learn to lead differently. Get clear on strategic priorities. Remove blockers. Build consistency. Create measurement systems.

I probably grew more from managing her than 10 years of leading people in the discipline I was most comfortable with.

Nobody told me at the time, but that's the whole transition from managing people to leading at the executive level.

I think this is the most under-discussed transition, so let me try to put words to the main shifts:

1. A VP of HR is evaluated on the health of the people function. A CPO is evaluated on the health of the business.

Those sound similar, but they're not. One lets you go deep on your craft and demonstrate mastery. The other requires you to go deep on the business and build a point of view on things outside of your domain.

2. A VP of HR has a clear role. A CPO's role is clear everywhere except the room where it counts most.

Outside of the ELT, everybody understands what you do. Inside it, the definition gets slippery in a way it doesn't for the CFO or the CMO. This is where the imposter syndrome lives, and I want to be direct with you: almost every CPO I've worked with has felt it in that room. It is not a signal that you don't belong there.

3. VPs of HR arrive with problems to solve. CPOs are expected to arrive with a proposal on how to solve them.

When I coach CEOs (and about 50% my practice is CEOs) the most consistent frustration they name about their executives is stating problems rather than solutions. Business is problems, and CEOs are already carrying more than they can hold. The shift is from "let's talk through this together" to "here's what I see, here's what I'd do, and here's what I need from you."

VPs of HR: Which of the above excites you most? Which feels the most intimidating?

CPOs and CHROs: When you look back on your career, what was the moment that shifted your leadership from "manager" to "executive?" When did you realize subject matter expertise alone wasn't enough?

I thought this group might enjoy this.....

My daughter (she of the potty mouth much like her mother....) is starting a new job and kicked off onboarding this week. She just sent me a text message:

"They use Bob for onboarding which I assume you’ve heard of? DAMN have they got their sh*t together!! <Company name"> HR is f'***ing 🔥."